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Drawing Portfolio: The Contemporary Picturesque Landscape
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by David Welch
Albuquerque Academy
Albuquerque, New Mexico
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| | Objectives/Outcomes
- The student will become familiar with the style of nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting.
- The student will create a painting from direct observation utilizing stylistic devices of nineteenth-century landscape painting.
- The student will learn techniques for dramatic landscape composition.
- The student will learn to exploit effects of color and light for expressive results.
Introduction
In a 30- to 40-minute presentation, students are introduced to the characteristics of nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting. Students receive a handout with the following definitions and stylistic characteristics: The "picturesque":
- Webster's (11th ed.): "1a: resembling a picture: suggesting a painted scene b: charming or quaint in appearance 2: evoking mental images: VIVID"
- Original meaning: That which was truly of painting or painters (an emphasis on color and light and shadow rather than draftsmanship)
Characteristics of the nineteenth-century, picturesque, Romantic landscape:
- An emphasis on the rough, unrefined, and irregular aspects of nature
- Spatial organization that is diagonal rather than frontal, often with a focal point in deep space to lure the eye all the way through the landscape
- Sizable form or forms placed in the extreme foreground to help establish the viewer's point of view -- this sometimes creates a "peekaboo effect" (the deep space becomes more seductive to the eye because some of it is hidden from view)
- Romantic lighting -- warm light and strong shadows -- the oblique light of early morning or late afternoon
- A "natural" or informal-looking composition that appears unplanned, at a viewer's casual glance (but is, in fact, extremely well planned to achieve diagonal recession through space and elegant positive/negative relationships)
- Bits of human or architectural incident (often overwhelmed by nature) that may have symbolic or sentimental importance
Recommended Slides
Slides shown for introductory discussion:
- Poussin, The Funeral of Phocion, c.1648 (Louvre) -- To show what a picturesque landscape is not: the image is full of information, full of the evidence of human presence, organized on a rectilinear grid, fairly evenly illuminated throughout
- Caspar David Friedrich, Mann und Frau, den Mond betrachtend (Alte Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), Berlin)
- Frederic Church, Sunset, 1856 (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York)
- Frederic Church, The Parthenon, 1871 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
- Albert Bierstadt, Sierra Nevada, c.1871 (slide from Universal Art Images)
- George Inness, Woodland Scene, 1891 (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia)
These slides are examples. Many other images, particularly from the Hudson River School and the work of Thomas Cole, would serve equally well.
In the presentation, the teacher first introduces the stylistic characteristics of picturesque Romantic landscapes and then encourages the students to identify and describe those characteristics as they analyze the compositional organization and content of subsequent images.
The Assignment
Create a picturesque landscape from your own world that embodies the dramatic effects of composition, color, and light employed by the nineteenth-century landscape painters.
Activities
This assignment may be done as a homework assignment or as a class assignment. As a homework assignment it has the advantages of (1) allowing students to work in the oblique light of early morning or late afternoon, and (2) offering a greater range of interesting subject matter. As a homework assignment, the project may be extended over two weekends (to allow adequate time to work in appropriate light) with a required in-class critique of work in progress after the first weekend.
Executed during class time the procedure is as follows: Before the presentation the teacher may wish to scout some sites on campus that offer dramatic views with objects in the foreground and illuminated vistas, strong light and shadow, etc. The working period should include ten 50-minute class periods. On the first day students select an outdoor site and do several thumbnail compositional sketches indicating major forms and areas of shadow. Selecting the best composition, the students work independently for the remaining nine periods with the teacher traveling from student to student, offering critique and advice. Periodically, during the execution phase, it is advisable to pull the students together at the beginning of the period to look at each others' work and to emphasize common recommendations (warm light, cool shadow, or need for greater value contrast, for example) that may be helpful to all. The last one or two class periods may be spent in the studio pulling the image together. The inclination to record exactly from nature is often very strong and it can be helpful for the student to separate from the observed situation in order to "push" the image more dramatically.
Materials and Resources
- Slides and projector (or digital database of art images)
- Drawing boards (20" x 26")
- Oil pastels on richly colored Canson "mi-teintes" paper, 18" x 24" (the colored charcoal/pastel paper insures that the bits of paper that show through the pastel create an interesting color effect rather than the unfinished look that results when white paper shows through)
This assignment can also be successfully executed in acrylic, dry pastel, or other painting media.
Evaluation/Closure
The assignment culminates with a one-period class critique that can be organized to discuss each piece individually or to address general questions such as:
- How does your eye travel through the image? Is there a diagonal recession?
- What role does light play in directing your eye to a focal area?
- Describe the mood created by the piece. What factors (of color, drawing, composition, light) contribute to creating that mood?
- In which piece(s) do you find the mark making (brushstrokes) particularly effective? Why?
- Do you see a piece in which the artist made a particularly adventurous or creative decision?
- Is there a piece that clearly expresses or suggests the power or majesty of nature?
- Choose two pieces that have very different qualities of light and try to describe the factors that create those effects.
- If you were to do one thing to improve a chosen piece, in what direction would you push it?
Students are allowed three days (outside of class time) to revise or further develop their work based on suggestions from the critique, before the work is graded.
Students receive a written, narrative, evaluative comment on their work as well as a grade. Grading criteria include:
- Skill in drawing from nature
- Success in achieving dramatic space through overlap and diagonal recession
- Dramatic use of light and shadow
- Willingness to explore and take risks
- Resolution and completeness of work
Examples of student work:
Justin Beck
Lucia Egbert
Evan Schultz
Elise Trott
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