Landscape - To Look If Not To See

A landscape is more than the space between here and there. It’s the place that catches our eye and usually evokes a feeling, a link to a distant past, real or imagined. Sometimes it fosters fantasies of what it might become. As artists, photo or otherwise, our interpretations of what we see become the essence of our work.

To interpret a scene is to feel some inner flame ignite and increase in intensity the longer we gaze upon the scene. Before we raise a camera or a brush to record what we see it’s our responsibility to ourselves, and to those who will view and probably own our work, to identify what turns us on in the scene. Is it the quality of the shape defining light that warms us? If we take off our glasses or look through squinted eyes, is it the beauty in the fuzzy colors and amorphous shapes that move us? It doesn’t matter what ignites us but it is important that we burn with a heart quickening passion when we fire that shutter or make that first brush stroke.

Digital photography makes my process much easier because I no longer must wait for hours, days, weeks or months to get my film back, often to realize that I didn’t actually capture the grandeur that moved Me. My results are immediately available, giving me the opportunity to correct an exposure, the time of day, the angle, to re-crop or to take another look at myself and how I fit into my fantasy of the scene. Will this scene become complete later as I work and live with it? What will the final outcome look like? That’s what I call pre-visualization. I'll discuss pre-visualization in depth later, I promise. For now, it’s important to me to recognize how I feel about what I'm seeing and figure out how to put my feelings on canvas or paper.

We all see landscapes in our own unique way. Our job as artists is not to make it real but to record for ourselves, and to convey to others, just how we feel about what we see. Don’t make it real, make it really yours.


Dave