In Chapter 3 of Looking at Art, Alice Elizabeth Chase discusses different ways of looking at landscape. She offers a sharp contrast to a photograph of a landscape versus a painting of a landscape, saying: “A camera will record the way things look. But to the artist, the representation of a wide and distant view offers a real challenge. He must reduce its immensity to the limits of his canvas or wall; he must reduce its size, or take a small section of it”(19). She then goes on to describe how different cultures painted different landscapes, ranging from Egyptian (maplike) to Chinese (meant to juxtapose humans and God) to Bruegel’s (meant to juxtapose the insignificance of human suffering with the vastness of nature).
As landscape painting became more popular, artists developed a formula to churn them out more quickly. As Chase puts it: “In the foreground a large tree with people or a cottage was painted dark greenish-brown. Next came a light area, then a dark, then another light, alternating to carry the eye to the distant horizon” (27). By the eighteenth century, this forula had been expanded upon, using bright colors to add an impression of moisture and growth within the land.
In America, patriotism was shown through a love of the land. The Rockies and Connecticut River Valley were painted, as well as the Hudson and the Adirondacks. This gave way to smaller-scale paintings of gardens, fields, and streams. Realistic painting gave way to paintings such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Chase then concludes chapter 3, talking about how a photograph and a painting can be equally evocative.
Chapter 4 of Looking at Art deals with perspective: how artists have rendered three-dimensional people in a two-dimensional space. This is why people are often depicted in profile on Greek vases and Egyptian paintings—to avoid awkward-looking torsions of the body. The use of shadow to accentuate height and space has not yet caught on. Perspective has not been discovered, nor has the existence of a vanishing point. European perspective is rediscovered in earnest during the Renaissance, during the time of Brunelleschi. Vanishing points are used, along with foreshortening, or making an object appear larger or smaller, depending on its distance from the viewer.
Chinese and Japanese perspective contrasts sharply: parallel lines remain parallel and do not come together at a vanishing point. Chase remarks: “We are so used to thinking of diagonal parallel lines coming together that when they don’t we get the impression…that they are spreading apart. The Japanese artist uses no shadows and does not observe the laws of foreshortening, but he carefully follows his own system, and…we learn to understand the scene clearly” (53). Isometric perspective also makes it possible to see the inside of a building, as opposed to merely its outside.
In the end, there are different ways of looking, but each can lead to understanding.
