6 Contemporary Landscape Artists Pushing Past Tradition

Let’s take a look at 6 artists pushing past tradition to re-imagine the landscape in contemporary terms.

 

1. Judy Watson

Australian artist Judy Watson works in printmaking, painting, video and installation. The landscape is a recurring subject in her practice, through which she explores her Aboriginal heritage. Large wall hangings picture grasslands, monuments, tools and significant sites from her homeland. She confronts colonial power, and the destruction of culture and community, as well as ecological issues. With devastating wildfires in 2020, an apocalyptic quality to her burnt orange canvases delivers an urgent message.

 

Standing stones, gumbi gumbi, stone tool by Judy Watson (courtesy of Ikon Gallery)

 

2. John Newling 

John Newling’s conceptual art is not only about nature, but made with nature. In Eliot's Note Books, he has transformed hundreds of copies of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland into sustainable soil. In a reverse process, he has subsequently used the soil to create books. If placed in the earth, these would grow again. Through his art, Newling invites us to consider a closer connection with, and greater understanding of, the natural world. As the artist explains: “I wish to contribute and give new possibilities to the traditions of landscape art. I am interested in creating works that will continue to grow and change long after I am not here.”

 

Eliot's Note Books by John Newling (courtesy of the artist)

 

3. Geoff Uglow

Geoff Uglow paints the landscape that surrounds his studio in rural Cornwall. Over the last ten years, he has cultivated a magnificent rose garden, gathering hips and seeds from his travels to Scotland and Italy. His richly painted, large-scale canvases celebrate the traditional symbolism of the rose, as an emblem of love. At the same time, the gestural, sculptural quality to his expressive painting technique shows the artist moving the medium forward.

 

Regina Hiems (Queen of Winter) by Geoff Uglow (courtesy of the artist)

 

4. Roberto Pagliarulo

With an Italian father, Roberto Pagliarulo paints the coastline of Amalfi as a means of exploring his cultural heritage. An exceptional colourist, he pictures Italy as a romantic dream-place, populated by classical statues, mythical messengers and pink trees. He also frames each scene from cinematic vantage points, blurring the boundaries between myth and reality. Whilst honouring antiquity, the artist pictures the landscape in a unique calligraphic style. He leaves you dreaming of an escape to Amalfi.

 

Positano by Roberto Pagliarulo

 

5. Geoff Diego Litherland

Geoff Diego Litherland explores the tension between the natural world and its appropriation by human influence. The artist draws from traditional genres of painting and the surrealism of science fiction. The result is a fantasia of abstraction: he creates a parallel world that seeks to not only question our perception of and relationship to nature, but paintings’ historical and current role in that.

 

Goodbye Enemy Starship by Geoff Diego Litherland

 

6. Marianne Nix

Marianne Nix combines photography, digital tools, traditional printmaking and oil paint to create layered images of the landscape. She is interested in the history of a place, including the writers, artists, poets and philosophers who have walked there before us. Her photographs of the Antarctic evoke expeditions of the mid-19th century, whilst her paintings of Kenwood’s rhododendrons recall the designs of William Morris. At the same time, she pictures the landscape in terms which suggest digital photography and its role in maintaining memory.

 

Blue Skies Dreaming by Marianne Nix