The Virtues of Realistic Painting

Leo von Klenze, View of the Valhalla near Regensburg.

My interest in painting and drawing started when my mother bought me an encyclopedia that included a short but excellent course in drawing and perspective and an expensive section about the history of art. I remember spending many afternoons after school trying to understand applied geometry to decipher the instructions to do drawings of stairs, columns and cubes in two-point perspective. I can also remember sanding pieces of wood to attempt my first miniature paintings with my inexpensive Tempera set. Years later, I moved to San Salvador, there while I studied English, I learned classic art methods with a few Salvadorian painters. In particular I enjoyed studying the techniques mastered by painters of the German romantic landscape period. Among the best of them are Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839), Carl Fohr (1795-1818), Carl Rottmann (1797-1850), August Matthias Hagen (1794-1878), and specially Leo van Klenze (1784-1864) whose paintings exhibit a richness of detail and special attention to light and compositional space.

Ludwig Knaus, Girl in a field.

The German romantic landscape imbued philosophical ideas that go beyond the process of creating art. In a way they saw themselves as mediators between God and mankind, therefore one needed to have a religious inclination and divine inspiration as a prerequisites for producing art of true value. They were in opposition to the sweeping currents of rationality, art and intellectual development such as the Enlightenment. You can see in their paintings the reverence they felt for the creation. What characterized the German romantic landscape painting process? I could mention: outstanding draughtsmanship, all the elements of the painting fuse in light and space to become a unified realistic view of the world, and their ability to render architectural elements in harmony with natural forms.

Joseph Anton Koch, Monastery of San Francesco di Civitella.

The German romantic movement searched for, as several other romantics movements in Europe at that time, the ultimate goal of the artist, to create a personal representation of what is beautiful through mastering the technical difficulties and limitations of pigment based painting.

Jenne Farm, Reading, Vt

One of the most difficult things to achieve in landscape painting is the accurate rendition of light. This problems is akin to finding the correct combination of tone and color that evokes the artist's view of nature. Thus artwork is seen, not as an approximation to a photograph but as an personalized, filtered view of the intrinsic beauty of nature. In this way the artist displays his talent for sharp observation with an equal and complementary ability to improve upon the natural world by rearranging and enhancing it.

Here at the bottom, I have included the completed artwork I started in the previous post, so you could see my attempts to render a sunny day in the countryside using a photo of Jenne Farm located in Reading, Vt.