For many years Paul Cezanne studied Mount Sainte-Victoire, retreating to his hometown of Aix-en-Provence in his later career. He wanted to be able to depict what he saw in its full metaphysical glory and pushed the Impressionist mode of painting forward with a more experimental and analytical way to depict a landscape. Cezanne was interested…
Category: Mindfulness
Art & Nature Series: April Gornik
“I am an artist that values, above all, the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful” – April GornikGornik’s incredibly immersive works that use “light as the protagonist” to create dreamlike…
Art & Nature Series: Bada Shanren
Art & Nature Series: Claude Monet
Claude Monet’s magnificent Water Lilies series (1914 – 1926) are some of his most famous works as Monet repeatedly depicts his beloved garden which he treated as a work of art alone, calling it his “finest masterpiece.” Working in the Impressionist style, Monet focuses on the experiential feeling and optical pleasure of nature with colourful…
Art and Nature Series: John Constable
“Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originality must spring”There is no one able to reproduce the heat of the mid-day sun, sound of a summer breeze, or the cool of the shade cast across a panoramic view than John Constable. ‘Hampstead Heath, with the House Called ‘The Salt Box’ (1819-20) is…
Art and Nature Series: Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth’s modernist sculptures are able to capture the essence of a landscape in abstract form. The interactive nature of ‘Three Obliques, (Walk-in)’ (1968) allows viewers to experience the art’s surroundings with a new perspective, both by immersing themselves in the sculpture’s presence as well as the viewfinder framed by looking through the work.Her remarkable…
Art and Nature Series: Georgia O’Keefe
Georgia O’Keefe is known for her gorgeous flower paintings and in ‘Red Hills and White Flower II’ (1949) she enters a new chapter of her life when she moved to New Mexico, sick of city life. O’Keeffe has a Model-A Ford as a mobile studio, where she could paint beautiful landscapes from her window. She…
Art and Nature Series: Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson constructed a stone and earth jetty in the Utah salt flats, ‘Spiral Jetty’ (1971). This ephemeral work fluctuates in colour, appearance, and visibility in the changing seasons and weather. This experience of art is transient as it questions the viewer’s assumptions of art and their own relationship to space. Only a few years…
Art and Nature Series: Henri Matisse
Matisse had a great love for the small southern sea town of Collioure and through the large swathes of unreal colours the heat of the summer can be felt. Each expressive brushstroke creates an energy as if the heat is radiating from the ground. With just a few angled strokes, Matisse masterfully creates a village…
Art and Nature Series: Vincent Van Gogh
Landscapes, yellow—old gold—done quickly, quickly, quickly, and in a hurry just like the harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on the reaping,” is how Van Gogh described this stunning painting, one of many quick studies of the fields in Provence. These idyllic views were his muse, consuming him to continuously capture…