Aerial landscape art - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

(This article concerns painting and other non-photographic media. Otherwise, see aerial photography
Aerial photography
Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or...

)

Aerial landscape art includes painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

s and other visual arts which depict or evoke the appearance of a landscape

Landscape art

Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...

from a perspective above it—usually from a considerable distance—as it might be viewed from an aircraft

Aircraft

An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...

or spacecraft

Spacecraft

A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....

. Sometimes the art is based not on direct observation but on aerial photography

Aerial photography

Aerial photography is the taking of photographs of the ground from an elevated position. The term usually refers to images in which the camera is not supported by a ground-based structure. Cameras may be hand held or mounted, and photographs may be taken by a photographer, triggered remotely or...

, or on maps

MAPS

Maps is the plural of map, a visual representation of an area.As an acronym, MAPS may refer to:* Mail Abuse Prevention System, an organisation that provides anti-spam support...

created using satellite imagery

Satellite imagery

Satellite imagery consists of photographs of Earth or other planets made by means of artificial satellites.- History :The first images from space were taken on sub-orbital flights. The U.S-launched V-2 flight on October 24, 1946 took one image every 1.5 seconds...

. This kind of landscape art

Landscape art

hardly existed before the 20th century; its modern development coincided with the advent of human transport which allowed for actual overhead views of large landscapes.

The earliest depictions of aerial landscapes are map

Map

A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes....

s, or somewhat map-like artworks, which show a landscape from an imagined bird's-eye viewpoint. For example, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n 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 Western artworks sometimes depicting a single town or precinct in a manner that comes closer to real aerial landscape, showing a town or city more or less as it might look from directly overead. These map-like aerial 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, angled as they might look to someone standing on the ground. The map-like functional purpose of these pictures meant that such landmarks ought to be recognizable to a viewer, therefore, a realistic overhead view of the scene would defeat the purpose. The advent of balloon travel in the 19th century encouraged the development of more realistic aerial landscapes, as the first pioneering aviators begin to learn what landscapes and buildings really looked like when viewed from directly overhead.

Modernist abstraction and the aerial landscape

The artist Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician, born of ethnic Polish parents. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.-Early life:...

(1878-1935), who wrote extensively on the aesthetics and philosophy of modern art

Modern art

Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

, identified the aerial landscape

Landscape

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...

(especially the "bird's-eye view

Bird's-eye view

A bird's-eye view is an elevated view of an object from above, with a perspective as though the observer were a bird, often used in the making of blueprints, floor plans and maps.It can be an aerial photograph, but also a drawing...

", looking straight down, as opposed to an oblique angle) as a genuinely new and radicalizing paradigm in the art of the twentieth century. In his view, air travel, and more specifically, aerial photography

Aerial photography

had created this broad change in consciousness. The Italian

Italian modern and contemporary art

Italian Contemporary art refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards.-Futurism:The founder and most influential personality of Futurism was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909.The Futurists...

Futurists

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...

were similarly fascinated with aerial views of landscapes.

Unlike traditional landscape

Landscape art

s, aerial landscapes often do not include any view of a horizon

Horizon

The horizon is the apparent line that separates earth from sky, the line that divides all visible directions into two categories: those that intersect the Earth's surface, and those that do not. At many locations, the true horizon is obscured by trees, buildings, mountains, etc., and the resulting...

or sky

Sky

The sky is the part of the atmosphere or outer space visible from the surface of any astronomical object. It is difficult to define precisely for several reasons. During daylight, the sky of Earth has the appearance of a pale blue surface because the air scatters the sunlight. The sky is sometimes...

, 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

Abstract art

Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...

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

Painting

. Often it seems that, as in a work of abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

, the painting might just as well be hung upside down or sideways. Furthermore, as in a Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...

or a Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey

Mark George Tobey was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the...

painting, such images often have an "all over

All-over painting

All-over painting refers to the non-differential treatment of the surface of a work of two-dimensional art, for instance a painting. This concept is most popularly thought of as emerging in relation to the so-called "drip" paintings of Jackson Pollock and the "automatic writing" or "abstract...

" distribution of interest that defies any attempt to decide on a "correct" orientation or focal point.

In addition to Malevich

Kazimir Malevich

, many other modern and contemporary artists have produced work inspired by aerial views of landscapes, including Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...

, Susan Crile

Susan Crile

Susan Crile is an artist, primarily a painter and printmaker. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions, and her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, and...

, Jane Frank

Jane Frank

Jane Schenthal Frank was an American artist. She studied with Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg and is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist...

, Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...

, Yvonne Jacquette

Yvonne Jacquette

Yvonne Jacquette , is an American painter and printmaker known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique.-Life:She grew up in Stamford, Connecticut.She...

, and Nancy Graves

Nancy Graves

Nancy Graves was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the moon...

Special case: the aerial cloudscape

The aerial cloudscape

Cloudscape (art)

In art, a cloudscape is the depiction of a view of clouds or the sky. Usually, as in the examples seen here, the clouds are depicted as viewed from the earth, often including just enough of a landscape to suggest scale, orientation, weather conditions, and distance...

s painted by Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

in the 1960s and 1970s are a special case. Many of them are not landscape

Landscape

s at all, since they don't show any land. They depict images of clouds viewed 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 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

Art Institute of Chicago

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...

).

During this period, O'Keeffe also produced some aerial cloudscape paintings which qualify as true aerial landscape paintings because they include a view of the land below the clouds. An example is "It Was Blue and Green" (1960; see external link to image below). This painting shows a view of land seen from above through a thin layer of clouds, combining the aerial landscape and aerial cloudscape genres.

Artists

Susan Crile
Susan Crile
Susan Crile is an artist, primarily a painter and printmaker. She has had over 50 solo exhibitions, and her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, and...
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a French photographer, journalist, reporter and environmentalist.- Early life :Yann Arthus-Bertrand was born in Paris on March 13, 1946 in a renowned jewellers' family founded in 1803 by Claude Arthus-Bertrand and Michel-Ange Marion. His sister Catherine is one of his...
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...
Jane Frank
Jane Frank
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American artist. She studied with Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg and is known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, and textile artist...
Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometime-filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena like camels or maps of the moon...
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky is a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view...
Yvonne Jacquette
Yvonne Jacquette
Yvonne Jacquette , is an American painter and printmaker known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointillistic technique.-Life:She grew up in Stamford, Connecticut.She...
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Malevich
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretician, born of ethnic Polish parents. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.-Early life:...
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
Don Reichert
Don Reichert
Don Reichert is a Canadian artist. While primarily a painter in the abstract expressionist tradition, he is also notable as a photographer and digital media artist. Born in Libau, Manitoba in 1932 to parents who had immigrated from Austria, he studied art in Canada, Mexico, and England. He...
Nikolas Schiller
Nikolas Schiller
Nikolas Schiller is an American blogger, a prominent digital map artist in the blogosphere, a vegetarian, and a civil rights activist who lives in Washington, DC...
Everett Warner
Everett Warner
Everett Longley Warner was an American Impressionist painter and printmaker, as well as a leading contributor to US Navy camouflage during both World Wars.-Early years:...
Assunta Sera
Michael Murray
Michael Murray
Michael Murray or Mike Murray may refer to:* Michael Murray , health psychologist at Keele University, England* Michael Murray , American-born organist...
Sebastian Vervenne

Books

Dreikausen, Margret, "Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art" (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

; Mississauga, Ontario
Mississauga, Ontario
Mississauga is a city in Southern Ontario located in the Regional Municipality of Peel, and in the western part of the Greater Toronto Area. With an estimated population of 734,000, it is Canada's sixth-most populous municipality, and has almost doubled in population in each of the last two decades...

: 1985) ISBN 0-87982-040-3
Faberman, Hilarie, "Aerial Muse : The Art of Yvonne Jacquette" (New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

: Hudson Hills Press ; Stanford, Calif. : In Association with Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, formerly the Stanford University Museum of Art, and commonly known as the Cantor Arts Center, is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California. The museum, which opened in 1894, consists of over...

at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, 2002) ISBN 1-55595-157-0
Yoseloff, Thomas, Jane Frank : a Retrospective Exhibition (New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

: A.S. Barnes, 1975) [exhibition catalogue] OCLC
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

: 2651512

Other

Lodder, Christina. "Malevich, Suprematism and Aerial Photography" [article] Publication: HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, 28, Part 1 (2004): 25-40; ISSN 0308-7298

External links

Margret Dreikausen page (with color images), at The New School, New York
"The Aerial View and Art" - essay by Ashley Warriner, from a page at the University of Tennessee website
COLOR IMAGE of aerial cloudscape painting by Georgia O'Keeffe: "Sky Above Clouds IV" (1965; oil on canvas; 8 x 24 ft.; Art Institute of Chicago)
COLOR IMAGE of aerial landscape painting by Georgia O'Keeffe: It Was Blue and Green, 1960
Aerial Landscape illustrations

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Modernist abstraction and the aerial landscape

Special case: the aerial cloudscape

Artists

Other related topics

Books

Other

External links