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“This type of art is important to me personally. “When doing plein air, the sun is going, clouds are moving, animals are flying around,” she says. Morales says this type of on-site, in the moment painting – called plein air – has a lesson to teach us. We had two hours or so, and we sketched out and painted it.” We’re on the side of a mountain, and we set up little easels.
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One afternoon, we walked up to a village. And you’re enamored with the sights and the food and the people. “It’s one of the best trips I’ve had in my life,” Morales says. Like many students who trek to Italy or France during one of Chang’s study abroad courses, Lucia Morales ’09, M.A.
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It’s a thing for your eye to travel through.” It’s something that you look at for a while and keep seeing new things to it, something new in each experience. I hope it evokes a sense of interest in people. “You paint, you feel it and you get into it,” she explains. With landscapes, she explains, artists re-create a scene, but they can also make it their own in a very personal way, changing the sunlight or the direction of the wind or the movement of the water. In fact, s he didn't just want to paint the scene. The water is large, but it draws you in close.” It has a certain kind of expanse and flow. There was something in the gesture of the weeds, the water. It’s such a big space, but personally, I felt it was very small and quiet. That’s why she decided to paint this serene scene from Wakulla Springs, a habitat in Florida. Albert first saw the scene in a photo her brother took of the spot. Quiet spaces are precious, says Victoria Albert '16, M.A. Take a deep breath, curl up on your favorite spot, and enjoy the beauty of art. To celebrate the peace and joy that art can bring during the age of coronavirus, Chang and alumni trained in his Academy of Portrait and Figurative Art (alumni who are all local art educators themselves), have shared their art with FIU Magazine in the hopes of inspiring our readers to pick up their paint brushes and engage in art, or to simply look at these paintings and let the landscape call us into its story. Artist or not, rich or poor, we all have that response. I’ve met very few people who would open the window on a beachfront hotel or house without saying, 'Wow.'" The vastness is the ever-infinite sky, it’s the depth of field, it gives human beings this calming quality. “Landscape throughout history has served rich and poor, it’s given that quality of nature brought home. “Human beings are naturally drawn to vastness in scenery,” explains renowned artist and Chair of the Department of Art + Art History David Chang. While few of us these days are venturing out of our homes, much less visiting the Everglades or other nature preserves, t here is still a way of bringing the peace of nature into our homes. A number of scientific studies have found it can help lower cortisol and blood pressure levels, and even alleviate depression and anxiety. Image via wikipedia.Spending time in nature reduces stress. Image via widewalls.ch Henri Rousseau – The Dream. Image via Claude Monet – Grainstacks at the End of Summer. Please scroll down and explore some of the celebrated paintings by famous nature artists.įeatured image: Vincent van Gogh – Wheat Field with Cypresses. The famous nature paintings which follow bellow showcase the mastery of artistic achievements and are considered as some of the most popular paintings of nature. The landscape paintings today showcase the importance of painting in open air which continues to fascinate landscape artists. The pioneer abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky used nature as a starting point for his paintings, which focused on the notion of the spiritual and suggestive in art. For many, Claude Monet’s painting, especially his series investigating light on the Rouen Cathedral, announced abstraction in art. Exploring the shifting light and investigating the perception of color, nature was a starting point for major achievements which forever changed the face of art. With the birth of avant-garde movement Impressionism, artists took to the countryside and began painting en-plain air. In the past, artists would often recreate nature in their studios and these models helped them to create some of the greatest imagery in art history. The famous nature paintings fall into various categories, from the highly realistic nature depictions, detailed watercolor illustrations of various animal species and new discoveries of the world, to stunning examples of abstract landscape paintings, and the most celebrated non-figurative paintings of the 20th-century.Ī pure fascination for artists, nature is a great setting onto which inner feelings and progressive ideas of the new aesthetic language and trends can be imprinted. The development of nature paintings follows two different schools: Chinese landscape painting and Western art.
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