Lesson 3. Landscape: nature as the hero

A landscape seems simple (“just nature”), but it too is built by rules. — Foreground and background. We usually distinguish the foreground (detailed, warm tones), the middle ground, and the background (paler, bluer, and blurrier the farther back they go — that's the aerial perspective from the unit on color at work). That is how depth is created. — The horizon line. Where it runs is an important decision. A low horizon leaves a huge sky: a feeling of space and grandeur, sometimes of a person's loneliness under the sky. A high horizon shows a lot of land: we seem to look down from above and survey the world. — A figure in the landscape. A small figure amid vast nature is a favorite device of the Romantics: it speaks of how small a person is before the elements, and of solitude and contemplation. Such a figure is sometimes called an “entry point”: we look at the landscape as if through its eyes. — Weather and time of day. A storm, fog, sunset, or dawn sets the emotion more strongly than any story. A landscape is rarely “just a view.” More often it is a mood expressed through nature.