Harmony

St. Emilion, 11x14 oil on canvas.

I've been examining a recent book titled "Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism."  In the main essay, Barry Schwabsky writes about man's relation to nature today and how it can affect current landscape painting.  He states that we no longer think that man is outside nature, the attitude that has brought us to where we are today, a planet on the brink.  Nor can we accept the other end of the continuum, that man is just a bunch of chemicals reacting blindly within nature.  He cites the example of Jackson Pollack engaged in painting, a "pure harmony, an easy give-and-take" dance which taps into and exposes something "quickened by a spirit" beyond painting, as a guide to how landscape painting may offer the opportunity to "reset" the relationship between man and nature.  Ironically, the example of Pollack demonstrates how precarious man's search for harmony can be.

Yesterday I finished reading Jean Renoir's biography of his father.  He quotes from some papers left by his father in which Renoir father wrote: "I believe that I am closer to God when I am humbly in front of the splendor of nature, accepting the role which I have been given to play, honoring this majestic splendor without self-interest and certainly without demands, persuaded that the Creator has forgotten nothing" [my translation].  It seems to me that Renoir, though writing at an earlier time, says about the same thing, but in less fashionable language.

Though landscape painting keeps re-inventing itself, the problem of man and nature and its reflection in landscape painting is not new.  Except today the urgency is much greater for re-establishing a harmonious relationship between man and nature because our survival depends upon it.  I think artists have always been aware of the man/nature conundrum.  Landscape painting, one way or another, has always expressed the latent desire to return to a Garden of Eden, the idyllic time and place before time, when man was in harmony with nature.  This is the archetypal myth which seems to underlie all poetry and painting, and keeps re-appearing in one form or another.

Schwabsky sees landscape painting as a means to pursue this harmony between man and nature, or make us more conscious of the need for it.  He writes "...it has become more and more common for painters to use landscape--the image of nature, displayed in all its artifice--as, in essence, a metaphor for painting itself, because they intuit that painting in turn can be a metaphor for our relation to nature."