Aerial landscape art

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An example of artistic depiction of an aerial landscape:Jane Frank (Jane Schenthal Frank, 1918-1986), "Aerial Series: Ploughed Fields, Maryland", 1974, acrylic and mixed materials on apertured double canvas, 52"x48".

(This article concerns painting and other non-photographic media. Otherwise, see aerial photography)

Aerial landscape art is painting or other visual art which depicts or evokes the appearance of a landscape as seen from above, usually from a considerable distance, as it might be viewed from an aircraft or spacecraft. Sometimes the art is based not on direct observation but on aerial photography, or on maps created using satellite imagery. This kind of landscape art hardly existed before the 20th century, with its development of means of human transport which allow for actual overhead views of large landscapes.

Before the twentieth century, the obvious precedents for aerial landscape art are maps, or somewhat map-like artworks, which depict a landscape from an imagined bird's-eye viewpoint. For example, Australian Aborigines, beginning in very ancient times, created "country" landscapes - aerial landscapes depicting their country - showing ancestral paths to watering holes and sacred sites. Centuries before air travel, Europeans developed maps of whole continents and even of the globe itself, all from an imagined aerial perspective, aided with mathematical calculations derived from surveys and knowledge of astronomical relationships.

There were other pre-20th century artworks sometimes depicting a single town or precinct, in a manner that comes closer to real aerial landscape, showing the landscape more or less as it might look from directly overead. These aerial landscapes and townscapes often employed a kind of mixed perspective: while the overall view was quasi-aerial - showing the disposition of features arrayed as if seen from directly above - individual features of importance (such as churches or other major buildings) were pictured larger than scale, and angled as they might look to someone standing on the ground. The advent of balloon travel in the 19th century aided the development of more realistic aerial landscapes.

1 Modernist abstraction and the aerial landscape
2 Special case: the aerial cloudscape
3 See also
- 3.1 Artists
- 3.2 Other related topics
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Modernist abstraction and the aerial landscape

Malevich, who wrote extensively on the aesthetics and philosophy of modern art, identified the aerial landscape (especially the "bird's-eye view", looking straight down, as opposed to an oblique angle) as a genuinely new and radicalizing paradigm in the art of the twentieth century. Unlike traditional landscapes, aerial landscapes often do not include any view of a horizon or sky, nor in such cases is there any recession of the view into an infinite distance. Additionally, there is a natural kinship between aerial landscape painting and abstract painting, not only because familiar objects are sometimes difficult to recognize when viewed aerially, but because there is no natural "up" or "down" orientation in the painting: often it seems that, like a work of abstract expressionism, the painting might just as well be hung upside down or sideways (the painting pictured at right is one such example). Furthermore, as in a Jackson Pollock or a Mark Tobey, such images often have an "all over" distribution of interest that defies any attempt to decide on a "correct" orientation or a focal point.

In the twentieth century, famous or notable artists who created works variously inspired by aerial landscape include Kazimir Malevich, Georgia O'Keeffe, Susan Crile, Jane Frank, Richard Diebenkorn, Yvonne Jacquette, and Nancy Graves.

[edit] Special case: the aerial cloudscape

The aerial cloudscapes painted by Georgia O'Keeffe in the 1960s and 1970s are an interesting case. They are generally, strictly speaking, not landscapes at all, since they show the clouds from above, suspended in blue sky, with the land below nowhere to be seen: it is the view of clouds regarded at a downward and sideways angle, as from the window of an airplane. These paintings typically depict a kind of "pseudo-horizon," formed not where land meets sky but where the suspended layer of clouds - a "pseudo-ground" - meets the empty upper sky. See the external link below for an image of O'Keeffe's gigantic 1965 aerial cloudscape entitled "Sky Above Clouds IV", housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Of course, during this period, O'Keeffe also produced aerial landscapes properly speaking - that is, views of the land from above. Below is an external link to an image of one of these: "It Was Blue and Green", 1960.)

[edit] See also

[edit] Artists

[edit] Other related topics

[edit] References

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