Oil Painting Reproductions On Canvas

Paint It While They’re There, Landscape Oil Paintings

Albert Bierstadt Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, California

Nature is really relaxing and comforting. When people want to get out of the bustling and rustling sound of the city, they opt to travel to places where there is peace and solemnity. These places are probably miles away from the city. But, believe it or not, even in the raucous and busy cities like Kyoto, Paris or Milan, one can find a piece of nature. And that piece of nature can be felt and found in landscape oil paintings.

Landscape oil paintings are arts that depict the scenic view of mountains, hills, valleys, oceans, forest and rivers. The nature painted can either be real or just an imagination of the artist. Either way, the goal of landscape oil paintings is to show the wide view of the nature. The sky and the weather are important elements of landscape oil paintings so they are mainly emphasized. To communicate the weather or the emotion enveloped in these oil paintings, the artists should know how to appropriate the colors. It is through the use of appropriate colors that one can feel the serenity or the delight of the nature.

Landscape oil paintings, just like any other landscape art, sprang from Western and Chinese culture. The earliest art work that shows pure landscape are frescos in Minoan Greece which was created in the 1500s. Other than the Greek landscape art, records showing the hunting scenes set in the Nile Delta are seen in Egypt.  However, unlike the contemporary landscape oil paintings, the hunting scenes painting gives emphasis on the human, or the single plant, not the whole landscape itself.

Chinese tradition, on the other hand, made landscape arts that included a small image of a human being or any object. However, the Chinese is not really notable for using oil paintings. They usually make use of their ink tradition by using ink sticks. Chinese landscape art showed great panoramas of landscape, generally backed with a range of mountains or bodies of water. The humans or objects are just an infinitesimal object of the entire Chinese art.

Another gigantic step was added in landscape art works when landscape oil paintings came onto the scene. Landscape oil paintings use mixed pigment and drying oil. In the medieval times, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo crushed the pigments and mixed them with oils from food. These oils include poppyseeds oil and walnut oils. During those times, it is important that the mixed paint be applied to cloth immediately because the oil base dries up easily.

Nowadays, enthusiasts of landscape oil paintings do not have to manually get oil from food because there is available oil that is sold in art stores. The commercial oil that is stored in tubes is called the linseed oil and is very effective and efficient for landscape oil paintings.

Contemporary landscape oil painters are William Hagerman. Hagerman paint real landscape oil paintings. Another painter is Teresa Bernard who also does real oil painting of landscape, seascape and wildlife. It is good to get nature on canvas before industrialization eats it up.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2012 at 8:57 am. It is filed under ART ARTICLES and tagged with landscape oil paintings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.