Landscapes In Needlework, Part III

Landscape fresco in Pompeii (Wikimedia)

People have been painting on walls for a very long time. Cro-Magnons painted wonderful animals on cave walls. The Egyptians painted on the walls of their tombs. Other ancient civilizations produced paintings and mosaics featuring conquerors and their armies, gods and heroes and, from the Greeks, athletes. But any attempts at landscapes were just sketchy backdrops for the figures. We have to go back to doomed Pompeii and Herculaneum to see landscapes painted for their own sake around 2,000 years ago. Today, even more of these murals are being uncovered as new excavations and restorations are done there. The cities were destroyed in 79 AD (CE). Buried so long in the ashes of Vesuvius, these murals are remarkably well-preserved.

Tuscan landscape, not too different than it would have appeared in Roman times

Detail and color fade with distance

We will probably never know the names of the artists or whether they were Romans or Greeks or people brought in from some other part of the Empire. They painted villas, hills, groves, mountains, seashores, farms, bridges, people, domestic animals, gardens, vineyards, boats, temples, rock formations, even small wildlife realistically. They had mastered atmospheric perspective, making distant objects proportionately smaller than those in the foreground and slightly graying colors near the horizon. They used trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) so effectively that viewers must have reached out to touch features of the paintings, believing that they were real. The artists sought to portray the peaceful and pleasant life of people living close to, and caring for, the land. The free, fluid brushstrokes and delicate colors would not appear again in Western art until the time of the Impressionists — more than eighteen centuries later! This photograph shows how background features become smaller and grayer.

Mountain panorama, photo by J.J.

In the 11^th Century, landscape painting began to flourish in China. Painters studied rock formations, trees and grasses, flowering plants, birds and insects, and drew them expertly. They portrayed the changing of the seasons with great delicacy. Despite their attention to detail, however, their landscapes do not represent specific places. Instead they represented the artist’s spiritual journey to connect with Nature in a perpetual search for enlightenment. These “journey” paintings are meant to be experienced by the viewer moving from right to left across them. This is probably because many paintings were done on scrolls, which were held in the right hand (and sometimes re-rolled), while the left hand unrolled the scroll, revealing a small area at a time.

Rustic cabin, photo by J.D.

I really like the proportions of the Chinese paintings. I have never been thrilled with the Golden Mean, which dictates our conventional frame sizes of 5 in. x 7 in., 8 in. x 10 in., 9 in x 12 in., 11 in. x 14 in., and so on. Whether vertical or horizontal, their pictures are more than twice as high as they are wide, or more than twice as long as they are deep. That is one reason that I like to do wall hangings. The eye cannot take them in at a glance, and so is drawn to look at one section at a time as the gaze travels the length of the work. Spring Thaw, for example, (3/11/2018) is meant to be viewed as it was stitched, from bottom to top. Here is one of J.D.’s ‘painterly’ photographs with similar proportions and lines that draw the eye from bottom to top.

Watercolor sketch by Annake

This is a picture of one of my paintings that eventually became “translated” into a wall hanging. The picture was painted from memory some years after the experience, but I can still remember many of the sensations. We had pulled our van over to the side of the road, parking by a large cluster of yucca plants, to watch a spectacular sunset. The yucca flowers were glowing, reminding me why one of their names is “Candelas del Dios”. A storm was moving in swiftly from the northwest. Thunder rumbled. Lightning flashed. I remember the smell of the dust blowing in the wind. Still we lingered, watching the afterglow as the yuccas became dark silhouettes against it. Then the storm was upon us. I may have mentioned that I love storms; my companions, however, were not as fond. We closed the windows and fled before the storm.

Yucca Sunset, latch hook wall hanging by Annake

Later, I made a latch-hook wall hanging as a kind of abstraction of the painting. Both of them are also intended to be “read” from bottom to top, from earth to sky. J. D peeled and polished the branch that holds the hanging, and secured it with leather thongs.

Horses, photo by J.J.

For several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, landscapes were primarily backdrops for religious themes. In the late 15^th Century, a well-known Flemish painter, Joachim Patinir, broke from this tradition. While his paintings bear the names of saints and martyrs (who do appear somewhere in the pictures), the viewer is much more likely to be impressed by the stunning landscapes which dominate the paintings. The artist used very high horizons and filled the foreground and middle ground, as well as the background, with an astonishing collection of landscape features. He included examples of human enterprise among the many natural features in his paintings. Human eyes could not have been able to distinguish in reality all the area included in a single canvas, no matter what their vantage point was.

Storm Reflections, photo by J.J.

By the 16^th Century, Spanish artists were moving away from strictly religious painting, embracing court paintings and portraits, and experimenting with still lifes and genre paintings. A man from the island of Crete went to Spain looking for a patron and found one in the city of Toledo. His name was Domenokos Theotokopoulos. Apparently that was too much of a mouthful for the Spanish people, who called him “El Greco” (“The Greek”). Although most of his paintings were religious scenes or portraits of church notables, he is probably best known for his View of Toledo, in which he captures the onset of a violent storm and the eerie light that sometimes precedes such a storm. Here is one of J.J.’s photos that has also captured that light. Notice how much darker the clouds are when reflected in the water.

Landscape with no sign of humans

Landscapes, with or without structures and/or figures, became an important new painting category in Northern Europe after the Reformation. While Flanders remained Catholic, Holland, Germany, and some other northern countries did not. Many of the Dutch painters turned to painting sunny interiors or elaborate still lifes, but others preferred to paint their local landscapes. German artists tended to emphasize, even romanticize, landscapes. Even the great Albrecht Durer, best known for his woodcuts and meticulous engravings, painted rather “dreamy” watercolors of the Alps, which he passed through on his way to and from studying in Italy. (The artist is rather special to J.D., who was born on Durer’s birthday.) Another German artist, Albrecht Altdorfer, achieved fame for his paintings of the Danube River Valley. He occasionally included buildings and people, but the landscape clearly dominated his paintings.

You may wonder why I have put so much emphasis on photos in this chapter. If you are at home with a new baby or toddlers; if you are a caretaker for a loved one; if you work from home; if your movement is limited by physical or financial conditions; if transportation is an issue or you live in a neighborhood where it is not safe to wander around, photos may be your best source for landscapes. In my long life, I have faced all of those situations. Some of them still apply to me. I have a large collection of sketches, my own and family photographs, art prints, etc., to draw upon for my work, but I still look for and collect drawings, logos, and pictures that attract my eye for some reason. If you are serious about doing needle art, I suggest that you start a collection of your own. Really look at everything you can see. Ask yourself questions like:”What colors can I see here?” and “What kind of stitches would it take to look like that texture?” As you learn — or invent — new stitches and stitch patterns, keep samples for future reference. A shoebox can hold a whole library of stitches.

Delicate Arch, unattributed photo from a calendar

Speaking of photos, I came across one in a calendar that really makes my point about how few places there are at Delicate Arch to sketch or photograph. This photographer stood a few feet to the right and a few feet closer to the drop-off in the right foreground than where I made sketches for the rug in Landscapes in Needlework, Part I. Unfortunately, no information was given about the photographer who took this beautiful winter sunset.

Train your eyes!

Photo Credits:
Roman fresco: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, Fresco fontana piccola 05, CC BY-SA 4.0
Tuscan landscape, Mountain lake, Delicate Arch are all unattributed from calendars with no publisher or manufacturers information: if you see your work or that of someone you know, please contact us so that we can give credit where due.
All other photos, copyright Annake's Garden

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.