Painting The Landscape: Thomas Sarrantonio & Janise Yntema
Artists throughout history have responded visually and conceptually to the terrain and its ever-changing identity. The landscape reveals color, light, condition, culture, and much more. Landscape has been interpreted in many ways throughout history. At times capturing reality with varying degrees of the actual. In other periods giving recognition of a spiritual element, seen exemplified in Romanticism of the late 18th century.
This week spoke with artists Thomas Sarrantonio and Janise Yntema about what it means to paint the landscape in modern times, and some of the intricacies of their practice. Next week we will look at the work of Cherie Mittenthal and Regina B. Quinn, and touch base with them about their painting methods.
Thomas Sarrantonio, Visibility, 42” x 42”, oil on panel
Why do you choose to paint the natural world?
I love painting of all kinds and have always had an attraction to the natural world (my first degree was in Biology). Combining two of my great loves allows me to indulge my passions on a regular basis. I have been painting outdoors from direct observation for 40 years and have not tired of it. Throughout the summer and into the fall this year I have been painting every morning starting at dawn. This provides me with a sustained daily meditation that has been so valuable in these stressful times. I typically spend 4-5 hours standing in one place, staring at the natural world, contemplating and responding to the light, color, air, and, hopefully entering "the zone." I am pretty much unaware of anything else, including time, and I generally feel quite calm (if not exhausted) once I lay down the brushes. Then I go home and find out the world is still a mess and I start looking forward to the next dawn.
We are blessed to live in a remarkably beautiful landscape with plenty to paint. Of course, the danger is always the overwhelming "prettiness" of the subject matter and it is a challenge to create work that is vital and relevant, avoiding the easy cliche or stereotype of a postcard view. I enjoy this challenge, even in failure, because I feel I learn something every time I approach a painting. I am less interested in doing what I already know how to do than in attempting something more ephemeral and difficult.
Although it may seem at times I am painting the same painting over and over, I am actually trying to "get it right" (not an accurate phrase, but functional) after perceived failures to achieve a desired vision. At the best of times, there is less frustration than determination in these efforts and the peculiarities of a changing landscape add a certain urgency to this endeavor. I always intend to finish my plein-air paintings in a day, not knowing what the next day may present and this embrace of change fosters a dynamic interaction with Nature I think of as more a collaboration than a soliloquy. Of course, I also work in the studio, which is a whole other story involving studies, memory, photos, imagination, and multiple sessions to complete a painting (sometimes years!).
How has landscape painting throughout history affected your work?
I am a student of art history and find great inspiration in works of the past and the challenge of contributing to an ongoing visual conversation. On a trip to Rome years ago I sat in a room surrounded by four walls with the fresco of the Garden of Livia from the Villa at Prima Porta. The lighting had been designed to mimic the changing light in the course of a day, compressed into a few minutes. I was spellbound by the beauty, delicacy and naturalism of the work and it seemed to me at once timeless and "modern" (all great art is modern when it is made, no?).
Other painters and traditions that sustain me include Giotto, Van Eyck, Chinese Landscape Painting, Japanese Brush Painting, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, Turner, Corot, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Pollack, Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, and many others. I often reference these artists in my own work, consciously or not, in my choice of palette, subject, or technique and I find great solace in contemplating their achievements. I feel they are speaking to me (visually) and I am motivated to respond.
How do you use opacity and translucency in capturing perspective, the imagery of the landscape, and any additional technique?
Transparency has become more and more crucial to my technique. I would tell my students that the three most important relationships in painting are: Dark/Light, Warm/Cool, and Transparent/Opaque, in that order. The most difficult to master is transparency because a transparent color can advance or recede, it can be light or dark, it can be warm or cool, and all of that is contingent on context. I have spent years exploring the transparency of pigments and doing endless studies to try and comprehend it. Ultimately I use this acquired experience to bolster my confidence in my own instincts.
As a painter I now do very little literal thinking about color when I am engaged in the process of painting. I make my choices based on visual immediacy - what I need at that moment (I do not think "Now I need a warmer color here and what is the complementary color of a cool red again?"). For me, rational thinking about color is a danger zone and I abandoned the "color wheel" (an arbitrary and misleading crutch) a long time ago (apologies to lovers of the color wheel).
The only impediment for me seems to be how to achieve that color that I need through mixing. I will often load my brush with three or more pigments to see what that looks like and this of course works best when using transparent colors. Generally I paint with primarily transparent colors in the early stages and build up with opaque colors as the painting progresses. This seems to be one, if not the only, rule of painting that holds up for me.
Janise Yntema, The Farmed Land, 55” x 59”, beeswax, resin, pigment, digital image on panel
What attracted you to the construct of the landscape?
Landscape allows a 2-dimensional space to be entered visually through color, irrelevant of canvas size: a 6” x 6” painting potentially holding the same psychological space as a 6’ x 6’ work. Over the years, I’ve pushed the idea of the landscape from abstraction to realism, initially incorporating ‘materiality of place’ through found objects in a mixed media approach. When I discovered R&F encaustic, my dark entropic work transformed as the purity of this material encouraged a more quiet focus on the subtleties of color and light.
More recently, an addition of digital imagery has brought a return to mixed media and a heightened realism to my painting, though I find my more successful pieces to hold firmly between abstraction and realism. From opacity to translucency, texture to encapsulation, I have found no other material more versatile than encaustic. As a landscape painter concerned with the environment and having worked with R&F encaustic for more than 20 years, I have made a conscious decision to avoid the array of petrochemical-based art materials continually flooding the market. The organic basis of encaustic agrees with my environmental philosophies. Nature is inherent in the paint.