introduction written by Spike for painters TUBES magazine
To my knowledge this is the third time that painters TUBES has issued a magazine that takes a look at landscape painting from both a historical and contemporary viewpoint. To be frank, their is so much landscape painting that has been created and is still being created by thousands of artists that the Editor of painters TUBES could cover this ubiquitous subject line every month for the next decade. And he still would have only scratched the surface of this specific genre.
As mentioned in the editors essay, the landscape painting genre is unquestionably the most loved and most sold artwork globally, and has been for many hundreds of years, and there are many reasons and opinions why that is the case. However, I do not wish to labour that much discussed subject, even though commercial galleries and public galleries hold lots of landscape paintings that are a sort of ‘get out of jail’ stock items to be offered to existing clients when the quarterly turnover figures indicate a nose dive or public visitor numbers show a drop off.
Many university art lectures hate the nature genre specifically, in fact they despise painting as a form of expression in general. It is clear that ‘painting’ is not high on their agenda, and in the UK particularly they discourage students to include it in their end of year presentations.
From a purely intellectual perspective, one could argue that Art is supposed to be
progressive and therefore new avenues of medium, especially artificial intelligence
and digital manipulation creations must be given priority. It’s as if Art is some
sort of ‘one up-man-ship game’ among the academic elites to compete to see who can
be the most progressive. The recent history of ‘New Art’ is full of this sort of bullish
attitude -
and yet the results and all the efforts made, direct results of the brain washing
of young former art students, are already languishing in the forgotten dustbin of
time. The academics will say, that is where all art should 'be' (sic: in the dustbin),
because art is transient. Art should not be given a pedestal for the masses to admire.
After all progress cannot be made in society without sacrifice on the alter of the
God of Progress. It's a stoic viewpoint usually held by privileged individuals who
are self righteous, myopic and have no understanding of the real life that is endured
by their fellow human beings.
When the elites profess about let's
