“In every walk with nature, one gets far greater than he seeks,” John Muir.
The same can be stated of a stroll through the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Expressions of Nature showcase.
Forget Albert Bierstadt. Forget the Hudson River School. Forget Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and the mid-nineteenth-century French Barbizon painters. Forget the practical, chic, quiet, reserved recreations of nature you’re aware of.
This is an excursion of pressure panorama portray in which, every so often, staid genre collides head-on with Modern Art as interpreted by most of the motion’s most outstanding and avant-garde practitioners.
“The landscapes covered in our exhibition (through September 22) can be visible as excellent examples of inventive freedom, where the affection of the medium—whether or not or not it’s paint, charcoal, or watercolor—is explored and pushed in new and exciting approaches,” Katy Rothkopf, BMA Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, said. “Unlike landscapes of the 18th and early 19th centuries, in which a story or moral lesson was commonly embedded within the scene, the contemporary artists visible in this show are generating paintings without the one’s obstacles.”
Chaim Soutine’s hellish View Overlooking Céret (1922). Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s feverish Flower Beds inside the Dresden Gardens (1910). Gustav Klimt’s ethereal Pine Forest II (1901).
The showcase further scrambles your mind, imparting notably peculiar paintings from famous masters.
There’s a charcoal drawing, Trees by the Edge of a River (1908), by Piet Mondrian. It lacks any coloration, functions as a realistic depiction, and couldn’t be similarly eliminated visually from the colorful, summary, rectilinear artwork, which made him an icon.
Admire a watercolor from Pointillist Paul Signac. Gorgeous as ever, no matter its entire loss of dots or dashes.
A pair of reality-fracturing seascapes from John Marin ship you greedy for handrails.
A woozy harbor scene by way of William H. Johnson leaves you asking, Where has this artist been all your life?
“For artists like Kirchner, Soutine, Johnson, Marin, or (Marsden) Hartley, one could experience the strength of the medium in their compositions, which can be filled with electricity and their unique, expressive patterns,” Rothkopf stated.
For an excellent wilder walk on the wild side of landscape portray, Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York presents Joseph Yoakumfrom from June 20 through July 26. Yoakum became a self-taught artist, his paintings variously classified as “outlier,” “outsider,” “folk,” “naïve,” and “vernacular.” The world has constantly struggled to define these artists who have come to it unconventionally.
Few paths can be less conventional than Yoakum’s. When it comes to picking paint, selection begins with choosing between oil-based and water-based paints. For hundreds of years, people have been using oil-based paints for their impermeability and toughness.
Unlike water, oil does not dry by evaporation. It dries through a process of oxidation that converts the oil into a polymer chain. This means that the layer formed will be resilient and long-lasting and will withstand the degenerative effects of water and air longer than water-based paints. There are, however, several disadvantages to oil-based paints. First of all, oil paints take longer to dry than water-based paints, have a strong odor that lingers long after the paint has been applied, and contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
The paint pigment in oil paint is suspended in the solvent. VOCs are found in this solvent and are released as the paint dries or cures. VOCs are harmful to occupant health and the environment. Indoor air pollution has now been identified as being three times more harmful than pollution outdoors. This is mainly due to the release of VOCs by oil-based paints and other off-gassing interior VOC-containing finishes and furnishings. Government regulations regarding VOCs are becoming stricter; this may be why oil-based paints are decreasing in popularity.
