landscape art 3: what is art for (again)?

as i understand visual art, it is as important to us as music, and dance.

i wrote some posts earlier about dance, dance of life, tree of life...partly because of gauguin's monumental painting, partly because i was inspired by pina bausch. but mostly because i am arriving at the conclusion that many, if not most noteworthy artists in any arts discipline have been tasked with doing what we should all be doing.

so i think we should all be living more music, living more dance, living more poetry and stories and plays and movies, and living more visual art as well...if you get my drift.

sadly however, many of us live in a society where these things are only limitedly tolerated, for whatever reasons. as human beings, we are not even close to realizing our human potential on a global scale, and we are often already bogged down by our immediate social peers.

whereas, to me it seems that life is an inscrutable mystery, in which we play a minor and incomprehensible part with lots of suffering and misery thrown in. in such a setting, any form of art ideally helps us to live our lives more joyfully, more peacefully, more in tune with life and less to the tune of greed, social oppression, military oppression, religious oppression, any oppression.

for many of us, music is an outlet for our emotions vis-a-vis what we encounter in daily life. in my own dutch society, music seems much more accepted in that way than visual art (although, one should count movies in here). yet visual art has so much to offer in the same sense as well. but to appreciate these possibilities would seem to require more exposure to and emphasis on the importance of visual imagery/art in our education system than is the current practice.

$$$$$$$ (money, that's what everybody seems concerned about)

anyway, landscape art is in many ways a counterweight to 'quick bucks'. it takes a long time for a natural landscape to form. when walking in such a landscape, i believe we connect to slow forces of nature, and even the benign-to-humans atmosphere of many trees and plants. (i know there are also less benign landscapes...but these also have a certain time-slowing impact on us).

how to represent in a painting or drawing or drainting or ..., the influence on our feeling and thinking that landscapes have? even more radical, landscapes often set me thinking about the nature of Nature, the nature of of spatiality, the forces of life & death, the nature of beauty,...

i feel quite some understanding for the aboriginal way of looking at the land: also through dreams and ancestral stories from time immemorial. no wonder that i am intrigued by some forms of aboriginal landscape art. why is it that so-called primitive societies seem to have such a much more evolved concept of what life is really about? also see dreamtime on wikipedia.


unknown land (own work, 54 x 60 cm, 2010, click on the image for an enlargement)