Untitled (#2), 1999

Each artist featured in the Why Draw a Landscape? portfolio has their own answer to the titular question: Jane Freilicher paints landscape because she appreciates it being there; she likes to look at it. Plimack Mangold is a Realist who investigates landscape by painting outside in the air, while Bechtle is a Photorealist who paints indoors and imitates the way the camera sees. Pat Steir works from the inside out, producing meditative landscapes that are the result of dripping and flinging paint, and Tom Marioni’s work demonstrates his own processes and use of materials to explore ideas about our culture, his landscapes becoming suggestions to be interpreted by the viewer.

David Nash, Bryan Hunt, and April Gornik come together to represent the various artistic approaches of 1980s within the portfolio. Nash makes unwieldly artworks directly in the landscape, touching and changing it, then illustrating these works in portable drawings and photos. Hunt works primarily in sculpture, using bronze to explore movement, the changing natural and manmade world. In contrast, Gornik paints romantic and spiritualized landscapes from her own imagination as opposed to direct interactions with nature. Finally, Joan Nelson and Anne Appleby reflect different approaches of 1990s with their own landscapes: Nelson’s work, which often evokes another time through secondary sources, is realistic, while Appleby’s, which is from her direct experience with nature, is abstract.

Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press identifies these eleven motivations – investigation, stylization, appreciation, meditation, imitation, demonstration, illustration, exploration, spiritualization, evocation, and abstraction – as crucial reasons for which artists engaging with postmodern issues continue to draw landscapes. The Why Draw a Landscape? portfolio proves that the subject of landscapes is not too old-fashioned for today’s artists and the philosophical dialogue of our time.