Part 1 ‘Beauty and the Sublime’ explores some of the traditional concepts within landscape art, in particular the concepts of beauty and the sublime and some of its technical concerns.
Concepts of beauty
“Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12
“Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.
Landscape perspectives: pictorialism to modernism
1.1: Preconceptions about landscape
1.2 Photography in the museum or in the gallery?
1.3 Establishing conventions: Landscape Photography and Landscape Art
The beautiful and the sublime
The Zone System
1.8 The Zone System in Practice
Landscape and the City
Assignment 1: Beauty and the Sublime
1.5 and 1.7: Preparing Assignment 6: Transitions
TASK
Write a short reflective account of your own views on the picturesque (around 300 words). Consider how the concept of the picturesque has influenced your own ideas about landscape art, and in particular your ideas about what constitutes an effective or successful landscape photograph.
NOTE: Link no longer available for the picturesque and romanticism in painting: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/r/romanticism-romance-sublime-picturesque/)
I have attended many art classes and read many books and magazine articles books on art and photography composition and techniques, many of which together with topics like Golden Mean/Rule of Thirds and theories of balance and harmony, promote ‘correctly’ picturesque principles like those of Gilpin:
- The texture should be “rough”, “intricate”, “varied”, or “broken”, without obvious straight lines (though against this, leading lines can exaggerate perspective and make it more dramatic).
- The composition should work as a unified whole, incorporating several elements: a dark “foreground” with a “front screen” or “side screens”, a brighter middle “distance”, and at least one further, less distinctly depicted, “distance”. (often together with a path or entry point conveniently disappearing at rule of thirds)
- A ruined abbey or castle would add “consequence” (or nowadays some flaking stone or wood can also give idea of impermanence)
- A low viewpoint, which tended to emphasise the “sublime”, was always preferable to a prospect from on high. (but depends how high – very high looking down steep is also good.)
So I am very sure that these principles have become more or less intuitive in the way I often initially frame landscape pictures. I also often evaluate pictures against these principles if I think things look uninteresting or flat.
However in general I find ‘picturesque’ images rather boring and carefully composed images that just follow these conventions rather cliche. There are very interesting debates in design theory on how far and in what ways some of these principles are ‘hard-wired’ and how our brains interprete images eg we see tonal structure before colour, automatically try to group elements in an images and (I for one) see faces everywhere. And how far these things (eg reading single-point perspective and how we see and experience perspective) are culturally learned. Personally from an aesthetic point of view I am more interested now in images that subvert the ‘natural’ way I see things and point to something new.
I do not however think my reaction to conventionally ‘picturesque’ landscape images is due simply to the aesthetic per se but rather the underlying concept of ‘picturesque’ in terms of making life and nature tame and ‘pretty’ rather than facing its contradictions, exhilarations and pains. Tourists seeking to idealise and sanitise their ‘safe’ experiences wither in the images they themselves produce, or those they purchase. I would much rather see and experience real sunsets, views from the top of ridges and crags and the wind in my face than see these in photographs. In photographs I am looking much more for the thoughts of the photographer on the meaning of their images – including Fay Godwin’s call for much more attention to complexities of power and conflicts of interest between different users of the countryside and also urban natural environments.
I have a long way to go though before my own images are able to go beyond the conventional.