what relationship is there between art and nature essay

Examining the Relationship Between Nature and Art

One of the most remarkable artists to ever live, Henry Matisse once said: “An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.”

For as long as there has been art, artists have been enthused by nature. Apart from providing endless inspiration, many of the mediums that artists use to create their masterpieces such as wood, charcoal, clay, graphite, and water are all products from nature.

The artists of years gone by

Although Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime, he was in a league of his own. He had the ability to bring aspects of nature, such as simple flowers, to life in his paintings. One such a work of art, Irises, is particularly impressive with the life-force of the flowers being almost tangible. Monet is another of the world’s greatest artist who drew inspiration from nature. His series of paintings entitled Lilies is a beautiful showcase of shadows, light, and water and portray his garden in France. Monet’s flowers were one of the main focuses of his work for the latter 30 years of his life, perfectly illustrating what an immense influence the natural beauty around us can have on the imagination of an artist.

Modern artists inspired by nature

Mary Iverson both lives and works in Seattle, Washington and draws inspiration from the immense natural beauty that surrounds her. Her remarkable paintings offer a rather contemporary spin on traditional landscape art portraying the great monuments and national parks of the USA. Mary’s greatest inspiration comes from the picturesque Port of Seattle, and the Rainer, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Mary’s work has been featured on the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine in 2015 and also appeared in Huffington Post, The Boston Review and Foreign Policy Magazine . She also works closely with a number of galleries in Germany, Paris, Amsterdam and Los Angeles and teaches visual art at the Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon where she passionately shares her love for the natural world with her students.

British artist draws lifelong inspiration from the natural world

British wildlife artist Jonathan Sainsbury is known for his astonishing ability to capture the fleeting moments of the natural world. Having spent most of his life observing and drawing his various subjects, Sainsbury has become a master at using watercolor and watercolor combined with charcoal to effortlessly evoke a feeling of movement in his artwork. Apart from capturing the very essence of countless natural scenes he also draws on nature in a metaphorical way to refer to our everyday lives. Jonathan’s work can be viewed at the Wykeham Gallery in Stockbridge, the Strathearn Gallery, and the Dunkeld Art Exhibition.

Despite the world becoming more technology-driven by the minute, there are very few things that can inspire artistic brilliance quite like nature does. From a single rose petal spiralling to the ground to a mighty fish eagle swooping in on its prey, the countless faces of Mother Nature will continue to mesmerize and provide inspiration for some of the most renowned works of art the world has ever seen.

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Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment Art & Environment

Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels and Joy Sleeman

Introducing the group of articles devoted to the theme of ‘Art & Environment’ in Tate Papers no.17, this essay reflects on changing perceptions of the term ‘environment’ in relation to artistic practices and describes the context for a series of case studies of sites, spaces and processes that extend from the immediate locality to the most remote boundaries of knowledge and experience.

Changing environments

Sites revisited, research in practice.

The group of articles devoted to the theme of art and environment in Tate Papers no.17 aims to explore new research frontiers between visual art and the material environment. The papers arise from a conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010 at which a range of practitioners and scholars – artists, writers, curators, theorists, historians and geographers – presented case studies of artworks addressing specific sites, spaces, places and landscapes in a variety of media, including film, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. The conference considered relations between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. The papers addressed cultural questions of weather and climate, ruin and waste, dwelling and movement, boundary and journey, and reflected on the way the environment is experienced and imagined and on the place of art in the material world.

Held at a time when the emergent effects of economic crisis were intersecting with a more established sense of ecological crisis, the conference offered an opportunity to rethink the relations between art and environment, which had become central to a number of art exhibitions and publications. These included in 2009 Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery and Earth: Art of a Changing World at the Royal Academy, both in London. 1 Conference contributors took the opportunity to reframe relations between art and environment critically and creatively, with a broad historical and geographical perspective that considered artworks from the eighteenth century to the present.

The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was organised by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Landscape and Environment programme. This is one of a set of AHRC thematic programmes supporting research fields of wide cultural and public value as well as academic scholarship and creative practice. The AHRC is distinctive internationally in supporting various forms of practice as well as scholarship – including curating and conserving artworks and archives as well as creating work of all kinds – and funds projects at museums, galleries and libraries, as well as higher education institutions, often in collaborative partnership with each other. One of the programme’s major projects was hosted at Tate Britain, ‘The Sublime Object’, a project that produced a series of its own conference findings published in issues 13 and 14 of Tate Papers.

The ‘Art & Environment’ conference was intended to be exploratory and to further research on art and environment in terms of methods and perspectives as well as subject matter, and in terms of research process and practice as well as product and outcomes. Contributors explored the changing meaning of ‘environment’ in art practice and the different ways it was encountered. They addressed, and some themselves undertook, different kinds of journeying, both epic and eccentric, which confronted and crossed various kinds of boundary, physical and symbolic, material and immaterial. The journeys represented in the conference talks were historical as well as geographical, travels through time as well as space, many reflecting on issues of environmental decline and degradation, some journeys through ruins. They intersected with longstanding journeying traditions of landscape art and aesthetics, encountering romantic and picturesque ruins and speculating on the wider processes of social and environmental transformation, from the ruins of empire to the regeneration of nature. Here were travels through the real and imagined worlds of the recent past and the longest imaginable time, both close to home and to the very ends of the earth.

The journeys, undertaken by both artists and historians, were sometimes to make new work, or conducted in the spirit of re-enactment or pilgrimage, and sometimes as research trips to distant or familiar locations. Some were made to places associated with the early phase of land art in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and such re-visitations inevitably prompt reflection on the contrast between the environment as it was perceived then and as it appears now, and indeed on altered perceptions of the term ‘environment’ itself in the discourses of art and nature. The artist Nancy Holt, describing in 1977 the landscape of the Utah border in which a year earlier she had made her Sun Tunnels , could speak of ‘walking on earth that has surely never been walked on before evokes a sense of being on this planet, rotating in space, in universal time’. 2 But was it ever such a tabula rasa ? Away to the east, on the other side of the Great Salt Lake, Holt’s late husband Robert Smithson had located his Spiral Jetty near an abandoned jetty built for oil drilling. He had always been interested in spaces depleted by industry: now there is talk of renewed oil extraction in the area.

In 1970, when Smithson extended his jetty into the shallow margins of the lake, the human environment seemed to be expanding rapidly, pushing beyond the limits of the earth, appropriating the moon. And in art discourse, too, ‘environment’ seemed a vastly expansive term, informed by a comparable frontier spirit, capable of embracing a multiplicity of interventions, both gallery-based and in wide open spaces. In London, the term figured in the title of an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, Environments Reversal , in 1969. Conceived to mark the opening of a new garden at the centre, its curator aimed to present ‘a situation in which art of an indoor nature will be in the garden and art of an outdoor character in the gallery’. 3 The film David Lamelas made for the occasion, A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space , begins with an analysis of the gallery space itself before spiralling outwards through ever widening physical, social and geographical environments until it ends by implication in outer space, with a series of interviews with passers-by on the most compelling topic in the news of the day, the Apollo mission and the landing of the first men on the moon. 4

The term ‘environments’ was used again in the plural in relation to another of the ubiquitous words of the era, ‘happenings’, in the title of an often-overlooked survey by the Liverpool poet and painter Adrian Henri, Environments and Happenings , published in 1974. In a chapter on ‘landscape and environment’ Henri offered a decidedly European framing for a phenomenon that was more usually seen as American; it opens with a quotation from the French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) proposing impromptu performances in the countryside and ends with an image of grazing cows in an urban plaza in the Netherlands. He writes that if ‘the major works of the new earth art are American … Holland seems to be a natural home for environmental art’. The new forms of art are an appropriate response to a landscape entirely transformed by man, and the chapter concludes with reflections on the implication for landscapes more familiar to him:

Correcting this section of the book on a train going through industrial South Wales, I was struck by the extent to which artists tend to condition our vision of the world. In precisely the way that Cézanne, Monet or Turner have altered our view of particular kinds of landscape, it is now impossible to see the randomly formed slag heaps, piled-up sacks in bright polythene, heaped slabs of rusting metal, the sudden ivy-shrouded chimney of a disused factory, bulldozed paths of a new motorway through a landscape, without being reminded of the work of Oppenheim, Heizer or Morris. 5

In this environment artistic interventions generate an awareness of the concurrent processes of ruination and productive activity.

Smithson himself had visited England in 1969 and made a number of works during his stay, including a piece in a chalk quarry near Oxted in Surrey, near the route of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way. 6 Smithson’s own works would soon become the object of pilgrimage, both those he actually made and unrealised projects. The sculptor Roelof Louw, an important figure in early manifestations of conceptual art in Britain, wrote an essay in which he invited his readers to join him on an imagined journey to the site of such an unrealised work, described in terms of both re-enactment and pilgrimage:

Smithson’s site works, it might be said, bind a style of physical action to geological circumstances. What then happens? Consider how the journey directed by Smithson’s proposed project for Sprawling Mounds might operate. (While this massive labyrinth for strip mine tailings is unrealized, it might readily be re-enacted as an experience by visiting strip mines tailings and by wandering through mine dumps) … The decision to travel to the site of this project is like setting out on an extraordinary pilgrimage to a wasteland … Shortly the enormous white mounds come into sight. Their eroded, misshapen surfaces of whitish rubble and gravel affront one; they loom ahead like an abominable mess. 7

Louw brings out a disturbing sense of dereliction and physical and moral collapse in the journey towards this entropic site, ‘a place where social values have fallen into disorder, where wealth has turned into waste’. In 1969, Barbara Reise, writing in the British-based journal Studio International , commented that ‘Smithson’s “non-sites” of photographs and material extractions from real-life rock quarries are consistently less interesting than rock quarries themselves’, a remark that seems to anticipate the artist’s imminent shift to making outdoor works on a large scale. 8 These included Broken Circle and Spiral Hill , constructed in 1971 in a sand quarry near Emmen in the Netherlands, Henri’s ‘natural home for environmental art’. Wasteland is transformed into monument, just as John Latham would re-designate mid-Lothian’s unsightly shale bings as monumental process sculptures later in the decade.

Given the apparently redemptive character of such projects, it is perhaps not surprising to find that the challenge to critical conventions presented by new forms of landscape art in the late 1960s and 1970s began to give way to narrower, more affirmative interpretations. In the 1980s they were more often seen as deeply felt expressions of human relationships with nature, with the term environment coming to refer almost exclusively to nature or the natural environment. In this context, certainly in Anglo-American publications, land art and earthworks were considered within more closely focused landscape terms, and the history and origin of these works as ‘quintessentially’, if not exclusively, American. This is the case even in the most explicit ‘environmental’ anthology, Alan Sonfist’s Art in the Land (1983). 9 In his introduction, Sonfist identifies his concern as with ‘a group of artists whose work makes a statement about man’s relation to nature’. 10 Elsewhere in the volume, however, Kenneth S. Friedman cautions against taking too narrow a definition of environment: ‘given that human beings and their culture are in the largest scale of description simply a form of life moving about and acting on the surface of the planet, the drilling of an oil company is as much part of the “environment” as a tree’. 11 There is ambivalence here about how environmental art should be understood: as a category of recent landscape art, predominantly American, with a concern for nature, or an all-embracing approach to art’s relationship with the environment that makes the latter term sound a lot closer to ‘ecological’. Indeed, there has been an increasing tendency to subsume environmental art under the banner of ecology, particularly apparent in a number of exhibitions. 12 In this way, the land art of the late 1960s and 1970s has come to be seen as a proto-ecological art form.

A recurring aspect of the research highlighted in this issue has been the revisiting of sites associated with earlier manifestations of art in the environment. Some of the changing possibilities and readings of environmental art as outlined above are brought out by Craig Richardson’s paper on John Latham ’s proposals in the mid-1970s intended to transform perceptions of the huge heaps of industrial waste that dominated (and disfigured, according to some viewpoints) the environment of mid-Lothian. But this project to re-conceptualise places of industrial dereliction as ‘process art’ on a monumental scale has itself become the object of a necessary exercise in historical recovery, and it is the more recent recognition that the shale ‘bings’ are sites of exceptional biodiversity that has proved more effective in securing their cultural value.

A longer historical perspective is provided by the papers of Richard Wrigley and Geoff Quilley . Wrigley considers the Roman campagna as a landscape with a special place in the history of art, since it was regarded as the cradle of idealised landscape painting, and associated with the origins of a pastoral tradition in poetry. Later artists, writers and tourists arrived in Rome’s hinterland with certain expectations, with mental pictures already formed of a noble landscape dotted with ruins, richly suggestive in moral lessons. But what they found was a terrain ruinous in more ways than one, a noxious landscape, inimical to health, and this led to speculation as to the historical causes of decline, and reflections on the failures of custodianship which had resulted in such a waste.

Geoff Quilley considers British naval artists’ representations of Tahiti in the mid-nineteenth century as re-enactments of the first views of the island by William Hodges and other artists on Thomas Cook’s voyages of exploration some sixty years earlier. Those early views had projected the formal terms of the idealising classical tradition on to completely unfamiliar terrain, and the later artists consciously reiterate those conventions. The ideological significance of such re-enactments lies in the recovery of a time when Tahiti was first imagined as a British possession, although the political reality was that it had recently been annexed as a French colony.

Re-enactment of a different kind, though no less ideologically loaded, is the key to Cai Guo-Qiang’s practice, as explored by Ben Tufnell . Cai’s photographic series The Century with Mushroom Clouds 1996 involved the artist visiting various significant sites in America, including those of canonical works of land art from its first heroic phase (including Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative 1969–70), but also the former nuclear test site in the Nevada desert, a landscape more sinister and toxic even than the malign, exhausted Roman campagna , though in its way now also a tourist destination. Cai detonated small hand-held explosive devices at these locations, documenting them in photographs. These actions are absurdly small-scale, playful and transient in the context of such monumental and symbolically resonant sites, yet also provocative and not without their own symbolic charge. With his interventions in places where works of radical art were once created on an epic scale, or which are associated with some of the most traumatic memories of the twentieth century, Cai is revisiting, and re-thinking, past human actions which were designed to reshape the environment itself.

An English landscaped park might seem to be a context at the very opposite end of the environmental spectrum to the mythic spaces of the Nevada desert, but the idea of revisiting the past is still the key to another project, Andy Goldsworthy’s interventions in the grounds of Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, since 1977 the location of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. As Helen Pheby demonstrates, Goldsworthy’s revisiting can be understood in a double sense: the making of new permanent outdoor works in order to engage critically with a particular landscape history of enclosure and exclusion, and the return to his own beginnings as an artist working with natural materials in the open air. Goldsworthy’s ambitious 2007 project at Bretton was in part staged ‘in celebration of the journey taken by both artist and organisation’, but it was also designed to counter and complicate the perception of his reputation as a second-wave land artist with a decorative sensibility and an easy popular appeal. 13

Nicholas Alfrey also goes back in his paper to an early piece of land art, Richard Long ’s A Ten Mile Walk England , made on Exmoor in the winter of 1968, in order to look again at the implications of this kind of environmental practice: an outdoor sculpture on an unprecedented scale but with no physical trace. This is to offer a corrective to the established view that such a work should be understood as an abstract gesture laid down in an empty space. But the terrain itself was already shaped by historical forces, and was far from being empty: it is a landscape of enterprise, improvement and enclosure, one in which boundaries matter as much as open ground. Long was adding one more layer to a space dense in association.

Projects by contemporary practitioners were also presented at the conference. Lara Almarcegui and Heather and Ivan Morrison participated in the Barbican’s Radical Nature exhibition and, like the other artists in that show, their work is instrumental in character, designed to promote awareness of the relationship between nature and the urban environment and often involves community participation and affirmative action. Almarcegui has campaigned to preserve empty lots from development and improvement, resisting the strategies of planners in order to let ‘natural processes of decay, transition and entropy’ take their course. In designating empty spaces and wastelands as artworks her tactics are reminiscent of those of John Latham, but she works within an ecological agenda, seeking to bring about the greening of urban space:

Wastelands are important as places of possibility, because one can only feel free in this type of land, forgotten by town planners. I imagine that, in a few years’ time, those wastelands that were protected by my projects will be the only empty spots within built areas. 14

The Morrisons are interested in utopian communities, sustainable materials, gardening, the construction of alternative modes of dwelling. For several years they managed an allotment in Birmingham as a performative work of art, and have since created an arboretum in ancient woodland by the Mawddach Estuary where they now live.

In contrast, Katie Paterson and Simon Faithfull make work that tests the very limits of the sphere of human activity and knowledge, and their conception of the environment as a vastly expanded field is made possible by new developments in technology and radical advances in scientific thinking and method. At the same time, the way in which their work is actually realised retains a keen sense of physical constraints and material conditions; they set themselves wilfully difficult tasks, and resolve them in ingenious, laborious, sometimes eccentric ways. Paterson describes her practice as:

cross-medium and multi-disciplinary, often exploring landscape, space and time, using technology to bring together the commonplace and the cosmic. Everyday technologies – phones, record players, radio – connecting with something vaster, more intangible: telephone calls to melting glaciers, maps of all the dead stars, streetlights which flicker in time with lightning storms, music reflected from the moon. 15

Two such projects operate at the extreme opposite ends of scale, one making use of new techniques in astronomy to look back to the ‘dark ages’ when the universe had only just begun to form, the other using nanotechnology to reduce a grain of sand from the Sahara Desert to its minutest form.

History of Darkness is an open-ended project made possible by her encounter with the astronomer Richard Ellis, who invited her to accompany him on a research visit to the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii where he was studying the ‘cosmic dawn’, looking directly at galaxies twelve billion years back in time, before the earth came into existence. ‘I discovered that his project was looking for the very first stars and galaxies to have evolved in the universe’ Paterson remarked. ‘Astronomers have now developed remarkable techniques to enable them to look back to almost 5% after the Big Bang. He told me of a period, the “Dark Ages”, shortly after the Big Bang, when the stars were beginning to alight’. 16 The first work Paterson made in response to this vertiginous new awareness was Ancient Darkness TV 2009, ‘a one minute broadcast on television in New York, transmitted at midnight, of the furthest away darkness. People could tune in and see nothing but a black screen, but they would know this darkness was from a very ancient time’. 17 The History of Darkness followed from this (fig.1). She describes it as:

a slide archive of darkness from throughout the Universe. It shows different pieces of darkness from multiple times and places – some are one thousand light years away, some are one million. A life-long project, it will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times and places in the history of the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each image is accompanied by a handwritten record with its distance from earth in light years, and arranged from one to infinity. 18

Fig.1 Katie Paterson History of Darkness 2010 Black and white photograph, de-bossed mounts Installation view Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2011 Photograph © Ingleby Gallery

The work is ambitious and understated at the same time, a thought-provoking conjunction of the sublime subject, innovative technology, handwritten record, the inscrutable elegance of the image, and sheer visual repetitiveness. It seems to allude to the history of minimal art as well as the history of the universe, and compels reflection on the impossibility of ever achieving full knowledge, or of finding a way of recording what is known. ‘I think that there is never a way to represent, see or know all the darkness in the universe’, she remarks, ‘so it is a kind of infinite journey, and a futile one, to try to capture it on a human scale’. 19

Paterson has described the speculative talk among the scientists at the observatory, as deep time appeared right there in front of them on the screen, and discussion of origins inevitably turns to that of a possible end. She heard them speak of ‘the Big Rip’, when all matter, from stars and galaxies to atoms, will be torn apart by the expansion of the universe. But what kind of art practice could hope to deal with such an incomprehensible domain? For her piece Inside this Desert Lies the Tiniest Grain of Sand 2010 she turned away from cosmic space to work at micro-scale:

I created a grain of sand on the nano-scale: that is, 0.00005 mm across, completely invisible. I took a grain from the Sahara Desert, then had it chiselled down using special techniques in nano-technology, to become almost nothing, but yet still a grain of sand. It was an invisible sculpture, but yet still present in time and space. 20

She then returned it to the Sahara, and buried it among the desert sands, and later posted 500 postcards announcing ‘this small event’ to friends, family and random recipients. The work, therefore, combines a challenging concept, elaborate technologies, the play of metaphors, and a real (that is, complicated, arduous and expensive) journey to the Sahara, as well as the use of old-fashioned infrastructures such as the postal service.

Simon Faithfull’s work evinces a fascination with the surface of the globe, across which he traces symbolic lines and figures, and with the wilful colliding of grand, abstract ideas with awkward physicality or quotidian expressive vehicles. His projects have involved programmes of action that follow a relentless logic to some ultimately absurd end, documented in films in which the camera scrupulously records real-time events, and which on occasion are projected as illustrations to performances in which the artist takes on the guise of an explorer or geographical society lecturer.

Escape Vehicle No.6 2004 charts the upwards journey of a weather balloon from which has been suspended what appears to be an ordinary domestic chair, the progress of which is recorded by a camera attached to the balloon itself. The chair ascends quickly to the point where the curve of the earth and black space beyond are visible. In the artist’s own words: ‘You can just about make out this thin blue line at the edge of the planet that quickly fades to black. This is the space that we normally occupy. We’ve reached about 30 kilometres high now and already we are beginning to leave the atmosphere’. 21 Thirty kilometres, he goes on to point out, is not that far, hardly a day’s walk. But at this height there is only a faint atmosphere and the temperature is minus sixty degrees, and the shortness of this journey reminds us of the relative thinness of our protective layer of air, and the fragility of our position in space. An empty chair in nineteenth-century pictorial symbolism stood in for the human figure, dead or absent, which habitually occupied it, and is here a further symbol of our vulnerability.

0.00° Navigation is another video piece in which the protagonist, the artist himself, follows an invisible but symbolically significant line, the Greenwich Meridian, from the point where it cuts the southern English coast at Peacehaven, across country, through villages, towns, then London and eventually via a caravan park near Cleethorpes, into the North Sea and presumably on to the North Pole (fig.2). The artist has described the appeal of this imaginary line, an entirely hypothetical construction:

A line built by Britain out of naval power and world domination but one that until recently was completely invisible. With the advent of GPS, however, you can now trace or feel it as its slices through the landscape … I was imagining myself as a kind of ghost following another phantom – a ghost-line. A very insignificant, unnoticed ghost following a much more powerful spook. 22

Fig.2 Simon Faithfull 0. 00° Navigation 2009 Video 55 min © Simon Faithfull

The figure’s progress is, of course, richly comical, as he scales the emblematic white cliffs, goes through the garden of a bungalow, exits via a kitchen window, scrambles through brambles, scales fences, clambers over rooftops, goes through schools and garages, crosses a golf course, lakes and ditches. The banal, suburban landscapes of England are contrasted with ‘this epic line created by empire, this grid slung around the planet by imperial power’. 23 There is an obvious allusion to the practice of Richard Long, and it might be taken as a parody of a work such as A Ten Mile Walk England across Exmoor – open moorland replaced by cluttered and commonplace spaces – were it not for the realisation that Long, too, had to commit himself to reckless trespass, and that there was a playful and provocative aspect to early British land art which has tended to be forgotten in later readings of that movement as environmentally affirmative and respectable.

The deadpan quality of 0.00° Navigation also alludes to the films of comic actor Buster Keaton. Faithfull has described it as ‘a kind of homage to Rail Rodder , a film that Keaton made right at the end of his life. In it Keaton swims out of the Atlantic on the east coast of America, accidentally traverses the complete landmass of Canada on a small railway buggy, and finally goes back into the water at the Pacific coast’. 24 Journeys from one coast to another are also a staple of the repertoire of British walking artists such as Long and Hamish Fulton , but the reference here to film, comedy and popular culture introduces an element of unpredictability and hybridity into Faithfull’s environmental practice.

Jem Southam has established a strong reputation as a photographer of landscape since the publication of his first collection in the 1980s. His work is mostly organised in series, often open-ended, in which he records changes, both natural and man-made, in particular locations over considerable periods of time. He is interested in the narratives that run through any given environment, narratives that can be historical, as in his first publication The Floating Harbour : A Landscape History of Bristol City Docks , or geological, as in his studies of coastal erosion, cliff falls and sand bars. 25 Sometimes the focus is on the activities of a small group of individuals, such as the well-meaning but misguided attempts of local ‘improvers’ to ameliorate a former industrial site in the Devon village of Upton Pyne, and sometimes on the larger ravages of industry, as in Red River and his work on the Cumbrian coast, where the rocky shoreline has been turned into solid metal as a result of molten slag being tipped there from the nearby steelworks. 26

Southam favours a very large format analogue camera, in essence equipment comparable to that used by earlier photographers, which at first sight seems to make his work an extension of a long tradition of topographical or documentary image-making. On the face of it, aspects of his method and vision appear to have something in common with the work of filmmaker Patrick Keiller: the same dedication to cumbersome equipment and a willingness to accept the constraints that this imposes, the same preference for working alone in the field, the same intense scrutiny turned on the landscape, with each carefully framed shot loaded with inexhaustible detail. Both have a respect for a certain kind of rigorous pictorialism, and a wariness towards the Picturesque. Both believe that much of the meaning of the world can be apprehended through the way it looks, and that looking is a mode of critical analysis that can reveal far more than what lies on the surface. Both are aware of the politics of landscape, and the stories that are threaded through it.

Yet there are connections in Southam’s work with some of the other artists who have been the subject of enquiry in this programme. There is his strong feeling for the sculptural, for example, so that the forms of dewponds or rockfalls can come to seem like the work of anonymous sculptors, even as a kind of land art. There is an unexpected affinity, too, with Paterson’s History of Darkness , for all that he is working with a traditional medium and that her interests are in conceptual art, performance and installation: a certain quality of melancholy, and an awareness of how limited our knowledge is, how difficult it is to be sure of anything.

This uncertainty comes across in his discussion of his most recent project, to photograph the River Exe and its tributary system. It begins with a simple question: what is a river? Southam had made rivers his subject before, but the origins of this new project are unexpected: a conversation about an experiment to throw light on the neurological development of children between the ages of five and eleven by asking them to make a drawing of a river (fig.3). He describes how he tried this experiment himself, and persuaded around ten local children aged between about seven and twelve to ‘draw a river’:

It was a very small sample but the results were fascinating. Most of the drawings showed a small river flowing from the top right across the horizontal sheet to the bottom left. All the drawings included trees and foliage and a series of small round shapes either within or next to the stream. I was puzzled as to what these represented for a while, until I realised that all the children of our street would, if they went out for a walk with their family, in all likelihood go to Dartmoor. The streams of Dartmoor are strewn with small granite boulders and rounded pebbles. So when asked to draw a river the children had responded by pulling from their imaginations pictures that corresponded to their direct experiences … Only one drawing featured tributaries, but the angle at which they met the main stream was against the flow of the river. When I asked about this, the child explained that they understood something of a river system, and when pressed on the matter of the angle of address, they explained that water flowed down the main stream and then UP the tributaries. 27

Fig.3 Anonymous child aged 12 A River 2006 Coloured drawing Photograph © Jem Southam

The drawings might be found charming for what they said about children’s naive understanding of the world and their capacity to express their knowledge in visual form. But Southam felt that they raised a deeper point: ‘could any of us say with confidence that we know what a river is, or could or we come up with a comprehensive definition? … A river, any river, even one as small as the Red River, is beyond our powers of understanding’. 28

Southam turned to his own medium of photography in search of a definition of what a river is, choosing the Exe because it was his local river, and walking its banks to determine possible locations, but without any clear idea as to what the content, form or structure of the finished work might be, or indeed if the work could ever be resolved, ‘since I was not aware of any model that might suggest a structural resolution’. 29 Right from the start, some formal and technical aspects – camera, lens, film etc. – had to be decided, considerations that would in themselves have far-reaching implications for the conceptual development of the ensuing work as well as its visual character:

Early on I started using a lens that rendered, even with this system, an exceptional degree of peripheral detail. This led me to pay more forensic attention to the myriad narratives that a view contained. In one photograph [fig.4], for example, a thin line of ice follows the bank of the river, a large dog has recently made its way onto the soft sand of the bank, the river level has recently receded five or so inches leaving a small ‘tide’ line of fine twigs, and two light stalks are all that remains visible from the profusion of towering and invasive Himalayan Balsam plants that grew here over the summer, while twisted through the lower hanging branches at various levels are clumps of organic material left from the earlier autumn floods, and on the higher branches of the alder trees that lean over the river hundreds of dark dots that are the remains of last year’s fruit. 30

Fig.4 Jem Southam River Exe 2010 Photograph © Jem Southam

Here is that intense scrutiny that is also found in Keiller’s films, comparable to his long-held shots of roadside flora, though the ‘narratives’ referred to by Southam are less evidently metaphorical or political.

Other aspects of the project’s methodology and content began to emerge: revisiting locations and re-photographing them at regular intervals over extended periods of time, the issue of access (which on non-navigable rivers in Britain can be very restricted), the question of structure, form and ultimate outcome. But each decision, each new photograph taken, only raises further questions and anxieties as the full complexity of the task ahead is gradually disclosed. There are so many reaches of the river, so many tributaries, springs and sources; it seems an ‘impossible task … a quagmire of a problem, from which I see no viable release’. 31

From this perspective, a river presents as much of a challenge to the artist as does the darkness of ‘anterior time’ that Paterson has taken as her subject. Southam’s pursuit of the elusive phenomenon of a river and Paterson’s discovery that ‘ancient darkness’ can be made visible have both given rise to projects that could be life-long, and to the creation of archives that are potentially infinite. The objects of their enquiry may be literally more than poles apart, but nothing could more vividly indicate the expanded terms in which artists might now engage with the world.

Patrick Keiller’s feature-length film Robinson in Ruins (2010) was the centrepiece among the artistic projects presented at ‘Art & Environment’; appropriate given that it was produced under the auspices of the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment programme itself. Elsewhere in this issue of Tate Papers , Stephen Daniels, Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright introduce the background of the film and the wider project of which it was part. Robinson in Ruins traces a journey following a roughly elliptical circuit around Oxford, across luminous pastoral landscapes which are nonetheless shadowed by economic crisis and an impending ecological collapse. Two other contributors to this issue also engage with the film, concentrating on its motif of ruin. Matthew Flintham was a part of Keiller’s research team, though working on a theme of his own, militarised landscape, which intersects the filmmaker’s concerns rather than coincides with them entirely. Flintham’s contribution ranges widely over recent British and American art practice and argues that art is a legitimate and productive means of responding to militarised spaces, despite the obvious difficulties they present. He brings out the analogies he sees in Keiller’s film between earlier historical enclosure movements and the large-scale appropriation of land by the military in the twentieth century. He also dwells on the physical ruins that are the legacy of such an occupation: urgently built, highly specialised structures that soon become redundant, and are then left to slow decline.

Finally, Brian Dillon ’s paper focuses as much on the metaphor of ruins as on their physical persistence. He takes Robinson’s rapt gaze on pastoral subjects – landscapes with ruins – as an indication that the English countryside has become ‘a monument to itself’, a symptom of a problematic nostalgia, associated with a tradition of English ruin aesthetics. But he also seeks to define Keiller’s own position as part of a broader and more critical European tradition in which ‘ruin lust’ can just as well imply fantasies of the future as of the past, an anticipation of coming ruination. In this light, the extended, almost exaggerated shots of foxgloves, thistles and poppies that have given rise to so much comment elsewhere, are suggestive of an ecology that is ominous rather than reassuring.

Patrick Keiller The Robinson Institute

Patrick Keiller creates an ambitious new project in the Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain from March 2012

Artist’s talk: Patrick Keiller

Artist Patrick Keiller talks about his work for the Tate Britain Commission, 23 May 2012

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in England, 1969

Nancy Holt and Simon Grant1

Robert Smithson, best known for his Land Art piece Spiral Jetty , and Nancy Holt, best known for her work Sun Tunnels , were both fascinated by man’s imprint on the natural landscape. They often travelled together and documented their work – and themselves – in photographs. In 1969 they took an important journey through England and Wales visiting sites that resonated with their practice, ranging from ancient ruins and landscaped gardens to wild natural places. For the first time, Holt reflects on the trip and its influence on their art

Jem Southam: From A Distance: An Industrial Landscape in Cornwall

Jem Southam: From A Distance: An Industrial Landscape in Cornwall: past Tate St. Ives exhibition

Layered Land: Andy Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Helen Pheby

Focusing on the long relationship Andy Goldsworthy has had with the landscape of the Bretton Estate, the location of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Helen Pheby explores the artist’s interest in the cultural heritage of the English landscape, which informed the design of estates such as Bretton.

Richard Long

Richard Long past Tate St Ives exhibition

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth

Richard Long: Heaven and Earth ate Tate Britain 3 June – 6 September 2009

Hamish Fulton: Walking journey

Hamish Fulton: Walking journey: photographic works about the experience of walking. Past Tate Britain exhibition

Psychosis and the Sublime in American Art: Rothko and Smithson

Timothy D. Martin

This paper addresses the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970) and Robert Smithson (1938–1973), and, referring to the philosopher Kant and psychoanalyst Lacan, discusses how the sublime can have a psychotic aspect. It argues that Kant’s categorical imperative, for all its attempts to exclude self-interest and the pathological aspects of the hypothetical imperative, establishes a frame not only for sublime aesthetic experience but also for psychotic delusion.

Lost Art: Robert Smithson

Jennifer Mundy

The Gallery of Lost Art is an immersive, online exhibition that tells the fascinating stories of artworks that have disappeared. Each week a new story of loss is added, and the evidence presented for examination

The Close Connection Between Art And Nature

By Team Mojarto

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his language.

-Henry Matisse

There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists’ artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where they can bring life to nature in their paintings. Many famous artists like Van Gogh and Monet celebrated nature in their artworks. Nature in art is glorified for its sublime and picturesque manifestation on canvas. It is cherished for its intricacy and beauty.

Some philosophers including Aristotle lauded that art can mimic nature. It embodies as a true reflection of the artist’s inner soul. Aristotle even once wrote that “Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies”. This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. Here’s a look at some beautiful artwork that can mesmerize one’s soul and convey a sense of deeper thoughts and perspectives.

The idea offered by nature is endless. It is seen as a way to appreciate nature and bring out the complex human connection to nature. From time immemorial artists and poets have connected nature to human characteristics and mood. Earlier artists used art as a medium to bring out the spirituality in nature. They portrayed every landscape, flower, and insect with a touch of divinity, which was largely attained by the use o light and shade. Art was also a way to explore the world of nature. It brought out the beauty and importance of nature. Many artists portray nature as realistically as possible, which led to the emergence of many movements surrounding art.

Photorealism to abstraction, nature is depicted in every art style. Art movements like Tonalism, naturalism, Plein air, Danube school, and Ecological art were based solely on nature and the natural world.

Landscape Paintings depict natural scenery in art, which is why it is also referred to as nature paintings. Artists have been enamoured by the beauty of nature and have tried to capture nature in all her glory through beautiful landscape paintings. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the Earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes that are also depicted extensively in art, such as moonscapes, skyscapes, seascapes among others.

Onam: celebrating forms of art through art, 5 unique ganesha paintings that redefine contemporary art, 5 stunning artworks to embrace this ganesh chaturthi, art and freedom: celebrating independence day.

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Art and Nature: Explore The Connection Between Nature And Art

“Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe. “Nature” refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general.”

The Relationship Of Nature And Art

The connection between art and nature is deeply intertwined, with artists drawing inspiration from the natural world for millennia. The connection between art and nature is multifaceted and enduring, reflecting humanity’s deep-seated fascination with the beauty, diversity, and fragility of the world we inhabit. Through art, we are able to celebrate, contemplate, and preserve the wonders of nature, ensuring that its beauty continues to inspire and enrich our lives for generations to come.

Art with a Purpose

The theme of nature in art can be approach in a variety of ways. Our eyes can be open to the complexity and beauty of the natural world through art. It could just be a lovely image that celebrates nature for what it is, or it could be a difficult painting that conveys the nuanced relationship that humans have with the natural world.

Beyond just being aesthetically pleasing, art can highlight important environmental issues and themes including biodiversity, conservation, sustainability, preservation, and vulnerable habitats. Art has the power to engage viewers and enlighten them about these matters, raising awareness of such significant subjects. Our innate desire to care for the things we feel a connection to is strong. Art may revitalize or ignite anew,our connection with nature.

Abstract Flowers 1 and 2 painting, interior decor look 1 - Arts Fiesta online Art Gallery

Sustainable art

Sustainable art is a movement whose aims are to ignite discussion (and adjust our perception) about the way we use our resources. It seeks to make us think more deeply about the impact that our lifestyle choices have on the planet.

Artists for Conservation

Artists for Conservation is a group of artists who, in various ways, support nature through their artwork. They paint nature in art in the form of beautiful and idyllic images of animals and landscapes. In addition, they also donate a portion of their art sales to conservation efforts.

Nature in Art

Nature in Art is a British museum devote entirely to artwork inspired by nature. They have an extensive collection of artwork covering a 1500 year time period, representing over 60 countries and cultures. In addition to their permanent collection, they have special exhibitions as well as classes and events for adults and children.

Art Galleries

Art Galleries such as Arts Fiesta an online art gallery specialize in original paintings, abstract art, bohemian art, and other Indian artworks with a natural theme.

Throughout art history, artists have strived to depict nature with varying degrees of realism. From highly detailed botanical illustrations to sweeping landscapes that evoke a sense of grandeur and scale, artists employ different techniques to convey the essence of the natural world.

Nature often serves as a powerful symbol in art, representing themes such as growth, renewal, and the cycle of life. Seasons change, symbolizing the passage of time, and flowers represent beauty, transience, or love.

Art and Nature: Explore the connection between nature and art

Inspiration

Nature has been a primary muse for artists across cultures and epochs. From the grandeur of majestic landscapes to the intricate beauty of flora and fauna, artists have drawn inspiration from the rich tapestry of the natural world. The play of light, the rhythm of the seasons, and the ever-changing landscapes offer endless opportunities for artistic exploration and expression.

In essence, the relationship between art and nature is a dynamic and multifaceted one, encompassing a wide range of themes, styles, and perspectives. Whether celebrating the beauty of the natural world, exploring humanity’s connection to the environment, or advocating for environmental stewardship, art continues to serve as a powerful medium through which we engage with, appreciate, and protect the wonders of nature.

Landscape Paintings

Artists have depict the beauty of nature in landscape paintings, which are also known as nature paintings. And have tried to capture nature in all her glory through beautiful landscape paintings. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth. Other sorts of landscapes are extensively depicts in art as well. Such as moonscapes, skyscapes, seascapes among others.

Botanical Illustrations

Marvel at the intricate beauty of botanical illustrations, where precision and artistry converge to capture the exquisite forms and textures of plants with scientific accuracy and aesthetic flair. Botanical art celebrates the diversity of plant species and serves as a timeless tribute to the wonders of nature.

Nature-Inspired Abstract Art

Explore the boundless creativity of artists who draw inspiration from nature to create abstract artworks. That evoke the essence of natural forms, patterns, and energies. Abstract nature art invites viewers to contemplate the interconnectedness of all living things and the mysteries of the natural world.

Environmental Art

Engage with thought-provoking artworks that address environmental themes and advocate for sustainability and conservation. Environmental art raises awareness about pressing ecological issues. Challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with the environment, and inspires action to protect our planet for future generations.

Exploring nature-inspired art at Arts Fiesta an online art gallery promises to be a captivating journey through the beauty and wonder of the natural world. you’ll discover a diverse array of styles, techniques, and perspectives that celebrate the beauty, complexity, and fragility of the natural world. Whether you’re drawn to the tranquility of landscapes. The elegance of floral art, or the intrigue of wildlife portraits. There’s something to inspire and captivate every nature lover and art enthusiast alike.

Some philosophers including Aristotle lauded that art can mimic nature. It embodies as a true reflection of the artist’s inner soul. Aristotle even once wrote that “Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies”. This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world. But also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. Here’s a look at some beautiful artwork that can mesmerize one’s soul and convey a sense of deeper thoughts and perspectives.

Drawing Connections

Drawing in contemporary art, spring 2017, nature as art, by joseph mangano.

what relationship is there between art and nature essay

Alan Sonfist, American (b. 1946), Earth Mapping of New York City , 1965. Charcoal on paper, 19 in x 22 in. University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Purchased with funds from Alumni Association, UM 1986.67.

Historically, drawing has been used mostly as a teaching tool and a preliminary step to develop ideas before completing a painting. With the rise of Modernism in the 20th century, drawing evolved to become its own medium for artists to express themselves. In the University of Massachusetts’s Contemporary Art Museum exhibition Body Language , viewers had the privilege to encounter different expressions of what a drawing could be in the categories of “Looking,” “Touching,” and “Feeling.” These diverse drawings opened the mind to the broad range of materials and functions of drawing. In particular, a drawing by Alan Sonfist titled Earth Mapping of New York City stood out to me among the rest. It appears to be a tracing of pine needles and natural objects found on the ground. I became fascinated with the transformation that took place when this everyday, natural pattern found on the ground was transferred into the context of art. As this interest peaked my curiosity, I started to research how artists have interacted with nature and used it as a primary source for their artworks. By considering Alan Sonfist and the works of other Land artists, I came to the conclusion that nature can be represented as a form of art on its own through the inclusion of pattern and interactive experience.

In the history of art, landscapes have proved the most enduring of artistic inspirations aside from the human figure. Only in this century has the enthusiasm for its depiction lessened due to the the multitude of technological developments that have led to a revival of abstract art. As Jacques Ellul states in his Remarks on Technology and Art :

Technology influences everything and has indeed become the chief determinant not only of man’s habitat but also of his history [….] Today art has two main orientations, the first a direct reflection of the increasing role of technology, the second a sort of explosive reaction against the rigor of technological thinking.¹

I believe a major reaction against technology has defined the movement known as Land Art, also referred to as “Earth art, “Earthworks” or “Environmental Art.” Land Art first gained popularity in the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s in response to the cultural turbulence and social unrest of the late 1960s. In order to really inspire people to feel compelled to conserve nature, a more public approach was needed. Rather than representing nature with paint on canvas or the welding of steel, a handful of artists chose to enter the landscape itself and work with its materials directly. Land Art developed out of conceptual practices in which artists started to make interventions into everyday life. These new earthworks did not depict the landscape so much as engage with it. The first works of this kind were created by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, and Alan Sonfist. These works distinguished themselves from other forms of sculpture due to their physical presence within the landscape.² Most of these works are also inextricably bound to their sites, creating a special relationship, which in turn becomes the primary content. However, since Land Art can simply be seen as a presentation of nature, what is it about nature that can be translated into the context of art?

Similar to paintings and drawings, nature provides the viewer with a pattern of similar forms that create a composition. Alan Sonfist’s Earth Mapping of New York City is a charcoal drawing that was completed in 1965. This artwork completely transcends the traditional definitions of drawing in its representation of the trace and the mark. A trace is something inscribed by the artist’s direct physical presence, while a mark is a sign placed with deliberate intention. Earth Mapping of New York City exists as both a trace and a mark. The drawing is a rubbing of pine needles and dirt that suggests the composition of the New York City landscape long before it was inhabited. However upon further examination, the drawing transforms into a landscape with its suggestion of depth, mountains, and even animals or figures in action. The possibility of seeing objects and pictures within this abstracted natural composition is what originally fascinated me in the drawing. If this drawing were still laying flat on the ground where Alan Sonfist traced over the surface, I would most likely just see the overall appearance of marks making up the ground. When this drawing is hung on a gallery wall, however, the bold and active strokes begin to mix with the stain-like shadows and smaller dots to create the illusion of a landscape with possible figures.

The possibility of seeing imagery that is not really there is explained by the concept of “pareidolia”. Pareidolia is “a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus (an image or a sound) by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists.” Pareidolia was used as a tool by artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci in the Renaissance and Alexander Cozens in the 18th century, both of whom used stains and natural occurring patterns to make pictures. In Da Vinci’s notebook “Precepts of the Painter,” there is a section included titled “A Way to Stimulate and Arouse the Mind to Various Inventions.” Here, Leonardo Da Vinci states:

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate well-conceived forms.

Leonardo understands that this new device for painting may appear “trivial and ludicrous” but is truly a vital tool in arousing the mind to various inventions.

Aside from Leonardo Da Vinci, later artists such as Alexander Cozens and Thomas Gainsborough, another 18th-century English landscape painter, used the effect of pareidolia in nature to invent works of art. Like these artists, I believe that pareidolia can help us understand a pattern and how it makes feel. This understanding can be important in deciding on the types of strokes and marks that you choose to render a scene or capture an emotion. The ability to see different forms and imagery adds an interactive component to nature where viewers can pull out individual perceptions of what lies in front of them, Aside from arousing new inventions for natural compositions, patterns in nature can also be directly translated as they appear. The idea of referencing patterns in nature dates all the way back to biblical times. In Exodus 25, a book in the Old Testament, God gives directions to the prophet Moses on how to build the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, with the specific instructions to “be sure that you make everything according to the pattern I have shown you here on the mountain.”³ Beyond patterns, this individual, psychological experience viewers gain is what makes nature a truly astonishing work of art.

Continuing with experience, strong pieces of art often evoke an emotion, bring to light a memory, or change the way you perceive something. For example, when I view works by Claude Monet I am always hit with a sense of nostalgia and familiarity with the landscape depicted as if I have been there in a previous life. This action of receiving a feeling and being put into a different emotional state is what I think makes great art. This one of the strenghts of nature over other forms of art. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this personal experience with nature in his essay titled “Nature.” The Transcendentalist writer brings up the idea that a true understanding of the self can be achieved by going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying activities as well as society. Emerson believes that when a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware of his own separateness from the material world resulting in an uninhibited way of thinking.? Like Emerson, I believe that nature can serve as an escape from the material world and can provide artists with a space to reflect on the world around them without the influence over others. This effect that nature can bring to the viewer is why Land Art is especially important today. For example, New York City’s famous “Times Square” is essentially a square intersection filled with over 230 billboards and advertisements. The advertising and influence of big corporations are posted all around Manhattan and constantly invade the minds of pedestrians.

Thankfully, a source of nature can be found in a Land Art work in lower Manhattan. In 1965, Alan Sonfist created the environmental public sculpture titled Time Landscape . This sculpture is an area of plants and trees that recreates the natural heritage of Manhattan long before it was filled with skyscrapers and taxis. In Sonfist’s essay “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments,” the artist explains that with Time Landscape he hopes to create a space for reflection and heightened sensitivity in a “cluttered and overly rationalized modern world” that would ideally stimulate an altered sense of one’s place within the world.? While critics might view Time Landscape as a simple garden or urban forest, the idea of using this natural space as a source for “reflection” transforms the traditional garden into an immersive experience. I believe the experience that Sonfist’s Time Landscape provides is an integral attempt to reconnect humans to nature.

Today we live in society where advertisements, political opinions, and worldly views are constantly being pushed into our mind by force. According to digital marketing experts, it is estimated that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.? A study at Oberlin College also revealed that the average American child is able to identify over 1,000 corporate logos but only can recognize about a dozen of the plants or animals found in their neighborhood.? Our society’s loss of connection within nature is creating a population controlled by media and opinions of corporations instead of living out our own personal discoveries and intuitions.

In conclusion, the patterns and personal experiences that viewers achieve when looking at nature justify nature as a direct material of art. While nature can sometimes seem only an aesthetically pleasing source for art, the interactive experience of reflection and individual thought is what pushes nature beyond its concrete existence into the realm of art. More importantly, using nature as a form of art can help compel society to conserve and revitalize our connection with the natural world.

1) Ellul, Jacques . “Remarks on Art and Technology.” Social Research , 1979, 805-33.

2) Beardsley, John. Earthworks and beyond contemporary art in the landscape . New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.

3) Exodus 25:40, Old Testament of the Bible.

4) Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays – “Nature” (1844). 1844. Accessed May 02, 2017. http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/nature1844.html.

5) Sonfist, Alan. Alan Sonfist: Natural Phenomena As Public Monuments . Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, 1978.

6) Marshall, Ron. “Advertising Campaigns.” Http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads.

7) “Loving Children: A Design Problem, David Orr.” Accessed May 02, 2017. http://designshare.com/research/orr/loving_children.htm.

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Land Art: Seeking The Right Approach →

Music Inspired by Landscape, Nature, and Place

“landscape” and the role of art in our understanding of nature.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with the Rest on The Flight into Egypt, 1666

In this spirit, I seek to acknowledge and engage with culture-based perceptions of nature as the ways in which we humans necessarily make sense and meaning from the world around us , whether it’s through an Albert Bierstadt painting or a Disney movie.

I feel that landscape is the term that best embodies this overall idea. This word was imported from Dutch into English in the 16th century and has been used historically to refer to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, especially in the context of visual art. “Landscape” may be as accurately applied to bucolic scenes (the word’s original application) or cityscapes, as to wilderness locales that have been minimally impacted or modified by human hands. That having been said, as a creator and an audience member I’m interested primarily in art and music that acts as a pathway to fostering a greater empathy with, and connection to, the rest of the natural world.

One thought on “ “Landscape” and the role of art in our understanding of nature ”

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Nature in chinese culture.

Wine pouring vessel (Gong)

Night-Shining White

Attributed to Dong Yuan

Finches and bamboo

Emperor Huizong

Scholar viewing a waterfall

Service with Decoration of Flowers and Birds

Landscapes after old masters

Dong Qichang

Windblown bamboo

Brush holder with “Ode to the Pavilion of the Inebriated Old Man”

Zhang Xihuang

Grazing Horse

Stately Pines on Mount Hua

Department of Asian Art , The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

In no other cultural tradition has nature played a more important role in the arts than in that of China. Since China’s earliest dynastic period, real and imagined creatures of the earth—serpents, bovines, cicadas, and dragons —were endowed with special attributes, as revealed by their depiction on ritual bronze vessels . In the Chinese imagination, mountains were also imbued since ancient times with sacred power as manifestations of nature’s vital energy ( qi ). They not only attracted the rain clouds that watered the farmer’s crops, they also concealed medicinal herbs, magical fruits, and alchemical minerals that held the promise of longevity . Mountains pierced by caves and grottoes were viewed as gateways to other realms—”cave heavens” ( dongtian ) leading to Daoist paradises where aging is arrested and inhabitants live in harmony.

From the early centuries of the Common Era, men wandered in the mountains not only in quest of immortality but to purify the spirit and find renewal. Daoist and Buddhist holy men gravitated to sacred mountains to build meditation huts and establish temples. They were followed by pilgrims, travelers, and sightseers: poets who celebrated nature’s beauty , city dwellers who built country estates to escape the dust and pestilence of crowded urban centers, and, during periods of political turmoil, officials and courtiers who retreated to the mountains as places of refuge.

Early Chinese philosophical and historical texts contain sophisticated conceptions of the nature of the cosmos. These ideas predate the formal development of the native belief systems of Daoism and Confucianism, and, as part of the foundation of Chinese culture, they were incorporated into the fundamental tenets of these two philosophies. Similarly, these ideas strongly influenced Buddhism when it arrived in China around the first century A.D. Therefore, the ideas about nature described below, as well as their manifestation in Chinese gardens , are consistent with all three belief systems.

The natural world has long been conceived in Chinese thought as a self-generating, complex arrangement of elements that are continuously changing and interacting. Uniting these disparate elements is the Dao, or the Way. Dao is the dominant principle by which all things exist, but it is not understood as a causal or governing force. Chinese philosophy tends to focus on the relationships between the various elements in nature rather than on what makes or controls them. According to Daoist beliefs, man is a crucial component of the natural world and is advised to follow the flow of nature’s rhythms. Daoism also teaches that people should maintain a close relationship with nature for optimal moral and physical health.

Within this structure, each part of the universe is made up of complementary aspects known as yin and yang. Yin, which can be described as passive, dark, secretive, negative, weak, feminine, and cool, and yang, which is active, bright, revealed, positive, masculine, and hot, constantly interact and shift from one extreme to the other, giving rise to the rhythm of nature and unending change.

As early as the Han dynasty , mountains figured prominently in the arts. Han incense burners typically resemble mountain peaks, with perforations concealed amid the clefts to emit incense, like grottoes disgorging magical vapors. Han mirrors are often decorated with either a diagram of the cosmos featuring a large central boss that recalls Mount Kunlun, the mythical abode of the Queen Mother of the West and the axis of the cosmos, or an image of the Queen Mother of the West enthroned on a mountain. While they never lost their cosmic symbolism or association with paradises inhabited by numinous beings, mountains gradually became a more familiar part of the scenery in depictions of hunting parks, ritual processions, temples, palaces, and gardens. By the late Tang dynasty , landscape painting had evolved into an independent genre that embodied the universal longing of cultivated men to escape their quotidian world to commune with nature. The prominence of landscape imagery in Chinese art has continued for more than a millennium and still inspires contemporary artists .

Department of Asian Art. “Nature in Chinese Culture.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cnat/hd_cnat.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Department of Asian Art

Department of Asian Art. “ Mauryan Empire (ca. 323–185 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Zen Buddhism .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Chinese Cloisonné .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Chinese Gardens and Collectors’ Rocks .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Landscape Painting in Chinese Art .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Kushan Empire (ca. Second Century B.C.–Third Century A.D.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Qin Dynasty (221–206 B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Rinpa Painting Style .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Jōmon Culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 B.C.) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ The Kano School of Painting .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Woodblock Prints in the Ukiyo-e Style .” (October 2003)
Department of Asian Art. “ Traditional Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (386–581) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Tang Dynasty (618–907) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Yayoi Culture (ca. 300 B.C.–300 A.D.) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) .” (October 2001)
Department of Asian Art. “ Art of the Pleasure Quarters and the Ukiyo-e Style .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Scholar-Officials of China .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Kofun Period (ca. 300–710) .” (October 2002)
Department of Asian Art. “ Shunga Dynasty (ca. Second–First Century B.C.) .” (October 2000)
Department of Asian Art. “ Lacquerware of East Asia .” (October 2004)
Department of Asian Art. “ Painting Formats in East Asian Art .” (October 2004)
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The Relationship between Nature and Art.pdf

The mid-eighteenth century was a defining moment in the tradition of aesthetic reflection in the visual arts. The relationship between nature and art was influenced by aesthetic thought expounded by various philosophers. Landscape painting became the model for the appreciation of nature, which was encouraged by aesthetic theory, at a time when the urban inhabitants of England’s major cities were longing to be reconnected with nature. The canonical idea of art’s function as imitation of nature was questioned in the artistic developments of English landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the emphasis on ‘imitation of nature’ was the subject of much debate.

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Catherine Wilson

Three features of Northern European visual art of the early 17 th century stand out as historically distinctive. One is naturalism, the interest in the faithful depiction of plants and animals. Flowers, crustaceans, game birds, and domestic animals are drawn and painted with affection and care. A second, related feature is ordinariness and intimacy. In Dutch painting of the period, ordinary folk are shown calmly engaged in the activities of daily life, preparing their meals, minding their children, employing their brooms and scales, absorbed in their reading, or practicing their musical instruments. They replace the saints and mythological figures portrayed in earlier genres in dramatic or highly emotional states, connected to supersensible reality. A third feature is the virtuostic rendering of materials, reflexy-const as the technical manuals of the period called it; the transparency of glass and the sheen of metal, but also the minute detailing of the products of human fabrication, such as cloth, carpets, figured porcelain, and silver. Earlier, painters of the English School had abandoned the classical interest in folded monochromatic drapery to depict their aloof subjects in spectacular outfits of figured tapestry, or embroidered with geometrical designs, and with jewellery and trim tending to the fantastic— webs of gems, lace ruffs and cuffs. The interest in repeated patterns and geometrical forms such as floor tiles and brocades extends to the " mathematical engagement" of still life composition, and in these pictures, both defamiliarization and an intimacy suggestive of Platonic reminiscence seem to remove them to a higher order of experience. A style of presentation implies a set of choices—what to depict and how to depict it-and choice implies a need for justification, for both the production and the consumption of art objects requires investment, of training, time, and effort on one hand, of money on the other. The objects depicted must therefore reveal ―a dimension of value capable of justifying their representation.‖ 1 and historians have long sought to explain the values of the above-mentioned

daniel watts

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Journal of Architectural/Planning Research and Studies (JARS)

Maimuna Saleh-Bala

The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque were three key concepts of aesthetics originated in philosophical context of the 18th century. Together, they outlined the variety of aesthetically significant experiences. The article aims to review historical roots of the three aesthetics and how they were associated with landscape architecture and environmental art, both of which concerned with shaping the land and environment. Subsequently, the article discusses associations between the English Landscape School - landscape architecture embraced by the 18th century three aesthetics and the ecological design - modern landscape architectural design theme primarily dominated by Ian McHarg in the 1960s. Conclusively, the article critically discussed lessons learned from the associations and how landscape architecture should be shaped forward.

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Relationships with what is called “nature” are often fundamental to the understanding of our experiences of the world, and therefore of our politics, our knowledges, and our everyday lives. The historical examination of these relationships and their meanings for certain people can therefore be a critically important archeo- logical means for exploring the origins of how we today think about these relationships. The English land- scape garden, intimately imbued with “natural” meanings and experiences, offers one site for such an exam- ination. It was the product of a set of philosophies and theories—aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, and political—that were foundational to the experience of the eighteenth-century gentleman, and therefore to the history of ideas in the Western world.

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A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Nature’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.

You can read ‘Nature’ in full here . Below, we summarise Emerson’s argument and offer an analysis of its meaning and context.

Emerson begins his essay by defining nature, in philosophical terms, as anything that is not our individual souls. So our bodies, as well as all of the natural world, but also all of the world of art and technology, too, are ‘nature’ in this philosophical sense of the world. He urges his readers not to rely on tradition or history to help them to understand the world: instead, they should look to nature and the world around them.

In the first chapter, Emerson argues that nature is never ‘used up’ when the right mind examines it: it is a source of boundless curiosity. No man can own the landscape: it belongs, if it belongs to anyone at all, to ‘the poet’. Emerson argues that when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

Emerson states that when he goes among nature, he becomes a ‘transparent eyeball’ because he sees nature but is himself nothing: he has been absorbed or subsumed into nature and, because God made nature, God himself. He feels a deep kinship and communion with all of nature. He acknowledges that our view of nature depends on our own mood, and that the natural world reflects the mood we are feeling at the time.

In the second chapter, Emerson focuses on ‘commodity’: the name he gives to all of the advantages which our senses owe to nature. Emerson draws a parallel with the ‘useful arts’ which have built houses and steamships and whole towns: these are the man-made equivalents of the natural world, in that both nature and the ‘arts’ are designed to provide benefit and use to mankind.

The third chapter then turns to ‘beauty’, and the beauty of nature comprises several aspects, which Emerson outlines. First, the beauty of nature is a restorative : seeing the sky when we emerge from a day’s work can restore us to ourselves and make us happy again. The human eye is the best ‘artist’ because it perceives and appreciates this beauty so keenly. Even the countryside in winter possesses its own beauty.

The second aspect of beauty Emerson considers is the spiritual element. Great actions in history are often accompanied by a beautiful backdrop provided by nature. The third aspect in which nature should be viewed is its value to the human intellect . Nature can help to inspire people to create and invent new things. Everything in nature is a representation of a universal harmony and perfection, something greater than itself.

In his fourth chapter, Emerson considers the relationship between nature and language. Our language is often a reflection of some natural state: for instance, the word right literally means ‘straight’, while wrong originally denoted something ‘twisted’. But we also turn to nature when we wish to use language to reflect a ‘spiritual fact’: for example, that a lamb symbolises innocence, or a fox represents cunning. Language represents nature, therefore, and nature in turn represents some spiritual truth.

Emerson argues that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’ Many great principles of the physical world are also ethical or moral axioms: for example, ‘the whole is greater than its part’.

In the fifth chapter, Emerson turns his attention to nature as a discipline . Its order can teach us spiritual and moral truths, but it also puts itself at the service of mankind, who can distinguish and separate (for instance, using water for drinking but wool for weaving, and so on). There is a unity in nature which means that every part of it corresponds to all of the other parts, much as an individual art – such as architecture – is related to the others, such as music or religion.

The sixth chapter is devoted to idealism . How can we sure nature does actually exist, and is not a mere product within ‘the apocalypse of the mind’, as Emerson puts it? He believes it doesn’t make any practical difference either way (but for his part, Emerson states that he believes God ‘never jests with us’, so nature almost certainly does have an external existence and reality).

Indeed, we can determine that we are separate from nature by changing out perspective in relation to it: for example, by bending down and looking between our legs, observing the landscape upside down rather than the way we usually view it. Emerson quotes from Shakespeare to illustrate how poets can draw upon nature to create symbols which reflect the emotions of the human soul. Religion and ethics, by contrast, degrade nature by viewing it as lesser than divine or moral truth.

Next, in the seventh chapter, Emerson considers nature and the spirit . Spirit, specifically the spirit of God, is present throughout nature. In his eighth and final chapter, ‘Prospects’, Emerson argues that we need to contemplate nature as a whole entity, arguing that ‘a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments’ which focus on more local details within nature.

Emerson concludes by arguing that in order to detect the unity and perfection within nature, we must first perfect our souls. ‘He cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit’, Emerson urges. Wisdom means finding the miraculous within the common or everyday. He then urges the reader to build their own world, using their spirit as the foundation. Then the beauty of nature will reveal itself to us.

In a number of respects, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forward a radically new attitude towards our relationship with nature. For example, although we may consider language to be man-made and artificial, Emerson demonstrates that the words and phrases we use to describe the world are drawn from our observation of nature. Nature and the human spirit are closely related, for Emerson, because they are both part of ‘the same spirit’: namely, God. Although we are separate from nature – or rather, our souls are separate from nature, as his prefatory remarks make clear – we can rediscover the common kinship between us and the world.

Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ in 1836, not long after Romanticism became an important literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in Europe and the United States. Like Wordsworth and the Romantics before him, Emerson argues that children have a better understanding of nature than adults, and when a man returns to nature he can rediscover his lost youth, that wide-eyed innocence he had when he went among nature as a boy.

And like Wordsworth, Emerson argued that to understand the world, we should go out there and engage with it ourselves, rather than relying on books and tradition to tell us what to think about it. In this connection, one could undertake a comparative analysis of Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and Wordsworth’s pair of poems ‘ Expostulation and Reply ’ and ‘ The Tables Turned ’, the former of which begins with a schoolteacher rebuking Wordsworth for sitting among nature rather than having his nose buried in a book:

‘Why, William, on that old gray stone, ‘Thus for the length of half a day, ‘Why, William, sit you thus alone, ‘And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed ‘To beings else forlorn and blind! ‘Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed ‘From dead men to their kind.

Similarly, for Emerson, the poet and the dreamer can get closer to the true meaning of nature than scientists because they can grasp its unity by viewing it holistically, rather than focusing on analysing its rock formations or other more local details. All of this is in keeping with the philosophy of Transcendentalism , that nineteenth-century movement which argued for a kind of spiritual thinking instead of scientific thinking based narrowly on material things.

Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau, was the most famous writer to belong to the Transcendentalist movement, and ‘Nature’ is fundamentally a Transcendentalist essay, arguing for an intuitive and ‘poetic’ engagement with nature in the round rather than a coldly scientific or empirical analysis of its component parts.

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Shakespeare's Nature: From Cultivation to Culture

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5 Even Better than the Real Thing? Art and Nature in The Winter’s Tale

Published: January 2014
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Set within the context of a putatively pastoral space, The Winter’s Tale dramatizes a conflict between art and nature which had come to dominate the Jacobean imagination. Moving beyond the parameters of Perdita and Polixenes’ dispute, however, the debate between art and nature permeates the play. Extending this discussion through the play’s wider focus on the relationships between truth and fiction, this chapter explores the changing space of the countryside and the opportunities it offers for consumerism and mobility. Such opportunities, this chapter argues, expose a new model of human intervention in the production of fantasy.

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The American Scholar

Ralph waldo emerson.

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Theme Analysis

In “The American Scholar,” Emerson emphasizes the particular role that nature has in a scholar’s development. Emerson believed that man was one with nature, and that by studying nature man could learn more about himself and all of mankind. America—as a new and vast country that was still being explored—offered ample opportunities for scholars to study and experience nature in a way that Europeans from smaller and more heavily-developed countries could not. By exploring and observing the “savage nature” that still existed in America, the American scholar could help pioneer a new intellectual and literary tradition that would be distinctly American and help define the present age.

Emerson considers nature “the first in time and the first in importance of the influences” in the early development of a scholar. The scholar, according to Emerson, is naturally drawn to nature as an object of study. He writes that the “young mind” initially sees everything as “individual,” but eventually begins finding connections between seemingly different objects. The clear connections among living things in the natural landscape serve as the intellectual basis for observing these connections elsewhere. The scholar’s “unifying instinct” eventually turns inward and they find that “nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part.” In studying nature, they begin to understand more of themselves and their place in the world. Furthermore, Emerson also believed that “man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.” This meant that if one man could truly begin to understand himself, especially through the study of nature, then he could also begin to understand those around him.

Emerson believed that “man is related to all nature.” Therefore, understanding nature was the first step to understanding mankind as a whole and not just the individual self. The “unifying instinct” that drives the scholar to find commonalities on the surface also drives them to look below the surface of the earth, where they will discover “roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one stem.” Because nature mirrors society, it follows that there are also unseen “roots” that bind individuals to one another despite differences in class, religion, race, sex, and culture. The scholar will recognize that he or she has the ability to use this knowledge to inspire others. However, they also likely know that they are not the first to find these connections, and that rather than regurgitating the wisdom of past scholars, it is important for them to create something original and specific to the present time and place.

When Emerson wrote this essay in the 1830s, America was still a new nation and largely unexplored and undeveloped. His hope was that a new generation of American scholars would turn to America’s landscape for inspiration to form new ideas and create a new style of art that would reflect the landscape’s untamed wildness. Emerson believed that new art and ideas did not come from libraries or colleges, but “out of unhandselled savage nature.” Furthermore, it was not a life spent in formal education that gave birth to the most influential ideas and literature, but that “out of terrible Druids and Berserkers come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.” Emerson also believed that the extent of a scholar’s understanding of nature reflected the extent of their understanding of their own mind. This would imply that because so much of America’s nature was still unexplored and therefore not understood, so, too, were the unique minds of the American people. America’s newly won independence and anxiety to create a respectable national identity, it’s vast expanses of unexplored land, and its relative isolation from European countries all contribute to Emerson’s assertion that the time was ripe for an artistic revolution, “if we but know what to do with it.”

To Emerson, nature is inextricably connected to humanity and is therefore the greatest influence upon the development of the scholar. By studying nature, Emerson believes, the scholar can develop all the tools they needed to study humanity and create literature and art that can uplift and inspire people from all walks of life. Furthermore, America’s unique landscape, if viewed and studied properly, could inspire a new generation of artists whose words and ideas would define what it was to be an American in the early 19th century.

Nature and Connection ThemeTracker

Nature and Connection Quotes in The American Scholar

He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of so much of his own mind does he not yet possess.

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COMMENTS

Nature in Art: Detailed Discussion of Nature Inspired Art and Artists
Nature in Art is a British museum devoted entirely to artwork inspired by nature. They have an extensive collection of artwork covering a 1500 year time period, representing over 60 countries and cultures. In addition to their permanent collection, they have special exhibitions as well as classes and events for adults and children.
Examining the Relationship Between Nature and Art
One of the most remarkable artists to ever live, Henry Matisse once said: "An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.". For as long as there has been art, artists have been enthused by nature.
PDF Write an essay examining Wilde's exploration of Art and Nature
In relating himself to Art, Wilde attempts to assert his control and individualism to immunise himself against the Victorian society's harsh moral judgements. Somewhat ironically, Carson also forms a symbiotic relationship between Wilde and his art, but does so with the intent of condemnation, not liberation. While Carson implies that Art is ...
Art and Nature
It is no longer simply a feeling of apartness, but also a sense that we own and control nature. But art shows us that we do not. We have laboratories where we recreate the birth of stars. Art is a record of our changing encounter with nature, and reveals the truth that our sense of separation is mere illusion — we are a tiny part of a greater ...
Is there art in nature? What is the nature of art?
This lesson uses comparison and contrast to examine the relationship between art and natural world more closely, and to see if we can better understand the nature of art.
To the Ends of the Earth: Art and Environment Art & Environment
Conceived to mark the opening of a new garden at the centre, its curator aimed to present 'a situation in which art of an indoor nature will be in the garden and art of an outdoor character in the gallery'.3 The film David Lamelas made for the occasion, A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space, begins with an analysis of ...
The Close Connection Between Art And Nature
There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists' artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where they can bring life to nature in their paintings. Many famous artists like Van Gogh and Monet ...
Art and Nature: Explore The Connection Between Nature And Art
There's something to inspire and captivate every nature lover and art enthusiast alike. There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists' artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where ...
PDF Is There Art in Nature? What Is the Nature of Art?
NATURE OF ART? The connection between art and nature is central to the understanding of each. Before the widespread use of photography, much of what we refer to as the visual arts involved an attempt to re-create the natural world. This lesson uses comparison and contrast to examine more closely this relationship, and to see if we can better ...
Nature as Art
More importantly, using nature as a form of art can help compel society to conserve and revitalize our connection with the natural world. 1) Ellul, Jacques . "Remarks on Art and Technology.". Social Research, 1979, 805-33. 2) Beardsley, John. Earthworks and beyond contemporary art in the landscape.
"Landscape" and the role of art in our understanding of nature
The interpretation of nature through art is, by definition, the representation of human perspectives. This, I believe, is not a bad thing. In Landscape And Memory, Simon Schama argues eloquently for the importance of understanding that "the cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature" and that culture is ...
PDF From science in art to the art of science
To generalize about the relationship between art and science is not so much ... There are as many potential relationships as there are artists who undertake pro- ... M. Visualizations: The Nature ...
Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships
Nature there is nothing dialectical in the relation- and artifacts commonly appear together, ship between art and nature, nature pro- and not infrequently artistic constructions vides the model for artistic composition and are intentionally placed in natural settings. there is, presumably, a harmonious rela- In a variety of ways, then, the ...
Nature in Chinese Culture
Chinese philosophy tends to focus on the relationships between the various elements in nature rather than on what makes or controls them. According to Daoist beliefs, man is a crucial component of the natural world and is advised to follow the flow of nature's rhythms. ... Department of Asian Art. "Nature in Chinese Culture ...
PDF The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the ...
The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their ...
PDF An essay examining Wilde's exploration of art, nature, love and desire
Hayley Wareham. Wilde's exploration of art becomes multifaceted when considered in tandem with his exploration of desire and sensation. This essay shall examine the presentation of art in The Decay of Lying and The Picture of Dorian Gray1 to see what insight is offered into Wilde's ideology as an artist and consider why his treatment of ...
Art and Human Nature
ther to human nature-to our enduring cogni- There are at least two reasons to believe this. tive, perceptual, and emotive architecture. Art The first is that children not raised with pictures. history and cultural studies rather than cognitive are able to recognize what pictures are pictures.
The Relationship between Nature and Art.pdf
Silvia Wistuba. The mid-eighteenth century was a defining moment in the tradition of aesthetic reflection in the visual arts. The relationship between nature and art was influenced by aesthetic thought expounded by various philosophers. Landscape painting became the model for the appreciation of nature, which was encouraged by aesthetic theory ...
A Summary and Analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Nature'
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'Nature' is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet's eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.
Even Better than the Real Thing? Art and Nature in The Winter's Tale
As the values of production become increasingly complicated by questions of 'art', the idea of nature re-emerges in the play's wider conflicts between truth and illusion. In The Winter's Tale , Bohemia offers a new space for the exploration of nature where human interference triumphs in the form of illusion, and where art offers the ...
Nature and Connection Theme in The American Scholar
Nature and Connection Theme Analysis. LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The American Scholar, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. In "The American Scholar," Emerson emphasizes the particular role that nature has in a scholar's development. Emerson believed that man was one with nature, and that by ...
Art and science: Intersections of art and science through time and
Art and science have coexisted, often indistinguishable from each other, across time and space. A wealth of early documented examples comes from the Islamic culture, where art and science joined in intricate star‐shaped architectural geometries, and the use of "Nur" (light) and material science to design utensils and lettering in manuscripts 2.