By Helen Mitsios · Paintings by Tony Winters
Some folks associate landscape paintings with museums, fusty prints, or maybe a glimpse on the backdrop wall of a royal household. But now, with artists relearning the fine skills to produce realistic landscape painting — that most difficult genre, with so many trees and leaves, or so many waves and spindrifts to render — landscape paintings are back. And their comeback is in tune with the current spirit of climate change and preserving the earth for future generations.
In fact, realistic landscape art never really went away, and now that you read this, you'll start noticing it in TV shows and on the walls of photogenic homes in design magazines like Architectural Digest. Or watch the evolution of landscape painting in the Emmy award-winning PBS series Landscapes Through Time. The fine art gallery Questroyal in Manhattan takes out full-page color ads to sell original Hudson River School paintings and their newer brethren. The art world is re-discovering the power of nature to elevate the spirit, though the words romanticism and spirituality are seldom used in the commercial art community. Then again, those words aren't used much anywhere these days.
It seems the world needs a dose of beauty, not just art that shocks or offends. Been there, done that — and anyway, nobody did it better than the Surrealists or Dadaists who were reacting to world wars. Now looking fresh to the jaded contemporary eye, the aesthetics of restrained harmony feel new again. Landscape paintings offer immersion in natural beauty and escapist fantasy.
The Atelier Revival
Now select schools around the world are teaching rigorous atelier techniques, beginning with cast drawing and building to color mastery and the glazing techniques brought to glory in the Renaissance. Stepping into the Florence Academy of Art in Italy or Grand Central Atelier in New York, one is carried back in time to a magical space where standards of rigorous high gatekeeping are kept. The atelier curriculum teaches the technical skills needed to produce, for example, the fabulous backlit clouds of a J.M.W. Turner sky.
Picking up where university art departments left off, the last twenty years have seen a huge growth in the atelier school movement, in which the traditional realist painting skills that almost disappeared during the last century were kept alive by a tiny handful of artists working in obscurity and passing down their knowledge to a tiny group of students.
Hard to imagine that the drawing and painting skills needed to paint a Hudson River-type landscape were almost lost. In America, knowledge of these "old master" techniques hung by a thread during the long reign of Modernism. Actually, two threads. One group descended from the 19th-century Académie Julian in Paris, passing through artist and teacher Ted Seth Jacobs, and culminating in today's Grand Central Atelier in New York and its landscape-oriented Hudson River Fellowship. Another lineage passed through artist Richard Lack, who studied with R.H. Ives Gammell in Boston. Gammell, in turn, had studied with William Paxton, whose teacher in Paris was Jean-Léon Gérôme.
The new crop of realistic landscape art is not only ambitious and skilled, but its poetic artistry values the timelessness and beauty of nature that gave birth to America's first home-grown art movement, the Hudson River School. Environmentalists and climate change activists might do no better than point to the scenery of landscape paintings as a reminder of what we once had, now have, and what we stand to lose.
More attuned to today's environmentalism than to the 19th-century age of "Manifest Destiny," the excitement of these images is still fueled by the artist's take on the power and beauty of nature. Consider Tony Winters, a prize-winning American contemporary landscape painter who met with us in his art studio — formerly an outdoor terrace that he enclosed with windows to capture daylight while he paints.
Why is landscape painting considered one of the most difficult genres of painting?
One reason is the challenge of making a convincing illusion of depth, with the foreground, middle ground, and far distance each satisfying the viewer's eye. Another is finding ways to render complicated surfaces like foliage, waves, or clouds. On a practical level, painting outdoors means dealing with bugs, sunburn, and wind — but working outdoors in nature is the best part of landscape painting.
Your painting of a beach and sailboat in Newport is so realistic. What drew you to Newport?
Newport was my father's hometown, and we visited often during my childhood. A lot of art is made from childhood memories — at least that's what Wordsworth said. I think. Plus, Newport has spectacular light and a great tradition of sailing.
What advice do you have for artists who want to push beyond "loose" painting and acquire the skills of realistic landscape painting?
Draw, draw, draw. Artists in prior centuries were expert draftsmen before they ever used color. In fact, some of the great Hudson River School artists such as Asher Durand and John F. Kensett started their careers as engravers. Take a look at a dollar bill and you can appreciate the drawing skills these guys brought to their art.
How do you choose the composition of the landscape you'll paint?
Composition is the most important thing, and it's the hardest. I try to find a foreground that will lead the viewer into the picture, and then keep the eye moving through the space. I like to have a feeling of movement in my landscapes, whether it's water moving, or just the dynamic shapes of the landscape. That's what I look for in building my compositions.
An artist who inspires you?
So many, but right now I'm really obsessed with John Frederick Kensett, who died in 1872, but his late work still looks nearly contemporary. He has a great combination of drawing skills and the ability to portray light. He was considered a "Luminist." He did many paintings of the beaches along Long Island Sound.
What's your personal favorite beach?
Hanalei Beach on Kauai.
Why should people buy original art pieces in today's world of digital screens?
A good landscape painting will last for centuries and invites the viewer into a world that feels immersive and real in a way screens just don't. I think that because a real person experienced the wonder of nature in a real place and had the skills and took the effort to share that experience is what gives art the power to move us emotionally and elevate our spirit.
To learn more about Tony Winters, visit tonywintersfineart.com or follow him on Facebook (@TonyWintersArt) and Instagram (@tonywinters.art).
Originally published in Beach Happy Magazine, Volume 11 (Winter 2023). Story by Helen Mitsios. Paintings by Tony Winters.
