The 19th century was the golden age of landscape painting in Europe and America. Three aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era divided the natural world into categories: the Pastoral, the Picturesque, and the Sublime. The first two represent Nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance. The last, as articulated by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), refers to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed Nature and its overwhelming forces . This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists. Burke associates qualities of “balance,” “smoothness,”and “color” with the beautiful, while he speaks of the sublime in terms such as “vastness” and “terror”.

Beauty/ Pastoral

Beauty is a widely employed term, referring typically to aesthetic experiences that are pleasing, while to some extent transcending preferences and needs that are specific to an individual. That is, the experience of something beautiful will please a subject for reasons that reach beyond the subjective inclinations of the subject and that can be experienced also by many other subjects. The scenes are peaceful, often depicting ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas, and fattened livestock. Man has developed and tamed the landscape – it yields the necessities we need to live, as well as beauty and safety.

Picturesque

Picturesque arose as a mediator between opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed in between these two rationally idealised states, seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity. Derived from the Italian pittoresco, “from a picture,” the term picturesque de nes an object or view worthy of being included in a picture.  It is an aesthetic category developed in the eighteenth-century to describe, in the words of artist and author William Gilpin (1724 – 1804) in his 1768 art treatise Essay on Print, ‘that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’. It was associated with fashionable landscape gardening, however its cultural significance extended far beyond this.

A picturesque view contains a variety of elements, curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to light that brings these details to life. In later publications Gilpin developed the concept more fully. The picturesque may be thought of as halfway between the beautiful, with its emphasis on smoothness, regularity, and order; and the sublime, which is all about vastness, magnitude, and intimations of power; the picturesque must combine aspects of both of those. A picturesque landscape would have characteristics of roughness (which includes textured or variegated surfaces) — indeed, Gilpin wrote that “roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful and picturesque” 

By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as being non-rational. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision – one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful; rather it came naturally as a matter of basic human instinct. 

“Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque—between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.”

—William Gilpin, ree Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 1794

Sublime

According to Burke, the Beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is that which has the power to compel and destroy us. The preference for the Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era. Burke connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.

Causation can be divided into formal, material, efficient and final causes. The formal cause of beauty is the passion of love; the material cause concerns aspects of certain objects such as smallness, smoothness, delicacy, etc.; the efficient cause is the calming of our nerves. 

“What is most peculiar and original to Burke’s view of beauty is that it cannot be understood by the traditional bases of beauty: proportion, fitness, or perfection. The sublime also has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty. Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear. He believed that “terror is in all cases… the ruling principle of the sublime.” 

In landscape the sublime is exemplified by J.M.W Turner’s sea storms and mountain scenes and in history painting by the violent dramas of Henry Fuseli. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today. Painters like Turner and Constable wanted to express the sublime in visual art. They were landscape painters and, although in different ways, they emphasized the strength of natural elements and studied the effects of different weather conditiond on the landscape. In 1814 the  English landscape painter John Constable put this in his own words when he said the beauty of nature generates a train of associations that leads “to the contemplation of higher, spiritual values”(Anne Lyles, Sublime Nature: John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from theMeadows, Tate) and his idea is illustrated in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831.  Constable’s dark, passionate clouds, are in contrast to the sunlight of the foreground, where you see the church scene as gothic, and negative.  These aspects of the painting widens towards sublimity: God, nature and man. Burke favoured this aesthetic idea over Beauty because, he said, ‘astonishment, obscurity and vastness cause a more powerful physical reaction in us than Beauty’s orderly calm’

Because the sublime is emotional, it is traditionally considered something one must experience alone.  It’s no coincidence that Rousseau’s last work was titled Reveries of a Solitary Walker.  Traditional Romantics associate the sublime directly with nature, and the artist, poet or simply the Romantic experiences the sublime directly witnessing the beauty of nature.  But it’s important not to confuse or reduce the sublime with simple beauty, rather, Romantics are interested in natural experiences that utterly consume us, perhaps moving us to tears, and giving us a humbling sense of the wonder and majesty of the natural world.

Abstraction

Abstract is a term often used in art to describe artworks that may appear to be without a recognisable subject. It can refer to artworks that use forms that have no source at all in external reality. Or to forms that are ‘abstracted’ from the real world – based on subject matter found in reality but reduced in shape, line and colour to their simplest forms. It uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

As it does not try to represent the material world, abstract art has often been seen as carrying a moral dimension, embodying such virtues as order, purity, simplicity and spirituality. Pioneers of abstract painting in the early twentieth century include Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, while Naum Gabo was an early pioneer of abstract sculpture. Since then abstract art has been indistinguishable from what we now know as modern art.

Abstract Artists:

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky is one of the pioneers of abstract art. His practice spans through different abstract art techniques and styles that would later be used by generations of abstract painters. Kandinsky first began to use expressive color masses separating them from forms and lines. Soon after that, he started to merge geometry with abstraction, thus participating in creation of geometric abstract art. Although geometric forms were not something Kandinsky was particularly interested in, in his art we see the first encounters of geometry and abstraction. Finally, his work at the Bauhas cannot be ignored. Here, Kandinsky theoretically examined the use of colors, and under the influence of Gestalt psychology, he began to focus on straight lines, which led to the contrasting tones of curved and angled lines on final compositions.

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Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.

Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the “inner necessity” of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.

Kazimir Malevich

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Malevich is also one of the pioneers of abstract painting, but he was also the creator of one of the most radical abstract art movements ever – Suprematism, a term which expressed the notion that colour, line, and shape should reign supreme over subject matter or narrative in art.  The main interest of Malevich (and his fellow Suprematist artists) was to search for the so-called zero degree of painting, the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art. As a consequence, they used extremely simple motifs, subjects and forms.

The whole composition is focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. Because of his contacts in the West, Malevich was able to transmit his ideas about painting to his fellow artists in Europe and the United States, thus profoundly influencing the evolution of modern art.

More radical than the Cubists or Futurists, at the same time that his Suprematist compositions proclaimed that paintings were composed of flat, abstract areas of paint, they also served up powerful and multi-layered symbols and mystical feelings of time and space

 

Yves Klein

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Yves Klein was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. For many, Yves Klein has been associated with minimalism and performance art. However, his legacy within the realm of contemporary abstract art is indisputable. As Klein said himself: Blue…is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not. All colors arouse specific ideas, while blue suggests at most the sea and the sky; and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

“Never using the line, one has been able to create in painting a fourth, fifth, or whatever other dimension – only color can attempt to succeed in this exploit. The monochrome is the only physical way of painting – permitting us to attain the spiritual absolute.”

http://www.yvesklein.com/files/filter_file_91.mp4

The abstract painting that dominated French art in the 1950s was invariably premised on the notion that an artist could communicate with the viewer through the power of abstract form. But skeptics of modern, abstract art have always alleged that the viewers, like the faithful devotees of a false god, do more of the work than the artist, investing the forms with their own feelings rather than discovering the artist’s. Viewed in this light, Klein’s monochrome blue paintings might be read as a satire on abstract art, for not only do the pictures carry no motif, but Klein insisted there was nothing there at all, only “the void.”

“… I thus seek to individualize color, for I have reached the conclusion that each color expresses a living world and I express these worlds in my painting. My paintings affirm the idea of absolute unity in the context of perfect serenity, an abstract concept represented in an abstract manner (…).”

Abstract Photographers

Ola Kolehmainen

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Ola Kolehmainen is a Finnish photographer whose exceptional work could easily fit into the abstract genre as we previously defined. He uses architecture as both a starting point and as his main source of inspiration. Instead of portraying architecture in a direct form, he reveals it as an examination of space, light and color, all of which reflect and question our typical, human way of looking at things.

It is intriguing to follow how Ola’s representation of buildings evolved from a direct approach into an artistic vision thanks to his closer examination of structures. Because of his unique perspective, Ola developed a more abstract and independent language that allowed him to distance himself from architecture as it is.

Recently Kolehmainen has shifted away from his traditional minimalism, and expanded into a complex approach dealing with space, light, and colour in his first exhibition centered around historical architecture. Kolehmainen photographed religious buildings in Istanbul for half a year. In addition to their historical dimension, the artist probes the buildings’ architectural volumes and light ratios: the buildings’ interiors and structural details reveal the changing light of days and seasons.

Andrew S. Gray

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From intricate and nearly impossible points of view to elegant camera shakes, abstract can be done in a variety of ways from simple to complex, all of which produce elegant results. Inspired by the paintings of the old English masters of pictorialism, Andrew S. Gray creates beautiful abstract landscapes with a unique style using intentional camera movement as well as well-planned color palettes.

He personally prints his work, which speaks volumes about his workflow mastery. In fact, Gray is so generous that he even helps people around the globe with one-on-one sessions and video tutorials in addition to offering online help for anyone trying to create landscapes (or other imagery) with a similar style of abstraction.

” Inspired by the paintings of the old English masters with a mix of camera techniques and post processing I have developed these painterly impressionist images of both recognisable and abstract scenes into a style that goes beyond what many consider photography.

The looseness and ability to play without being tied by the light or weather affecting the scene you’d normally be shooting is the style’s appeal to me, also the chance of creating a scene that was not necessarily there. Using a tool of which its sole function is to capture exactly what is in front of it and then making it almost become a brush with which we “paint” is a joy. The results I have achieved since first experimenting with intentional camera movement (icm) have been more satisfying than any photograph I’ve made previously. “

Maija Savolainen

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The artist, Maija Savolainen is a recognized photographer from the Helsinki School. For this specific topic, we will focus on her project called paperworks in which she created abstract and minimalist representations of landscapes using a colorful palette. Much like watching a pastel ode to Hiroshi Sugimoto, Savolainen demonstrates through her work that the simplest resources can lead to the most beautiful simplifications and abstractions.

The series, Paperworks is a study on the colors of sunlight and the photographic way of seeing. The images are made with a folded, white A4 sheet placed in direct sunlight at different times of the day and year. When looking at the picture at a distance, one might see a horizon line. When taking a closer look, it becomes clear that there is something strange about the view. The horizon appears to be a fold on a sheet of paper, the colors are reflections of sunlight on the white surface; a little bit of information makes the eye see something else than before.

In her series ‘Works on Light’  uses recurrent materials, paper, thread, sand and reflecting surfaces in her photographs to showcase the different properties of light and the illusory possibilities of photography. “They are the elements from which other things can be formed through a photographic gesture. When the light hits a round glass plate on my hand from a certain angle it might resemble the full moon in an astounding way.”

“To illustrate this feature, the Helsinki-based photographer Maija Savolainen has created still-life imagery that responds, on an abstract level, to the themes raised by Rail Baltica and the Talsinki tunnel. The sets which are built from paper and yarn, evoke notions of social and economic networks, overlapping and incompatible structures, parallel and twinned cities, and liminality.”  – Crystal Bennes

Colour is the aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities of light being reflected or emitted by them.

To see colour, you have to have light. When light shines on an object some colours bounce off the object and others are absorbed by it. Our eyes only see the colours that are bounced off or reflected.Light waves carry energy, determined by frequency, carried by small packets known as photons. This energy provides the basis for human vision, solar power and digital photography.

In color photography, electronic sensors or light-sensitive chemicals record color information at the time of exposure. This is usually done by analyzing the spectrum of colors into three channels of information, one dominated by red, another by green and the third by blue, in imitation of the way the normal human eye senses color.

HOW DOES COLOUR WORK?

Before colour could be reproduced the nature of light and how we perceive colour had to be clearly understood. The scientific investigation of colour had begun in the seventeenth century. In 1666, Sir Isaac Newton split sunlight with a prism to show that it was actually a combination of the seven colours of the spectrum. Nearly 200 years later, in 1861, a young Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, conducted an experiment to show that, in fact, all colours can be made by an appropriate mixture of red, green and blue light.

Maxwell took three separate lantern slides of a tartan ribbon through red, green and blue filters. These slides were then projected through the same filters using three separate magic lanterns. When the three images were carefully superimposed on the screen, they combined to make a coloured image which was a recognisable reproduction of the original. While Maxwell’s experiments demonstrated clearly the basic principles of colour photography, in practice, his demonstration should not have worked at all. Although the physicist didn’t know it, the photographic emulsions that he used were insensitive to red light. Fortunately for Maxwell, the red cloth in the ribbon reflected ultraviolet light. This was invisible to the eye but did register on the emulsion.

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Luminance – The Absolute Measurement of Light

• Luminance measures the absolute intensity of light, that hits the eye, after reflecting off an object.
• Luminance is measured in candela per square meter
• Luminance is a measured value such as velocity or weight. It does not depend on the human eye or setting, only measured physical attributes.

Brightness – Our Perception of Luminance

• Brightness is used to denote how the human eye perceives the luminance of an object.
• For example, a computer screen at maximum luminance looks brighter in a dark room than it would outside in the sun.
• Although the luminance of the computer screen is the same our eyes perceive it’s brightness differently, depending on the conditions for viewing.
• Brightness can range from dim, at the low end, to brilliant at the high end. Brightness is perceived value. It is not measured. It changes dependent of surroundings.

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One person may interpret light differently than another person.  There are instances two individuals seeing the same object interpret different colours. Scientists are uncovering some interesting data on how we interpret light waves. Even though two people are seeing the same wave length they may still interpret the object to be a different colour than the other. New research suggests this can be due to things like mood and experiences.

Warm vs Cool

The distinction between “warm” and “cool” colors has been important since at least the late 18th century. The difference seems related to the observed contrast in landscape light, between the “warm” colors associated with daylight or sunset, and the “cool” colors associated with a gray or overcast day which make you feel calm, relaxed and refreshed . Warm colors are often said to be hues from red through yellow, browns and tans included. They are associated with heightened emotions and passion as well as joy and playfulness. Cool colors are often said to be the hues from blue green through blue violet, most grays included. There is historical disagreement about the colors that anchor the polarity, but 19th-century sources put the peak contrast between red orange and greenish blue.

According to Munch, “I painted this picture – painted the clouds like real blood.  The colors were screaming.[”, warm and cool color intensified fear and the feeling of hopelessness respectively, the combination of opposite color tone made the contradiction more significant and thus affecting the emotion of the audience more. 

Color theory has described perceptual and psychological effects to this contrast. Warm colors are said to advance or appear more active in a painting, while cool colors tend to recede; used in interior design or fashion, warm colors are said to arouse or stimulate the viewer, while cool colors calm and relax.

Colour Psychology

Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behaviour. Color can indeed influence a person; however, it is important to remember that these effects differ between people. Factors such as gender, age, and culture can influence how an individual perceives color.  

White:

Just as black is total absorption, so white is total reflection. In effect, it reflects the full force of the spectrum into our eyes.

Positive: Clarity, Purity, Cleanliness, Innocence, Simplicity, Sense of Space

Negative: Sterility, coldness, barriers, unfriendliness, elitism

BLUE:

Blue is the colour of the mind and is essentially soothing; it affects us mentally, rather than the physical reaction we have to red. Strong blues will stimulate clear thought and lighter, soft blues will calm the mind and aid concentration. 

Positive: Intelligence, communication, trust, efficiency, serenity, duty, logic, coolness, reflection, calm.
Negative: Coldness, aloofness, lack of emotion, unfriendliness.

YELLOW:

The yellow wavelength is relatively long and essentially stimulating. In this case the stimulus is emotional, therefore yellow is the strongest colour, psychologically. The right yellow will lift our spirits and our self-esteem; it is the colour of confidence and optimism. 

Positive: Optimism, confidence, self-esteem, extraversion, emotional strength, friendliness, creativity. 
Negative: Irrationality, fear, emotional fragility,

RED:

Positive: Physical courage, strength, warmth, energy, basic survival, ‘fight or flight’, stimulation, masculinity, excitement. 
Negative: Defiance, aggression, visual impact, strain.

Being the longest wavelength, red is a powerful colour. Although not technically the most visible, it has the property of appearing to be nearer than it is and therefore it grabs our attention first. 

BLACK:
Positive: Sophistication, glamour, security, emotional safety, efficiency, substance. 
Negative: Oppression, coldness, menace, heaviness.

Black is all colours, totally absorbed. The psychological implications of that are considerable. It creates protective barriers, as it absorbs all the energy coming towards you

The American conceptual artist John Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He has influenced several generations of younger artists, and since the 1960s, has consistently renegotiated his own working practice – from his earlier text paintings to reworkings of old film stills.  His work is primarily regarded as an extended humorous meditation on the nature of art itself; he is notorious for cremating his own paintings, commissioning others to make his artwork, and admonishing himself to make no more boring art.

In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography and abandoned painting altogether, makng a diverse range of media . He has created thousands of works that demonstrate the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. 

“You know, when you’re sitting in a dentist office or doctor’s office, and you look in a magazine and, and you go, ‘What was that?’ I would like people to have that feeling, you know, that, ‘Wait, what did I just see?’ ” Baldessari says with a laugh. Like with the colored dots pasted onto photographs — they’re actually price stickers. Over the years he’d been collecting black-and-white news images — pictures of people at various civic occasions.

“I just got so tired of looking at these faces,” Baldessari says — faces of mayors shaking hands with firefighters, faces of local officials at ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating

Using two found photographs, one color, one black-and-white, and eradicating the faces in both photos with his trademark dots and color silhouette techniques, Baldessari presents two protagonists, one implicitly heroic, the other not so much. Wearing a military uniform, arms crossed, sitting upright, the hero figure is carried on the shoulders of a crowd of celebratory men, draped in streamers and balloons. The scale of the image, together with the grandeur of his pose, invoke history painting, as well as movies about World War II.  The second section is marked with orange painted lines, echoing the orange and blue painted streamers that festoon the hero’s celebration, yet here the painted lines represent lines of fracture—fissures—which show how this world is coming apart, as if under the strain of its own contradictions.

“If you can’t see their face, you’re going to look at how they’re dressed, maybe their stance, their surroundings,” he explains.

Defining of his practice was an embrace of humour, and a tendency towards producing art that, while it may appeal to more cultivated sensibility, is also accessible. For example, in his video I Am Making Art 1971 we see him repeatedly reciting the title as he raises one arm after the other consecutively.

A crucial development in Baldessari’s work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages.

Much of Baldessari’s work from the 1980s participates in a dialogue with a number of his contemporaries who were exploring questions of sexual identity and representation through photography and text. Baldessari’s interest in making the gaze explicit, in a number of works from this period, such as Man and Woman with Bridge (1984) and Spaces Between (Close to Remote) (1986), belongs to this historical moment. During this period, Baldessari also produced a series of works that explicitly deal with issues of masculinity and representation. Arguably, he shifts away from the category of Conceptual art to take up some of the political and aesthetic concerns of a younger generation

John Baldessari: Talking Art (talking about his career)

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/john-baldessari-talking-art