Capturing an invigorating experience of landscapes

Art collector, expert and adviser Vickram Sethi takes us on an invigorating experience of landscapes on the eve of Ram Kumar & Paresh Maity show. Here are the insightful observations made by him:

The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.
(Psalm 19.1):

• Landscapes have a generative power and presence which inspires the mind and soul of a painter. It is not faithfulness to the obvious that confers the sense of reality, it is the artist’s inner cognizance which gives life to empty forms.
  
  
• An image of a landscape will have eternal validity only if the artist’s observation can search out the infinite and thus transform the particular into the universal.
  
  
• A landscape is a cultural mediation between space and the human subject; it’s the use and representation of space that an artist uses for communication with the viewer. Nature is the inspiration for all landscapes. An artist gives his viewers a new understanding of nature which enables them to see it as they have never done before.
  
  
• Contemporary landscapes are in most aspects quite different from what the eye sees; they are modified by the individual creative process applied by the artist, the visual image produced may be simplified, exaggerated, reorganized or abstracted to some degree in comparison to the actual landscape.
  
  
• Every landscape has a dominant characteristic, a certain mood and an ambiance and the challenge for the painter is to capture this essence. Landscape painting is the exploration of the outer world by the creativity of the inner soul of the painter. It is in that a point of union of art and living.
  
  
• To give us nature as we see it is well deserving of praise; to give us nature such as we have never seen but has often wished to see it is better and deserving of higher praise and is the triumph and perfection of art.