TRANSPARENT LANDSCAPE

Can we learn from a Renaissance landscape painting? The drawing above tries to answer that question.

The painting in question is titled The Harvesters and it is by Pieter Brugel the Elder, done in 1565.  It is considered a highly influential painting because it was the first to turn away from religious themes and focused instead on the human aspects of the landscape.  It is, of course, in Representational Spacetime.  It represents the state of the art (pardon the pun) of landscapes on canvas in the mid 1500s:  immense space, a tangible light quality, compositional balance, etc.

The landscape painting is totemic in the history of art. It has served as a cultural repository for humanity’s view of their position in Universe. The depiction of landscapes has been with us since the time of the Greeks. And in the ensuing thousands of years, it has served as a spiritual vessel for humanity.

Over the centuries, emotion, rather than knowledge, is what has been conveyed on the great canvases.  There is no doubt that The Harvesters contains great emotion. We immediately identify with the vast landscape. We emotionally link to the workers in the field. The painting plucks our heart strings. But how much knowledge is on the canvas? From my viewpoint, not very much.

The focal point of the painting is the dark area just to the right of center.  The interesting shape of the cut wheat leads your eye to this point.  The background wraps around behind.  And just visible is a church.  And it appears that there are suggestions of other buildings to the right of the church.  So these buildings must take up space.

But the space that would be necessary for there to be a church and for the topography to fall off behind the church is not rationalized.  There is simply not enough physical space for these features to be accommodated.  And you can get away with this when your medium is opaque blobs of paint.   When emotion is your primary goal, you can ignore a rationalized spatial understanding.

Yet, it would seem that more knowledge of the landscape could be provided. For example, I would like to understand the relationship between the central wheat form and the village. I would also like to understand the topography of the land both around the church as well as on the other side of the church. I would like to understand where the roads are, and where the pathways between the wheat field segments are.

In an attempt to knowledge these questions, I did another quick drawing, below, that is taken from a 90 degree angle from the viewpoint in the painting. I am looking back on to the field where the workers are harvesting. In this drawing, I try to develop a more holistic understanding of how the landscape works. I am now drawing sections of the landscape that are not visible from the painting in an effort to rationalize the scene. I simply wanted to provide knowledge by addressing areas of space that the painting ignores.

Is this increased knowledge at the expense of emotion? Absolutely. That is exactly why we draw for knowledge. We draw to knowledge how things work. And even though we typically don’t think of landscapes as things that work, we should! And the best way, so far, that I know to knowledge is thru transparency.

We draw for knowledge, form, holism and expression. Representational Spacetime, as summarized in the painting, does not yield these truths. Representation Is Dead. Transparent Drawing provides a pathway.