Aerial landscape art

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(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. Of course, this kind of landscape art hardly existed before the 20th century, with the advent of air travel and space flight. Famous or notable artists who created works variously inspired by aerial landscape include Kazimir Malevich, Georgia O'Keeffe, Susan Crile, Jane Frank, Yvonne Jacquette, and Nancy Graves.

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.

[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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