Liquid Green Sky
Forest of Sorrows
Dormant Landscape
Gloaming Cove
Twilit Landscape n1
Fossil Sky
Tidal Forest
Felled
Symbolist Landscape n1
The Road Less Taken: Early in my development, still-lifes were used as a point of departure for invention. I have been slower coming to landscape since invention must still adhere to the general rules of landscape: i.e., figure/ground. The same may be said (broadly) of still-lifes. Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that oil painting and landscape are perfectly wedded in their metaphysics, and in these schemes, one borrows from Nature without copying her.
Landscapes of The Mind: Landscapes in the wild are rarely suitable for painting. From Poussin to the present day, one must arrange them, usually by pruning away branches or whole trees, so to clear paths around or through them. This assemblage or theatrical backdrop approach to landscapes has a long history in art, dating from Medievalism and the Renaissance. With the invention of photography, imagination is less common as an organizing principle.
None of the paintings below are based on real locations. They are invented topographies built around color design.
Click images to enlarge. Contact me at: teaguemichael5858@gmail.com for purchase information on individual artworks.
Landscapes and Symbolism: Historically, the inclusion of dead trees in landscape painting has functioned similar to toppled pillars in depictions of Greek ruins. They add mystery and decay, but also, like foreshortened skeletal arms reaching into the foreground, they create a depth of field where otherwise only a hanging curtain of green foliage would confront the viewer.
Templates vs Starting from Zero: As stated on my homepage, I am not a prolific painter. This is another reason why I have gravitated to landscape in recent years. Increasingly, landscape motifs are used as backgrounds in feature paintings.
Landscape requires less pure invention, which is the hardest part of every painting I create. Although the templates of landscape are straightforward, repeatable, and reliable as formulas, they are highly varied by simple tweaks.
Dali, Landscape, and Me: My interest in painting began with the discovery of Salvador Dali when I was a teenager. I received a book of his paintings and a set of oil paints one Christmas in the mid-1970s. I copied specific passages from his paintings with a view to dissect technique, and having achieved a passable facsimile I filed away what I learned for later use. I did not paint again for several years. Dali’s influence is everywhere on this website. The first piece of music I composed in Garageband, Ouefs de Dali, was a tribute to him.
The bare unclutteredness of the high-plains desert of Catalonia provided Dali with the blank canvas upon which his vivid imagination could build. However, landscape was never an end-in-itself for him. Other painters have used landscape variously in imaginative end-in-itself ways. These include American painters Alexandre Hogue, Rockwell Kent, Eyvind Earle, John Rogers Cox, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and Maxfield Parrish. I would also add Russian mystic painter Nicholas Roerich to this list.
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