art in nature essay

Tate Etc 18 June 2018

Opinion Art and Nature

John-Paul Stonard

Art can only ever express the distance between humans and the natural world

Fan Kuan, Travellers among Mountains and Streams c.1000, ink on silk hanging scroll, 206.3 x 103.3 cm

The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei

‘Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.’ – Pablo Picasso, 1923

Picasso was right. No matter how naturalistic a work of art, it is always more about art than nature. Works of art show our sense of being apart from the natural world, our stubborn sense of difference from other animals and the the universe in which we find ourselves.

Landscape paintings made in China around the 900s are among the first great poetic statements of this sense of apartness. Fan Kuan’s hanging- scroll painting Travellers among Mountains and Streams , the most famous of this school, shows the ‘unendurable contrast’, as the poet and translator Arthur Waley put it, between the human and natural worlds. Vast cliffs swamp the human world, tiny figures lost in the ink-drawn landscape.

It was an idea taken up in European art many centuries later – a sense that nature was beyond human control. I love James Ward’s great, glowering painting Gordale Scar 1812–14 , in Tate’s collection, but it does nothing to rid you of your deep sense of fear when actually approaching the towering cliffs in the Yorkshire Dales, or to calm your racing heart when scrambling up the dangerous limestone cleft, an ascent both terrifying and impossible to resist. Only at the top, lying exhausted out on the quiet, windswept plateau, is it possible to think of Ward’s painting once again.

Art is constantly driven by the attempt to bridge the apartness of humans and the world. It always fails. In the 20th century, this pursuit became a matter of finding an equivalent not for the appearance, but for the invisible forces of nature. How might you show processes of growth, decay or gravity in art? These are just as much ‘nature’ as a tree in the field. ‘Art imitates nature in her manner of operation’, in the words of the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy in his 1934 book The Transformation of Nature in Art . This tradition of thought was brilliantly summarised by Clement Greenberg in his essay from 1961 ‘On the Role of Nature in Modern Painting’. He describes how impressionist artists tried to resolve all conflict between art and nature by bringing painting to the verge of abstraction, but it was for the cubists to realise what this meant: ‘When Braque and Picasso stopped trying to imitate the normal appearance of a wineglass and tried instead to approximate, by analogy, the way nature opposed verticals in general to horizontals in general – at this point art caught up with a new conception and feeling of reality that was already emerging in general sensibility as well as in science’. Perhaps this was when Picasso first conceived his ‘not nature’ definition of art.

Ward’s Gordale Scar now seems prophetic of how this feeling of reality has become, in our own times, so dark and dangerous. John Ruskin was among the first to realise that man had ‘desacrilised’ nature, as he put it, viewing it as a source of raw materials to be exploited, emptying it of its mystery. It is no longer simply a feeling of apartness, but also a sense that we own and control nature. But art shows us that we do not. We have laboratories where we recreate the birth of stars. Art is a record of our changing encounter with nature, and reveals the truth that our sense of separation is mere illusion — we are a tiny part of a greater whole. Art ‘cannot stand in competition with nature’, Hegel once wrote, ‘and if it tries it looks like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant’.

John-Paul Stonard is a writer and art historian. He is currently writing a book telling the story of art, from Palaeolithic to the present day, for Bloomsbury.

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In the early eighteenth century Joseph Addison described the notion of the sublime as something that ‘fills the mind with an agreeable kind of horror’. It was an idea feverishly explored by artists such as Turner, John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich, and further taken up by the American abstract painters Rothko and Barnett Newman. But how about now? As Tate comes to the close of a three-year research project, ‘The Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language’, Tate Etc. explores how contemporary artists have responded.

Examining the Relationship Between Nature and Art

One of the most remarkable artists to ever live, Henry Matisse once said: “An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.”

For as long as there has been art, artists have been enthused by nature. Apart from providing endless inspiration, many of the mediums that artists use to create their masterpieces such as wood, charcoal, clay, graphite, and water are all products from nature. 

The artists of years gone by

Although  Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting  during his lifetime, he was in a league of his own. He had the ability to bring aspects of nature, such as simple flowers, to life in his paintings. One such a work of art, Irises, is particularly impressive with the life-force of the flowers being almost tangible. Monet is another of the world’s greatest artist who drew inspiration from nature. His series of paintings entitled Lilies is a beautiful showcase of shadows, light, and water and portray his garden in France. Monet’s flowers were one of the main focuses of his work for the latter 30 years of his life, perfectly illustrating what an immense  influence the natural beauty around us  can have on the imagination of an artist.  

Modern artists inspired by nature

Mary Iverson both lives and works in Seattle, Washington and draws inspiration from the immense natural beauty that surrounds her. Her remarkable paintings offer a rather  contemporary spin on traditional landscape art  portraying the great monuments and national parks of the USA. Mary’s greatest inspiration comes from the picturesque Port of Seattle, and the Rainer, North Cascades, and Olympic National Parks. Mary’s work has been featured on the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine in 2015 and also appeared in Huffington Post,  The Boston Review and Foreign Policy Magazine . She also works closely with a number of galleries in Germany, Paris, Amsterdam and Los Angeles and teaches visual art at the Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon where she passionately shares her love for the natural world with her students.  

British artist draws lifelong inspiration from the natural world

British wildlife artist Jonathan Sainsbury is known for his astonishing ability to capture the fleeting moments of the natural world. Having spent most of his life observing and drawing his various subjects, Sainsbury has become a master at using watercolor and watercolor combined with charcoal to effortlessly evoke a feeling of movement in his artwork. Apart from capturing the very essence of countless natural scenes he also draws on nature in a metaphorical way to refer to our everyday lives. Jonathan’s work can be viewed at the Wykeham Gallery in Stockbridge, the Strathearn Gallery, and the Dunkeld Art Exhibition.

Despite the world becoming more technology-driven by the minute, there are very few things that can inspire artistic brilliance quite like nature does. From a single rose petal spiralling to the ground to a mighty fish eagle swooping in on its prey, the countless faces of Mother Nature will continue to mesmerize and provide inspiration for some of the most renowned works of art the world has ever seen.

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nature in art

User-created.

This user gallery has been created by an independent third party and may not represent the views of the institutions whose collections include the featured works or of Google Arts & Culture.

The theme of nature in art has almost always been present whether in American art, Korean art, or art from any other culture. Sometimes its depiction can be literal or even abstract, narrowing it down to just colors of the natural world. Nature can be a simple add on to a painting to convey a sense of depth, or perspective. However, it can also be the main focus of a work of art. Just like nature can be recreated through art, it can also be used as a stand in for greater thought. A realistic depiction of a mountain for example can symbolize not only the sublime, but also curiosity for the unknown. Depictions of nature can also be about intellectual thought and spirituality. Art involving nature can be done simply to display the beauty of the natural world around us, to make scientific observations in an environment, or to open our minds to philosophical ideas about our own connection to nature and beyond. The philosopher Aristotle once wrote that "Art not only imitates nature, but it also completes its deficiencies." This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak.

Drawing Connections

Drawing in contemporary art, spring 2017, nature as art, by joseph mangano.

Alan Sonfist, American (b. 1946), Earth Mapping of New York City , 1965. Charcoal on paper, 19 in x 22 in. University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Purchased with funds from Alumni Association, UM 1986.67.

Historically, drawing has been used mostly as a teaching tool and a preliminary step to develop ideas before completing a painting. With the rise of Modernism in the 20th century, drawing evolved to become its own medium for artists to express themselves. In the University of Massachusetts’s Contemporary Art Museum exhibition Body Language , viewers had the privilege to encounter different expressions of what a drawing could be in the categories of “Looking,” “Touching,” and “Feeling.” These diverse drawings opened the mind to the broad range of materials and functions of drawing. In particular, a drawing by Alan Sonfist titled Earth Mapping of New York City  stood out to me among the rest. It appears to be a tracing of pine needles and natural objects found on the ground. I became fascinated with the transformation that took place when this everyday, natural pattern found on the ground was transferred into the context of art. As this interest peaked my curiosity, I started to research how artists have interacted with nature and used it as a primary source for their artworks. By considering Alan Sonfist and the works of other Land artists, I came to the conclusion that nature can be represented as a form of art on its own through the inclusion of pattern and interactive experience.

In the history of art, landscapes have proved the most enduring of artistic inspirations aside from the human figure. Only in this century has the enthusiasm for its depiction lessened due to the the multitude of technological developments that have led to a revival of abstract art. As Jacques Ellul states in his Remarks on Technology and Art :

Technology influences everything and has indeed become the chief determinant not only of man’s habitat but also of his history [….] Today art has two main orientations, the first a direct reflection of the increasing role of technology, the second a sort of explosive reaction against the rigor of technological thinking.¹

I believe a major reaction against technology has defined the movement known as Land Art, also referred to as “Earth art, “Earthworks” or “Environmental Art.” Land Art first gained popularity in the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s in response to the cultural turbulence and social unrest of the late 1960s. In order to really inspire people to feel compelled to conserve nature, a more public approach was needed. Rather than representing nature with paint on canvas or the welding of steel, a handful of artists chose to enter the landscape itself and work with its materials directly. Land Art developed out of conceptual practices in which artists started to make interventions into everyday life. These new earthworks did not depict the landscape so much as engage with it. The first works of this kind were created by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Robert Morris, and Alan Sonfist. These works distinguished themselves from other forms of sculpture due to their physical presence within the landscape.² Most of these works are also inextricably bound to their sites, creating a special relationship, which in turn becomes the primary content. However, since Land Art can simply be seen as a presentation of nature, what is it about nature that can be translated into the context of art?

Similar to paintings and drawings, nature provides the viewer with a pattern of similar forms that create a composition. Alan Sonfist’s Earth Mapping of New York City is a charcoal drawing that was completed in 1965. This artwork completely transcends the traditional definitions of drawing in its representation of the trace and the mark. A trace is something inscribed by the artist’s direct physical presence, while a mark is a sign placed with deliberate intention. Earth Mapping of New York City exists as both a trace and a mark. The drawing is a rubbing of pine needles and dirt that suggests the composition of the New York City landscape long before it was inhabited. However upon further examination, the drawing transforms into a landscape with its suggestion of depth, mountains, and even animals or figures in action. The possibility of seeing objects and pictures within this abstracted natural composition is what originally fascinated me in the drawing. If this drawing were still laying flat on the ground where Alan Sonfist traced over the surface, I would most likely just see the overall appearance of marks making up the ground. When this drawing is hung on a gallery wall, however, the bold and active strokes begin to mix with the stain-like shadows and smaller dots to create the illusion of a landscape with possible figures.

The possibility of seeing imagery that is not really there is explained by the concept of “pareidolia”. Pareidolia is “a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus (an image or a sound) by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists.” Pareidolia was used as a tool by artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci in the Renaissance and Alexander Cozens in the 18th century, both of whom used stains and natural occurring patterns to make pictures. In Da Vinci’s notebook “Precepts of the Painter,” there is a section included titled “A Way to Stimulate and Arouse the Mind to Various Inventions.” Here, Leonardo Da Vinci states:

If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate well-conceived forms.

Leonardo understands that this new device for painting may appear “trivial and ludicrous” but is truly a vital tool in arousing the mind to various inventions.

Aside from Leonardo Da Vinci, later artists such as Alexander Cozens and Thomas Gainsborough, another 18th-century English landscape painter, used the effect of pareidolia in nature to invent works of art. Like these artists, I believe that pareidolia can help us understand a pattern and how it makes feel. This understanding can be important in deciding on the types of strokes and marks that you choose to render a scene or capture an emotion. The ability to see different forms and imagery adds an interactive component to nature where viewers can pull out individual perceptions of what lies in front of them, Aside from arousing new inventions for natural compositions, patterns in nature can also be directly translated as they appear. The idea of referencing patterns in nature dates all the way back to biblical times. In Exodus 25, a book in the Old Testament, God gives directions to the prophet Moses on how to build the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, with the specific instructions to “be sure that you make everything according to the pattern I have shown you here on the mountain.”³ Beyond patterns, this individual, psychological experience viewers gain is what makes nature a truly astonishing work of art.

Continuing with experience, strong pieces of art often evoke an emotion, bring to light a memory, or change the way you perceive something. For example, when I view works by Claude Monet I am always hit with a sense of nostalgia and familiarity with the landscape depicted as if I have been there in a previous life. This action of receiving a feeling and being put into a different emotional state is what I think makes great art. This one of the strenghts of nature over other forms of art. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this personal experience with nature in his essay titled “Nature.” The Transcendentalist writer brings up the idea that a true understanding of the self can be achieved by going out into nature and leaving behind all preoccupying activities as well as society. Emerson believes that when a man gazes at the stars, he becomes aware of his own separateness from the material world resulting in an uninhibited  way of thinking.? Like Emerson, I believe that nature can serve as an escape from the material world and can provide artists with a space to reflect on the world around them without the influence over others. This effect that nature can bring to the viewer is why Land Art is especially important today. For example, New York City’s famous “Times Square” is essentially a square intersection filled with over 230 billboards and advertisements. The advertising and influence of big corporations are posted all around Manhattan and constantly invade the minds of pedestrians.

Thankfully, a source of nature can be found in a Land Art work in lower Manhattan. In 1965, Alan Sonfist created the environmental public sculpture titled Time Landscape . This sculpture is an area of plants and trees that recreates the natural heritage of Manhattan long before it was filled with skyscrapers and taxis. In Sonfist’s essay “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments,” the artist explains that with Time Landscape he hopes to create a space for reflection and heightened sensitivity in a “cluttered and overly rationalized modern world” that would ideally stimulate an altered sense of one’s place within the world.? While critics might view Time Landscape as a simple garden or urban forest, the idea of using this natural space as a source for “reflection” transforms the traditional garden into an immersive experience. I believe the experience that Sonfist’s Time Landscape provides is an integral attempt to reconnect humans to nature.

Today we live in society where advertisements, political opinions, and worldly views are constantly being pushed into our mind by force. According to digital marketing experts, it is estimated that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.? A study at Oberlin College also revealed that the average American child is able to identify over 1,000 corporate logos but only can recognize about a dozen of the plants or animals found in their neighborhood.? Our society’s loss of connection within nature is creating a population controlled by media and opinions of corporations instead of living out our own personal discoveries and intuitions.

In conclusion, the patterns and personal experiences that viewers achieve when looking at nature justify nature as a direct material of art. While nature can sometimes seem only an aesthetically pleasing source for art, the interactive experience of reflection and individual thought is what pushes nature beyond its concrete existence into the realm of art. More importantly, using nature as a form of art can help compel society to conserve and revitalize our connection with the natural world.

1) Ellul, Jacques . “Remarks on Art and Technology.” Social Research , 1979, 805-33.

2) Beardsley, John. Earthworks and beyond contemporary art in the landscape . New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.

3) Exodus 25:40, Old Testament of the Bible.

4) Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays – “Nature” (1844). 1844. Accessed May 02, 2017. http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/essays/nature1844.html.

5) Sonfist, Alan. Alan Sonfist: Natural Phenomena As Public Monuments . Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, 1978.

6) Marshall, Ron. “Advertising Campaigns.” Http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads.

7) “Loving Children: A Design Problem, David Orr.” Accessed May 02, 2017. http://designshare.com/research/orr/loving_children.htm.

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature , Oxford, 2003, 180pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199259658.

Reviewed by Fiona Hughes, University of Essex

This book comprises four essays, each based on previously published articles and capable of being read independently, yet as a whole they constitute a substantial study of the aesthetics of nature. The book has the virtue of serving as an introduction to the uninitiated while deepening the interest of the converted and will be of interest to anyone working in the field of aesthetics. Budd is committed to a catholic perspective allowing for the aesthetic appreciation of nature, art, sport, juggling and much else. [p. 15] But his focus in this book is exclusively on the first of these. He dates a renaissance in the topic to the publication in 1966 of Ronald Hepburn’s highly influential ``Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, which Budd suggests reversed the priority of artistic over natural beauty prevailing since Hegel. Not surprisingly, given this genealogy, Hegel’s predecessor, Kant, for whom natural beauty was paradigmatic, figures as an important point of reference for Budd’s studies.

The approach is analytical and critical in style. Budd’s aims are descriptive in that he believes that any successful theory will ‘chime in with’ our experience. His preference is for a theory that would be ‘neutral as to the relative importance or priority of art and nature within the field of the aesthetic’. [p. 13] These preferences set the scene for investigations that are rigorous and unpolemical. However, an emphasis on the shortcomings in theories under investigation can be limiting, especially when it comes to seeing the broader picture. In particular, Budd displays a lack of sympathy for Kant’s systematic commitments.

Essay 1 is concerned with what it is to aesthetically appreciate ‘nature as nature’, the Leitmotiv of the book as a whole. In Essay 2 Budd gives an extended, although necessarily selective, reading of Kant’s aesthetics of nature in the Critique of Judgment , focusing on Kant’s account of natural beauty, the relationship of the latter to morality and the sublime in nature. Essay 3 takes issue with those aesthetic theories for which art is the dominant paradigm, even for an aesthetics of nature. Budd then turns to ‘positive aesthetics’, for which everything in unmanipulated nature has a positive aesthetic value. In particular he considers arguments put forward by Allen Carlson, whose environmentally oriented aesthetics stands in contrast to his own account. In Essay 4 Budd gives a helpful, though selective overview of trends in the literature since Hepburn’s article. Carlson figures once again as a major interlocutor, particularly with reference to the way in which knowledge plays a role in aesthetic appreciation. While Carlson believes that Kendall Walton’s distinction between apparent and real properties of artworks can be applied to nature in so far as the latter is capable of being ‘determined by the right categories’, Budd convincingly questions whether such categories could ever be established. His conclusion is that, because of the freedom left to the observer in the face of the variability or ‘relativity’ of phenomena, ‘there is no such thing as the appropriate foci of aesthetic significance in the natural environment or the appropriate boundaries of the setting’[p. 147].

In Essay 1 Budd distinguishes between a weak and a strong form of the aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’. [pp. 9-10] The weak or ‘external’ form covers those cases where a natural thing or event is liked either not in virtue of being an artwork or in virtue of not being an artwork. Budd calls the first the ‘non-artistic’ and the second the ‘anti-artistic’ version. The strong or ‘internal’ form is only the case when the liking arises in virtue of something being natural. In other words, the natural status of the object or event – Budd uses the neutral term ‘item’ – constitutes a necessary element of one’s appreciation. This is Budd’s own position, which he seeks to elaborate and then apply throughout the rest of the book. He sums it up as:

the idea of a response to a natural item, grounded on its naturalness—on its being a part of nature or on its being a specific kind of natural item—focused on its elements or aspects as structured or interrelated in the item, the item being experienced as intrinsically rewarding, unrewarding, or displeasing, the hedonic character of the reaction being ‘disinterested’.[p.16]

Aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’ entails an awareness of the object or event falling under the concept of nature and this knowledge is constitutive of our liking for it.

The idea of liking ‘nature as nature’ marks an important difference between Budd and Kant, which can be drawn out by contrasting the ways in which they characterize aesthetic appreciation as ‘free’. Whereas, as we have seen, for Budd the freedom of the spectator arises from the diversity of categories under which nature could be taken up, for Kant the freedom of aesthetic judgment implies that it is not determined by a concept. Budd is, however, right to insist that Kant’s account does not entail that ‘the object must be experienced without its being experienced as falling under a concept (of that natural kind)’. [p. 29] Kant does not insist that we are unaware of the object’s natural kind in finding it aesthetically pleasing, but only that a concept does not determine the pleasure. Budd holds that, nevertheless, Kant has no account of aesthetic appreciation of ‘nature as nature’, in that he insists that when I like something aesthetically, I ‘abstract’ from any empirical concept of it. [p. 29] This would seem to rule out the possibility that my liking could be ‘grounded on its naturalness’ as Budd’s model requires, for although in another frame of mind I know the object to be natural, this does not contribute to my aesthetic appreciation of it.

It is arguable that Kant concedes a greater role to our awareness of the natural status of an aesthetically appreciated object than Budd’s talk of ‘abstraction’ suggests. Paradoxically, we can draw this out from Kant’s claim that the beautiful in nature looks as if it were art, whereas the beautiful in art looks as if it were nature. [ Critique of Judgement AA 306] Budd rejects positions such as Savile’s and Wollheim’s that regard artworks as paradigmatic for our aesthetic appreciation of natural objects. Without entering into an assessment of his response to either (his account of the latter is very brief), I would like to suggest that there is more to Kant’s chiasmic statement than meets the eye. Kant’s suggestion is surely that the natural thing, recognized as natural, is beautiful in so far as it mimics art. But in what sense does it do so? The aesthetically pleasing natural object bears a certain structural similarity to an artwork in so far as it displays purposiveness of form. The artwork, conversely, is only beautiful in so far as, while we are aware that it is an artwork, it nevertheless mimics the purposeless or intention-free appearance of nature. The beautiful hovers between purpose and purposelessness and this indeterminate status is only possible in so far as a natural object mimics art or vice versa . If this is right then there is a sense in which the awareness of the object’s natural status is a necessary condition of, while not determining or engendering, our aesthetic appreciation of it.

Repeatedly Budd argues against the idea that aesthetic appreciation of nature involves seeing the latter as art. An early statement of this central commitment comes when he says that his theme is ‘nature as nature and not as art (or artefact)’ [p. 5]. However there is a distinction between viewing nature as art in a reductive sense and the subjunctive mood of the ‘as if’. Nature can be viewed as if it were art, without in any sense reducing nature to art. Admittedly, conceding this distinction to Kant does not result in an aesthetics of ‘nature as nature’ in Budd’s terms. But this is not because Kant ‘abstracts’ from the natural status of the aesthetic object, but rather because its being natural is not sufficient for it to count as aesthetic. If it is to qualify as such, it must be recognized as nature and yet at the same time mimic art. To say that nature is seen as if it were art is strictly to say that it is not possible to determine the scene or thing under a concept because of the playful or expansive frame of mind it invites in our response to it.

There is undoubtedly a disagreement between Kant and Budd in so far as the latter holds that ‘relevant knowledge’ makes possible aesthetic responses that would otherwise be impossible. [p. 20] The knowledge now in question is not simply the awareness that the object or event is natural, but rather that further determinations play a role in our aesthetic appreciation of it. In principle, Kant need not have excluded the possibility that knowledge can enhance our aesthetic appreciation, just as he concedes an ancillary role to charm. But he did not entertain such a possibility, blinded perhaps by the need to exclude knowledge as the determining ground of aesthetic pleasure. While Budd denies that knowledge necessarily leads to heightened aesthetic pleasure, he insists that it can do so. The question that arises is whether knowledge is capable not only of ‘transform[ing] one’s aesthetic experience of nature’ [p. 20], but also of engendering it. Budd seems to be on firmer ground in the former case, but he also says the sublime can be ‘produced’ by the addition of knowledge to perception. [p. 22] As he makes no distinction between the sublime and aesthetic response in general here, we must conclude that this would hold for any aesthetic experience. While knowledge is not a necessary condition of aesthetic pleasure, it can, according to Budd, be a sufficient condition. Yet this claim would require a deeper analysis of the role played by knowledge in the internal dynamics of aesthetic appreciation.

Importantly not all knowledge is aesthetically relevant for Budd. Only that which ‘integrate[s] with the perception in such a manner as to generate a new perceptual-cum-imaginative content of experience ’ counts. [my emphasis. p. 22] This distinction is important for the distance at which Budd stands to Carlson’s ‘natural environmental model’ of aesthetics of nature, discussed in Essays 3 and 4. Whereas Carlson insists that common sense or natural-scientific knowledge of nature is essential to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, Budd asks how we can delimit the knowledge that is aesthetically relevant. [p. 136] Whereas Carlson’s account threatens to deaden aesthetic affect under a burden of knowledge, Budd’s focus on the emergence of new perceptions through the intermediary of imagination discovers a criterion of aesthetic relevance for knowledge. Budd does not much develop this idea beyond supplying an extended range of examples in Essay 1, nor does he do so in the critical reconstructive discussion of Essay 4. Nevertheless it is one of the most valuable ideas he offers and reveals a place for knowledge in aesthetics, which it would be possible to combine with the Kantian insight that the latter is not reducible to cognitive, moral or other, including environmental, interests. This insight could have been developed into an account of how different orientations overlap in the aesthetic case, without their determining it. This could allow us to see how aesthetic freedom fosters our capacity not only for cognitive open-mindedness, but also for moral impartiality.

However such a development of his account of the generative role of knowledge would almost certainly go against Budd’s instincts. In Essay II he reveals himself to be skeptical about Kant’s systematic aspirations. While there is much in his reading of Kant that is of great value, two points are particularly telling. Firstly, Budd is unconvinced by Kant’s attempt to link aesthetic judgment to morality through their shared formal status. With characteristic incisiveness, he points out the distinction between the formal status of the categorical imperative that concerns any maxim or principle of action’s ‘ accordance or conflict with the requirement of willed universality ’ and ‘the form of a beautiful object’ that is nothing other than ‘ the structure of its elements ’. [p. 57] The transition from aesthetics to morality is unsuccessful because ‘the existence of natural beauty … reveals only that nature is hospitable to the aesthetic exercise of our cognitive powers’. It does not concern ‘our ability to realize our moral ends’. [pp. 56-7] The second issue is that of Kant’s much criticized use of a psychological idiom, in that he tries to explain the possibility of knowledge and aesthetic appreciation through a ‘murky’ [p. 31] investigation of mental faculties. Budd says that this amounts either to a ‘picturesque redescription of the experience’ or ‘a priori speculation about psychological processes’. In the first case it is ‘unenlightening’, while in the second ‘it needs to be replaced by an empirically well-founded account’. [p. 34] These two criticisms are related, for it is by means of faculty theory that Kant attempts to show the systematic connection between aesthetics, morality and cognition.

Kant’s reason for writing a third critique was not simply the discovery of a distinct species of aesthetic judgment, but the coincidence of this event with the possibility of revealing a bridge between cognition and morality, thus completing the critical system. While Budd is right that the formal status of aesthetic judgment and of morality are distinct from one another, it would be possible to show how they are linked within a systematic account of Kant’s formalism. I can only sketch what would be an intricate argument. The form of an object or the ‘structure of its elements’ invites a formal judgment in which the imagination is in harmony with the understanding without determination by an empirical or categorial rule. We are able to give the rule to ourselves (this counts as ‘heautonomy’), even though in response to something given to us in experience. This is a first step to revealing our capacity for the autonomous use of reason. It is strictly a preparation or propadeutic for the moral ability to judge according to the form of the moral law. Whereas it would be impossible to move directly from the form of the aesthetic object to the form of the moral law, as Budd rightly says, the move is rather from the form of aesthetic judgment to that of action based on a formal principle. The freedom of mind both imply is the ground of the possibility for the transition from aesthetics to morality. As aesthetics is based on the subjective conditions of cognition, the giant step from cognition to morality becomes, at least in principle, possible.

Artistic Representation of Nature Essay

One of the main qualities of visual art is that it allows people to get in touch with the surrounding physical reality through the perceptual lenses of another person’s mind – hence, making it possible for the spectators to experience the sensation of aesthetic pleasure. 1 The derived pleasure often proves particularly intense when the art piece in question is inspired by the works of nature, or when it is concerned with depicting the natural environment.

This simply could not be otherwise – nature has always served as an important source of creative inspiration for many generations of artists. The actual explanation for this has to do with the innermost essence of art, as the instrument for amplifying the pleasurable aspects of one’s ‘experience of being’. 2 When exposed to the elements, most people naturally grow to feel aesthetically overwhelmed – especially when surrounded by some breathtaking scenery. In its turn, this triggers several artistic anxieties in them – hence, prompting the affected individuals to consider creating art, or to act ‘artfully’. 3

Nevertheless, even though nature does inspire artists more or less equally, how they channel their fascination with the natural environment vary rather substantially. The most logical explanation as to why this is being the case is that just about any nature-inspired work of art is reflective of the specifics of ‘mental wiring, on the part of its creator. 4 What this means is that it is possible to experience the aesthetic thrill of observing ‘nature art’, and to gain certain insights into the innermost workings of the affiliated artist’s mentality. To substantiate the validity of this suggestion, I will discuss some nature-depicting paintings by Janaina Tschape and Katherine Del Barton.

Janaina Tschape is a German-born artist, who had spent her formative years in Brazil, and who now resides in New York. She is known for her willingness to experiment with the innovative artistic techniques, as well as for the prominent impressionist quality of many of her artworks. 5 Tschape’s painting Winter stands out as a perfect example in this respect.

Even a glance at this artwork will reveal that by working on it, the artist was the least concerned with trying to ensure the lifelikeness of what is being depicted. Rather, she strived to provide the visualization of the whole range of her feelings, invoked by the snowy weather outside of the window. Partially, this explains a certain nebulosity of the author’s artistic representations of a cloudy sky, trees, water in the river, bridge, and some watery streaks on the window.

After all, it does take some time observing Tschape’s painting to realize that the cloud-like objects in the artwork’s upper part are indeed clouds and not the crowns of some trees, for example. This, however, is exactly what contributes towards strengthening the impression that the depicted objects are in a state of some elusive motion. The unmistakably ‘cold’ palette of the featured colors does its work helping to establish a proper perceptual mood in onlookers. 6

Tschape did not merely strive to ‘catch the moment’ while creating this painting, but also to present its discursive motifs being inseparable from her sense of individuality – hence, the earlier mentioned impressionist appearance of the analyzed art piece. In a certain sense, the artist’s personality is being objectified within the compositional elements of the painting, which implies that Winter is as much about the author herself, as it is about the portrayal of the snowy landscape in the distance. Essentially the same applies to Tschape’s other painting Clouds .

As we can see in it, the depicted clouds resemble the real ones only formally. However, while exposed to this painting, one is likely to experience the realistic sensation of standing under the cloudy sky. Just as it is the case with the earlier mentioned painting , Clouds presents viewers with the strongly personalized artistic account of nature – hence, the presence of bright yellow color amidst the otherwise ‘cold’ ones. In the painting, they codify the hidden ‘clusters of meaning’, which the audience members are expected to be able to ‘decipher’. 7 It is namely while ‘deciphering’ the artwork’s implicit semiotics that viewers can experience the feeling of aesthetic excitement. This excitement will prove particularly intense in those individuals who know a thing or two about the theory of art.

In light of what has been said earlier, it will be appropriate to suggest that Tschape tends to use the images of nature in her works as the vehicles for promoting her own highly subjective understanding of what accounts for the effects of one’s exposure to the surrounding natural environment on the formation of his or her attitudes towards life. Thus, it will only be logical to assume that Tschape’s interrelationship with nature is marked by the artist’s unconscious tendency to think of nature’s expressions as such that serve the purpose of helping her become increasingly enlightened, as to what accounts for human life.

For Tschape, nature is much more of an abstract idea of some omnipresent potency than merely the object of one’s aesthetic admiration. This provides us with a rationale to suggest that both paintings reflect the aesthetic workings of Tschape’s ‘Faustian’ psyche 8 – the artist regards nature to be the actual key to discovering the innate principles of how the universe operates, even without being aware of it consciously. Therefore, there is nothing too odd about the apparent whimsicalness of the artist’s style – it is yet another indication of Tschape’s innate predisposition towards trying to achieve some sort of intellectual enlightenment by the mean of subjecting the surrounding nature to her emotionally driven aesthetic inquiry.

The artworks of Del Kathryn Barton (an Australian artist, who lives in Sydney 9 ) are concerned with the deployment of the entirely different methodological approach to depicting nature, as compared to that of Tschape. The most notable difference in this regard is that whereas the works of the latter connote ‘motion’, Barton’s paintings are best described as ‘motionless’, in the representational sense of this word.

Partially, this can be explained by the reference being made to the technical details of how Barton’s artistic masterpieces come into being, “Her (Barton’s) paintings show an obsession with meticulous mark-making; from minuscule dotting to veins on leaves and strands of hair. Being that the production process for her larger paintings is extremely labor-intensive”. 10 To exemplify that this is indeed the case, we can refer to the artist’s painting Animals , as seen below.

What immediately comes into one’s eye, regarding the subtleties of Barton’s artistic style, is that they are strongly ornamental. That is, the author made a deliberate point of using bright colors to increase the anthropomorphic appeal of the depicted animals – the aesthetic technique commonly used by the Aboriginal people in Australia. 11 The impression that Barton’s artwork was indeed inspired by the legacy of Aboriginal art is strengthened even further by the visual and thematic idealization of nature, 12 achieved through the application of the tiny bits of paint to the canvas throughout its entirety.

Given the sheer amount of time, required to create artworks like Animals , the discussed painting cannot be deemed quite as spontaneous and ‘moody’, as it is the case with Tschape’s Winter and Clouds . At the same time, however, there are a few similarities between the aesthetic strategies of both artists. The most distinctive of them is that, just as it appears to be the case with Tschape, Barton tends to treat the emanations of nature as being highly symbolical and allegorical. The artist’s painting Birds can be considered as yet another proof in this regard.

That is, nature for Barton is more of an abstract idea than something that can be experienced and enjoyed as a ‘thing in itself’. While observing Barton’s art, people are also required to solve a mental puzzle as to what accounts for the proper approach to interpreting this art’s symbolical denotations. Thanks to the artist, there is nothing too challenging about the task. The pale coloring of human hands (one of the compositional elements in both Barton’s paintings), as well as how they are portrayed, implies that Barton uses her art as a medium for channeling the message of environmental friendliness to people. According to this message, people must aspire to live in perfect harmony with nature.

There is, however, even more to it. As it can be confirmed regarding the mentioned paintings by Barton, just about every depicted object in them is shown visually interlocking with the rest, which results in increasing the measure of both paintings’ holistic integrity. This specific effect is brought about by the fact that, despite the elaborative detailing of each component in Barton’s paintings, all of the featured elements (including the tiniest ones) are perceived as the integral parts of a whole.

Therefore, there is nothing accidental about the presence of Aboriginal motifs in Barton’s artworks – the specifics of the artist’s conceptualization of nature correlates well with the provisions of Non-Western ‘perceptual holism’, which stands in opposition to the Western (object-oriented) outlook on the natural environment and one’s place in it. 13

Thus, there is indeed a good reason to believe that the significance of a particular artistic representation of nature should be discussed in conjunction with what accounts for the affiliated artist’s psycho-cognitive predispositions, which define the qualitative aspects of this person’s aesthetic stance. This concluding remark is fully consistent with the paper’s initial thesis. There can be no ‘pure art’ 14 – just about every form of artistic expression is symptomatic of its originator’s psychological predilection – just as it was implied in the paper’s introductory part.

One of this conclusion’s possible implications is that, as time goes on, the positivist theories of art, based on the assumption that there are universally recognized ‘canons’ in the artistic domain, will continue to fall out of favor with more and more people. 15 The dialectical laws of history predetermine such an eventual development.

Bibliography

Chakravarty, Ambar. “The Neural Circuitry of Visual Artistic Production and Appreciation: A Proposition.” Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology 15, no. 2 (2012): 71-75.

Currie, Gregory. “Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art’s Definition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 235-241.

Davey, E. R. “‘Soft Framing’: A Comparative Aesthetics of Painting and Photography.” Journal of European Studies 30, no. 118 (2000): 133-155.

De Lorenzo, Catherine. “The Hang and Art History.” Journal of Art Historiography no. 13 (2015): 1-17.

Galenson, David. “The Life Cycles of Modern Artists: Theory and Implications.” Historical Methods 37, no. 3 (2004): 123-136.

Hawkins, Celeste. “ Del Kathryn Barton. ” The Art and the Curious , 2015. Web.

Leslie, Donna. “Seeing the Natural World Art & Reconciliation.” Art Monthly Australia no. 258 (2013): 30-33.

McClelland, Kenneth. “John Dewey: Aesthetic Experience and Artful Conduct Education and Culture.” Education and Culture 21, no. 2 (2005): 44-62.

Murphy, Margueritte. “Pure Art, Pure Desire: Changing Definitions of l’Art Pour l’Art from Kant to Gautier.” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (2008): 147-160.

Pearse, Emma. “Janaina Tschape.” ARTnews 104, no. 9 (2005): 184-185.

Tekiner, Deniz. “Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning.” Social Justice 33, no. 2 (2006): 31-44.

Thomas, Daniel. “Aboriginal Art: Who Was Interested?” Journal of Art Historiography no. 4 (2011): 1-10.

Vasilenko, Ivan. “Dialogue of Cultures, Dialogue of Civilizations.” Russian Social Science Review 41, no. 2 (2000): 5-22.

Wilson, Henry. “Pleasure Palettes.” World of Interiors 30, no. 1 (2010): 58-67.

Young, Michael. “Del Kathryn Barton: Disco Darling.” Art and AsiaPacific no. 96 (2015): 68-69.

• Gregory Currie, “Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art’s Definition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (2010): 237.
• Kenneth McClelland, “John Dewey: Aesthetic Experience and Artful Conduct Education and Culture.” Education and Culture 21, no. 2 (2005): 46.
• E. R. Davey, “‘Soft Framing’: A Comparative Aesthetics of Painting and Photography.” Journal of European Studies 30, no. 118 (2000): 138.
• Ambar Chakravarty, “The Neural Circuitry of Visual Artistic Production and Appreciation: A Proposition.” Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology 15, no. 2 (2012): 72.
• Emma Pearse, “Janaina Tschape.” ARTnews, 104, no. 9 (2005):185.
• Henry Wilson, “Pleasure Palettes.” World of Interiors 30, no. 1 (2010): 65.
• David Galenson, “The Life Cycles of Modern Artists: Theory and Implications.” Historical Methods 37, no. 3 (2004): 129.
• Ivan Vasilenko, “Dialogue of Cultures, Dialogue of Civilizations.” Russian Social Science Review 41, no. 2 (2000): 10.
• Michael Young, “Del Kathryn Barton: Disco Darling.” Art and AsiaPacific 96 (2015) 68.
• Celeste Hawkins, “Del Kathryn Barton.” The Art and the Curious , 2015. Web.
• Daniel Thomas, “Aboriginal Art: Who Was Interested?” Journal of Art Historiography no. 4 (2011): 14.
• Catherine De Lorenzo, “The Hang and Art History.” Journal of Art Historiography no. 13 (2015): 5.
• Donna Leslie, “Seeing the Natural World Art & Reconciliation.” Art Monthly Australia no. 258 (2013): 32.
• Margueritte Murphy, “Pure Art, Pure Desire: Changing Definitions of l’Art Pour l’Art from Kant to Gautier.” Studies in Romanticism 47, no. 2 (2008): 147.
• Deniz Tekiner, “Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning.” Social Justice 33, no. 2 (2006): 33.
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IvyPanda. (2020, November 5). Artistic Representation of Nature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/artistic-representation-of-nature/

"Artistic Representation of Nature." IvyPanda , 5 Nov. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/artistic-representation-of-nature/.

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Friday essay: in defence of beauty in art

Senior Lecturer, Art History and Visual Culture, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Robert Wellington receives funding from Australian Research Council. Material in this article was first presented as the Australian National University 2017 Last Lecture.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Art critics and historians have a difficult time dealing with beauty. We are trained from early on that the analysis of a work of art relies on proof, those things that we can point to as evidence. The problem with beauty is that it’s almost impossible to describe. To describe the beauty of an object is like trying to explain why something’s funny — when it’s put into words, the moment is lost.

Works of art need not be beautiful for us to consider them important. We need only think of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade” urinal that he flipped on its side, signed with a false name, and submitted to the exhibition of the newly founded Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. We’d have a hard time considering this object beautiful, but it is widely accepted to be one of most important works of Western art from the last century.

To call something beautiful is not a critical assertion, so it’s deemed of little value to an argument that attempts to understand the morals, politics, and ideals of human cultures past and present. To call something beautiful is not the same as calling it an important work of art. As a philosopher might say, beauty is not a necessary condition of the art object.

And yet, it is often the beauty we perceive in works of art from the past or from another culture that makes them so compelling. When we recognise the beauty of an object made or selected by another person we understand that maker/selector as a feeling subject who shared with us an ineffable aesthetic experience. When we find something beautiful we become aware of our mutual humanity.

Take, for example, the extraordinary painting Yam awely by Emily Kam Kngwarry in our national collection. Like so many Indigenous Australians, Kngwarry has evoked her deep spiritual and cultural connection to the lands that we share through some of the most intensely beautiful objects made by human hands.

In her work we can trace the lines of the brush, the wet-on-wet blend of colours intuitively selected, the place of the artist’s body as she moved about the canvas to complete her design. We can uncover her choices—the mix of predetermination and instinct of a maker in the flow of creation.

It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason. It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that works of art ought to be beautiful. What I want to defend is our felt experience of beauty as way of knowing and navigating the world around us.

The aesthete as radical

The aesthete — a much maligned figure of late-19th and early-20th century provides a fascinating insight on this topic. Aesthetes have had a bad rap. To call someone an aesthete is almost an insult. It suggests that they are frivolous, vain, privileged, and affected. But I would like to reposition aesthetes as radical, transgressive figures, who challenged the very foundations of the conservative culture in which they lived, though an all-consuming love of beautiful things.

Oscar Wilde was, perhaps, the consummate Aesthete - famed as much for his wit as for his foppish dress and his love of peacock feathers, sun flowers and objets d’art. His often-quoted comment “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china” has been noted as a perfect summary of the aesthete’s vacuous nature.

For Wilde and his followers, the work of art — whether it be a poem, a book, a play, a piece of music, a painting, a dinner plate, or a carpet — should only be judged on the grounds of beauty. They considered it an utterly vulgar idea that art should serve any other purpose.

Over time, the term “aesthete” began to take on new meanings as a euphemism for the effete Oxford intellectual. Men like Wilde were an open threat to acceptable gender norms—the pursuit of beauty, both in the adoration of beautiful things, and in the pursuit of personal appearances, was deemed unmanly. It had long been held that men and women approached the world differently. Men were rational and intellectual; women emotional and irrational.

These unfortunate stereotypes are very familiar to us, and they play both ways. When a woman is confident and intellectual she is sometimes deemed unfeminine. When she is emotional and empathic, she is at risk of being called hysterical. Likewise, a man who works in the beauty industry — a make-up artist, fashion designer, hairdresser, or interior designer — might be mocked for being effete and superficial. We only need to look to the tasteless comments made about Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson to see evidence of that today.

By the 1880s, many caricatures were published of a flamboyant Wilde as a cultivated aesthete. One cartoon from the Washington Post lampooned the aesthete with a reference to Charles Darwin’s controversial theory of evolution. How far is the aesthete from the ape, it asked. Here the pun relies on a comparison made between the irrational ape — Darwin’s original human — and Wilde the frivolous aesthete.

The aesthete was a dangerous combination of male privilege, class privilege, and female sensibility. The queerness of aesthetes like Wilde was dangerously transgressive, and the pursuit of beauty provided a zone in which to challenge the heteronormative foundations of conservative society, just as Darwin’s radical theories had challenged Christian beliefs of the origins of humankind.

Wilde’s legacy was continued by a new generation of young aristocrats at a time of cultural crises between the two World Wars. The Bright Young Things, as they were called, were the last bloom of a dying plant — the last generation of British aristocrats to lead a life of unfettered leisure before so many were cut down in their prime by the war that permanently altered the economic structure of Britain.

Stephen Tennant was the brightest of the Bright Young Things. He was the youngest son of a Scottish peer, a delicate and sickly child whose recurrent bouts of lung disease lent him a thin, delicate, consumptive and romantic appearance.

Stephen was immortalised as the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s character of the frivolous Oxford Aesthete who carries around his teddy bear, Aloysius, and dotes on his Nanny, borrows these characteristics from Stephen — who kept a plush monkey as a constant companion right up until his death.

Waugh’s book is a powerful meditation on art, beauty and faith. The narrator, Charles Ryder, is thought to have been loosely based on Tennant’s close friend, the painter/illustrator Rex Whistler, the aesthete-artist who tragically died on his first day of engagement in the Second World War.

Through the character of Charles, Waugh grapples with the dilemma of beauty vs erudition. Visiting Brideshead, the magnificent country estate of Sebastian’s family, Charles is keen to learn its history and to train his eye. He asks his host, “Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.” Sebastian replies: “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” Sebastian gives the aesthete’s response, that a work of art or architecture should be judged on aesthetic merit alone.

I’m not suggesting that we should all drop what we’re doing and quit our jobs to pursue an uncompromising pursuit of beauty. But I do think we can learn something from the aesthete’s approach to life.

Aesthetes like Wilde and Tennant, cushioned by their privilege, transgressed the accepted norms of their gender to pursue a life not governed by reason but by feeling. This is a radical challenge to our logocentric society; a challenge to a world that often privileges a rational (masculine) perspective that fails to account for our deeply felt experience of the world around us.

How, then, to judge works of art?

How, then, should the art critic proceed today when beauty counts for so little in the judgement of works of art?

The unsettling times in which we live lead us to question the ethics of aesthetics. What happens when we find an object beautiful that was produced by a person or in a culture that we judge to be immoral or unjust?

I often encounter this problem with works of art produced for the French court in the 17th and 18th century – the period I study.

Last year, when I took a group through the exhibition Versailles: Treasures from the Palace at the National Gallery of Australia, one student was particularly repulsed by Sèvres porcelain made for members of the Court of French king Louis XV . For her, it was impossible to like those dishes and bowls, because she felt they represented the extraordinary inequity of Old Regime France – these exquisitely refined objects were produced at the expense of the suffering poor, she thought.

I suppose that might be true, but I can’t help it – I find this porcelain irresistibly beautiful.

The vibrant bleu-celeste glaze, the playful rhythm of ribbons and garlands of flowers, those delicate renderings painted by hand with the tiniest of brushes. It is the beauty of such objects that compels me to learn more about them.

When it was first made, Sèvres porcelain demonstrated the union of science and art. We are meant to marvel at the chemistry and artistry required to transform minerals, metal and clay into a sparkling profusion of decoration. This porcelain was the material embodiment of France as an advanced and flourishing nation.

You might well argue that the politics of 18th-century porcelain is bad. But our instinctual perception of beauty precedes the reasoned judgement of art.

The artists and makers at the Sèvres factory were responding to the human capacity to perceive beauty. These objects were designed to engage our aesthetic sensibilities.

Works of art don’t have to be beautiful, but we must acknowledge that aesthetic judgement plays a large part in the reception of art. Beauty might not be an objective quality in the work of art, nor is it a rational way for us to argue for the cultural importance of an object. It’s not something we can teach, and perhaps it’s not something you can learn.

But when it comes down to it, our ability to perceive beauty is often what makes a work of art compelling. It is a feeling that reveals a pure moment of humanity that we share with the maker, transcending time and place.

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• Oscar Wilde

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6 What Makes Nature Beautiful?

Elizabeth Scarbrough

Introduction

As you have read in this volume, much of contemporary aesthetics focuses on the nature of art and artworks. The aesthetics of nature as a subdiscipline of analytic philosophical aesthetics gained prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. [1] Discussions about the aesthetics of nature are complicated by questions about the scope of the topic: Are we talking about natural objects? Natural environments? Whole ecosystems? What about human-created natural environments such as gardens, parks, and cityscapes? Exactly what counts as natural beauty?

In what follows I will present a brief overview of different theories of the beauty of nature. I will start by discussing two historical accounts that I believe have most impacted our current conception of the beauty in nature: the picturesque and the sublime. I will then turn to a discussion of contemporary accounts of the beauty of nature, dividing these accounts into conceptual accounts, non-conceptual accounts, and hybrid accounts of nature appreciation.

Historical Accounts of the beauty of nature

Anthropocentric accounts: the picturesque and landscape aesthetics.

The picturesque is an aesthetic category often applied to the aesthetic appreciation of nature. It was popularised toward the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. [2] At the core of the notion of the picturesque is the prospect of converting natural scenes into pictures. This “landscape aesthetic” assumes that one ought to employ a mode of aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment that is informed by the practice, and aesthetic criteria of, landscape painting. Eighteenth-century landscape painters used devices such as the “Claude-glass” to help “frame” the scene they wished to paint. These Claude-glasses became so popular in the eighteenth century that travelers and other flâneurs would use them without any intention to paint the vistas they saw. [3] While there were many disparate understandings of the picturesque during this time period, I will mention two seminal figures: Sir Uvedale Price (1747–1829) and Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824). [4] Price argues that the picturesque was an objective aesthetic quality that resided in the object (Ross 1998, 133). Price believes that the picturesque could be defined through its “roughness, sudden variation, irregularity, intricacy and variety,” and his list of picturesque objects included: water, trees, buildings, ruins, dogs, sheep, horses, birds of prey, women, music, and painting. In contrast, Knight thinks that the picturesque was a mode of association found within the viewer and thus any object could be picturesque. These associations, he believes, would only be available to those who had knowledge of landscape paintings:

This very relation to painting expressed by the word picturesque, is that which affords the whole pleasure derived from association; which can, therefore, only be felt by persons who have correspondent ideas to associate; that is, by persons in a certain degree conversant in that art. Such persons being in the habit of viewing, and receiving pleasure from fine pictures, will naturally feel pleasure in viewing those objects in nature, which have called forth those powers of imitation and embellishment. (Ross 1998, 155–156)

Thus, within the history of the picturesque we see differing ideas about the source of beauty: Is beauty subjective (residing in the perceiver’s mind) or is beauty an objective quality in objects? [5] Whether you believe beauty is subjective or objective, the picturesque is probably still the most popular (mis)conception of the beauty of nature. When we think of a beautiful scene of nature, our ideas are substantially informed by our past experiences with landscape paintings, and now landscape photography.

The sublime

The sublime is another theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. While the first reference to the sublime is in the first century CE (we see hints of its predecessor in Aristotle’s Poetics ), [6] the term really blossomed in eighteenth-century British philosophy. Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1671–1713), third Earl of Shaftesbury (now known simply as Shaftesbury) wrote about the sublime in The Moralist: A Philosophical Rhapsody . While viewing the Alps during his “Grand Tour” he wrote,

Here thoughtless Men, seized with the Newness of such Objects, become thoughtful, and willingly contemplate the incessant Changes of their Earth’s Surface. They see, as in one instant, the Revolutions of past Ages, the fleeting forms of Things, and the Decay even of their own Globe. … The wasted Mountains show them the World itself only as a humble Ruin, and make them think of its approaching Period. (Hussey [1927] 1983, 55–56). [7]

He praises the mountains as sublime, claiming that mountains are the highest order of scenery (Hussey [1927] 1983, 55). The sublime, for Shaftesbury, is not contrary to beauty, but superior to it.

The sublime is bigger, harder, and darker than the picturesque. Unlike the picturesque, whose beauty is aimed to charm, the sublime teaches us something. The two most influential theories of the sublime are those of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

In his Introduction to Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Adam Phillips writes, “Beauty and Sublimity turn out to be the outlaws of rational enquiry. Both are coercive, irresistible, and a species of seduction. The sublime is a rape, Beauty is a lure” (Burke [1757] 2008, xxii). The sublime is dangerous, full of terror. Burke’s sublime can be found in both art and nature. [8] For Burke the sublime exists in degrees, the strongest of which invokes astonishment from the viewer, mingled with a degree of horror (53). Burke claims that the strongest forms of the sublime are usually found in the ideas of eternity and infinity (57). In weaker forms, the sublime’s effects include admiration, reverence and respect (53). Burke states,

Whatever leads to raise in man his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind. And this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates. (46)

When we experience the sublime, we feel as if the human mind has triumphed in the face of terror. This accomplishment is pleasurable, and thus we receive pleasure from what at first started as an unpleasurable experience.

Burke’s influence on Kant’s theory of the sublime cannot be overstated. Like Burke, Kant recognised that in experiencing the sublime, something pleasurable resulted from an experience that could not be called beautiful. Like Burke’s, Kant’s conception of the sublime is tied to notions of awe and respect, and, like Burke’s, Kant’s sublime is found in the infinite. Kant took Burke’s nascent ideas and from them developed a full-fledged theory of the sublime. Unlike Burke, Kant believed that the experience of the sublime resides solely in the minds of people.

Kant distinguishes two different types of the sublime: the mathematical and the dynamical. The paradigmatic example of the mathematical sublime is that of infinity (again, similar to Burke). With the mathematical sublime,

the feeling of the sublime is thus a feeling of displeasure from the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude for the estimation by means of reason, and a pleasure that is thereby aroused at the same time from the correspondence of this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason, insofar as striving from them is never less a law for us. (Kant [1790] 2001, § 27, 5:247).

For Kant, the imagination is the faculty we use to bring perceptions into our mind before we subsume these “intuitions” under concepts. With the mathematical sublime, my mind is incapable of perceiving the magnitude of what I’m witnessing. When I look up at the starry night, my mind cannot comprehend the magnitude of space. While I can’t comprehend the magnitude, I am none the less pleased at my ability to grapple with it. In sum, what Kant is saying here is that we feel displeasure in the fact that we cannot fully comprehend infinity but feel pleasure in the fact that we at least have the ability to try.

Kant’s dynamical sublime involves the recognition of the possible destructive forces in nature, which could result in our death. This recognition, while initially unpleasurable, leads to pleasure since these forces in nature (e.g., storms, winds, earthquakes) “allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature” (Kant [1790] 2001, § 28, 5:261). The experience of the dynamical sublime, then, is an experience of the enormity of nature and our role within it. We feel puny against the forces of nature, but also realise our reason gives us standing.

Now that we have discussed two historical accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature, I turn to more contemporary accounts.

Contemporary Accounts: (a) cognitive, (b) non-cognitive, (c) hybrid

Contemporary accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature start to gain traction around the 1970s. [9] This is no accident as the environmental movement was in full swing. In what follows I will discuss the contemporary accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature in two major camps: the cognitive (or conceptual) camp and the non-cognitive (or non-conceptual) camp. Loosely speaking, cognitive theories are those that emphasise the centrality of knowledge in the appreciation of natural beauty. These theories come in many flavours, but many of them (e.g., the theories of Carlson, Rolston, and Eaton [10] ) focus on the use of scientific categories in nature appreciation. Allen Carlson’s Natural Environmental Model (NEM) is a paradigmatic example of a cognitivist theory of the aesthetics of natural environments. For Carlson, the key to appreciating nature aesthetically is to appreciate it through our scientific knowledge. Carlson’s NEM borrows Paul Ziff’s notion of aspection (Ziff 1966, 71). Aspection (seeing the object first this way, then that) provides guidelines or boundaries for our aesthetic experiences and judgments of certain art objects. Different artworks have different boundaries, which will yield different acts of aspection. For example, while many paintings can be viewed from one location, other works of art (e.g., sculpture, architecture) require you to walk through space. Thus, painting and sculpture require different acts of aspection.

Drawing upon the insights of Ziff (and others such as Kendall Walton, [11] ) Carlson argues that the proper aesthetic appreciation of nature involves acts of aspection through the lens (or category) of scientific knowledge. [12] Just as knowledge of the art’s kind (e.g., opera, painting, sculpture) informs our appreciation, scientific information about nature informs our aesthetic appreciation of it. Thus, to truly appreciate an ecosystem or an object in that system, one must have (some) scientific knowledge in order to employ the appropriate act of aspection. Importantly, one must not treat nature as one would treat art, turning a natural object into an art object, [13] or transforming an experience of an open field into an imagined landscape painting (as theories of the picturesque might). [14] Carlson acknowledges that nature is importantly unframed and as a consequence when we try to frame nature by turning a natural object (e.g., driftwood) into a free standing object, or when one tries to frame nature by experiencing it as if looking through a Claude-glass, one imposes a frame that should not be there. Carlson’s approach is labeled “cognitivist” because it emphasises the importance of cognition in aesthetically appreciating nature well .

Non-Cognitive

Non-cognitive theories are those that emphasise the subjective aesthetic experience of natural beauty and often focus on the role of the imagination. These include theories put forth by various philosophers, including Hepburn (2010), Berleant (1992), Carroll (2004), Godlovitch (1997), and Brady (1998). [15]

Emily Brady presents one such non-cognitivist model in her article “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” Using Carlson’s NEM as a foil against her own account, she argues that basing the aesthetic appreciation of nature on scientific categories is flawed because it is “too constraining as a guide for appreciation of nature qua aesthetic object” (Brady 1998, 158). She provides four core criticisms of Carlson’s scientific approach. First, she asserts that Carlson’s account rests on a faulty analogy: just as aesthetic appreciation of art requires knowledge of art history and criticism to help place art in its correct category, we should use natural history (e.g., geology, biology, physics) to place nature in a correct category. In a (now) famous counterexample to the NEM, recounted by Brady, Noël Carroll raises the worrisome case of the waterfall (Carroll 2004, 95). Carroll asks: What scientific category must we fit a particular waterfall in order to appreciate it aesthetically? If the only category that we need is that of a waterfall, then the NEM need not rely on scientific knowledge at all, but just rely on “common sense.”

Further, Brady argues that even if we grant that scientific knowledge could enrich an aesthetic appreciation of nature, it does not seem essential to aesthetic appreciation. Ecological value, she argues, is—and ought to be—a distinct (while still overlapping) category of value. Perhaps most convincing of Brady’s objections is that the scientific approach is too constraining, since proper aesthetic appreciation of nature requires “freedom, flexibility, and creativity” (Brady 1998, 159). We should have the freedom to explore trains of thought not related to scientific categories. When looking at the weathered bark on a tree, I need not know how it was formed; rather I may make associations between the weathered tree bark and the beauty of a beloved older relative’s face—the ravines in both adding a beautiful texture to the surface. She believes that the aesthetic appreciation of nature ought to use perceptual and imaginative capacities, such as those exemplified in my tree bark/relative example. [16] Brady claims that the most desirable model of aesthetic appreciation of nature will: (a) be able to distinguish aesthetic value from other types of value, (b) provide a structure to make aesthetic judgments which are not merely subjective, and (c) solve the problem of how to guide the aesthetic appreciation of nature without reference to art models.

Criticisms of this “imaginative approach” focus on the possibility of an unfettered imagination producing absurd trains of aesthetic inquiry. For example, one might look at the ripple pattern reflecting on the water of a lake and imagine that the ripples look like the ridges of the potato chips you recently cut out of your diet. From here you begin a train of thought which leads you to worry about processed food, factory farming, and fad diets. This seems like an unproductive, and unaesthetic, train of thought. To combat this “unfettered imagination” worry, Brady gives us some guidelines to prevent self-indulgence and irrelevant trains of thought. She believes the Kantian notion of disinterestedness can help prevent the sort of train of thought I just rehearsed. [17] Further Brady gives us guidelines for what she calls “imagining well.” She believes “imagining well” should be thought of like an Aristotelian virtue: it is acquired only through practice and only becomes a virtue once it is a matter of habit. This is a non-conceptual model of aesthetic appreciation in that it does not rely on previous concepts of art or nature for deep aesthetic appreciation.

If imagining well is like an Aristotelian virtue, then there should be a developing capacity on the part of the aesthetic participant to know when to employ scientific categories and when not to. Surely, sometimes focusing on scientific categories can cut aesthetic pleasure off at the knees.

An example of this phenomenon can be seen in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi :

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book–a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.  . . . In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter. . . . I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river. . . .The sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights. . . . No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. (Twain [1883] 1984, 94–96)

This much-discussed example shows that knowledge sometimes precludes aesthetic appreciation. Turning to another example, as a flute player I am aware of passages that are particularly hard to play. One reason for their difficulty is the lack of a natural stopping place to take a quick breath. Whenever I hear another flute player perform one of such pieces, I am on the edge of my seat, anticipating when he or she will take a breath. The in-depth knowledge about the piece precludes my appreciating the overall sound of the music. Instead, I find myself focusing on the technical ability of the artists. According to Brady, I am not appropriately disinterested in this instance. If that’s the case, then almost any amount of expert knowledge (including scientific knowledge) could preclude aesthetic appreciation. Is there a happy middle ground?

Hybrid Accounts: Can We Marry Cognitive and Non-Cognitive accounts to get the best of both worlds?

Perhaps instead of aiming for a uniform experience, we should be aiming for experiences that are aesthetically meaningful and reward our attention and efforts. In other words, we should allow for the co-recognition of a variety of experiences rather than defending one account of meaning over another when it is possible to countenance them all. In his book Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts , Ronald Moore (2007) details a pluralist model of aesthetic appreciation. Moore argues that the appropriate way to aesthetically appreciate nature is syncretic: rather than using any one particular model, we should draw from multiple models. This syncretic way of appreciating nature re-integrates our appreciation of natural objects and artworks. Moore insists that we “approach the qualities of things we think worthy of admiration in nature through lenses we have developed for thinking of aesthetic qualities at large—not art, not literature, not music, not politics, not urban planning, not landscape design, but all of these and more” (2007, 216). If the goal of our aesthetic appreciation is to use those parts of our intelligent awareness that suit the object, then this model can include all modes of aesthetic appreciation.

But while such a model enables us to explore many modes of appreciation, it does not tell us what modes of appreciation are relevant to which objects. Some might see this as a weakness of the syncretic account, but one might also argue that the charm of the syncretic model is that it challenges us to come up with specific accounts of appreciation for different types of objects.

One might worry that different modes of appreciation might preclude one another. When Moore declares that syncretism is “the Unitarianism of aesthetics” (2007, 39), a precocious deist might ask if one can be both Jewish and Buddhist, both Jesuit and Bahá’í? In my view, some models are not only compatible, but also ampliative. For example, non-cognitive models of the appreciation of natural beauty that focus on “trains of ideas” or “associations,” may be informed by more cognitive models such as Carlson’s NEM. [18] Scientific information about an object of delectation can spur more interesting, and perhaps, more productive trains of thought. If we know that a particular flower blooms but once a year, that scientific information can be utilised to ground a fruitful aesthetic experience.

But some models might be incommensurable; it might be impossible to employ two models at the same time, to have two experiences of appreciation at the same time. In this scenario we might decide to alternate between two different modes of appreciation. Take, for example, the film critic. Film critics often watch movies twice: once to allow themselves to enjoy the film—to immerse themselves, and the second time to focus on technical aspects of the production with an eye toward their criticism. The “technical” mode and the “immersion” mode might very well be incompatible, but one might be able to switch off and on between the two. If this is the case, there is nothing stopping me from having one experience after the other as the appreciation unfolds throughout time. These multiple avenues for aesthetic pleasure favor a syncretic model, or pluralist model, of aesthetic appreciation. We must draw upon whatever models we have at our disposal, including conceptual as well as non-conceptual models, artistic as well as natural models, historical and contemporary models alike.

In this chapter we examined some of the historical underpinnings of our appreciation of nature, namely the British Picturesque and the sublime. We then discussed cognitive, non-cognitive, and hybrid accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. What I hope to have shown is that there is no one-principle-fits-all solution for all aesthetic experiences of nature. An immersive experience river rafting will be different from birdwatching. Knowledge in some cases will add depth to our aesthetic experiences, while in other cases will impede our ability to appreciate. We should thus embrace a pluralistic model of aesthetic engagement, one that allows us to employ different models to different objects—or different models at different times in our life. The appropriate response to nature, for the sublime, is awe and humility. This might be instructive for me at a particular time in my life. At another time, the NEM might allow me to gain access to experiences of unscenic nature otherwise inaccessible through other models (such as the picturesque).

I would like to leave you with one final thought: we need not go to a National Park to engage with nature. We live in nature and are part of it. It is accessible to us in the trees that line our streets, the urban animals who forage for scraps in our trash bins, and in the sunsets we watch through our car windshield on our commute home. The beauty of nature surrounds us and is available to all—free of charge.

Alison, Archibald. 1790. Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste . London: J.J.G and G. Robinson.

Berleant, Arnold. 1992. The Aesthetics of Environments . Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Brady, Emily. 1998. “Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring): 139–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/432252. Reprinted in Carlson and Berleant 2004.

Burke, Edmund. (1757) 2008. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carlson, Allen. 1979. “Appreciation and the Natural Environment.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37, no. 3 (Spring): 267–275.

Carlson, Allen, and Arnold Berleant, eds. 2004. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments . Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Carroll, Noël. 2004. “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History.” In The Aesthetics of Natural Environments , edited by Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press.

Dewey, John. (1934) 2005. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee Books.

Eaton, Marcia Mulder. 2004. “Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” In Carlson and Berleant, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, 170–181.

Gilpin, William. (1768) 2010. “An Essay upon Prints, Containing Remarks upon the Principles of picturesque Beauty.” In Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale ECCO, Print Editions.

Godlovitch, Stan. 1997. “Carlson on Appreciation.” S. Godlovitch and A. Carlson Debate 55 (Winter): 53–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/431604 .

Hepburn, Ronald. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Sky and Space.” Environmental Values 19, no. 3: 273–288. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327110X519835 .

Hussey, Christopher. (1927) 1983. The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View . London: F. Cass.

Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgment . Translated by Paul Guyer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Marsh, George Perkins. (1865) 2018. Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Moore, Ronald. 2007. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts . Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Muir, John. 1894. The Mountains of California . New York: Century Co.

Rolston III, Holmes. 2004. “The Aesthetic Experience of Forest.” In Carlson and Berleant, The Aesthetics of Natural Environments , 182–195.

Ross, Stephanie. 1998. What Gardens Mean . Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper). (1709) 2010. The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody. Being a Recital of Certain Conversations upon Natural and Moral Subjects. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale ECCO, Print Editions.

Thoreau, Henry D. (1862) 2012. October, or Autumnal Tints . Illustrated by Lincoln Perry. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Twain, Mark. (1883) 1984. Life on the Mississippi . New York: Penguin.

Walton, Kendall L. 1970. “Categories of Art.” The Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (July 1): 334–67. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183933 .

Ziff, Paul. 1966. Philosophical Turnings: Essays in Conceptual Appreciation . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• Ronald Hepburn’s 1966 article, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” is a good place to start and a must-read for anyone interested in the topic. This essay, and many others I discuss in this chapter, can be found in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant’s edited volume, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Carlson and Berleant 2004). ↵
• The term seems to have first appeared in 1768, in an essay by Rev. William Gilpin (1724–1804) entitled, “An Essay Upon Prints,” where Gilpin defined the picturesque simply as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture” ([1768] 2010, xii). ↵
• Allen Carlson, whose Natural Environmental Model we will discuss in the next section, has noted that if we are to adhere to the landscape cult’s practice of viewing the environment as a landscape painting, we are essentially forced to see the natural environment as static and as a mere two-dimensional representation. This leads us to have an incomplete and shallow aesthetic engagement with the natural environment. ↵
• While I will discuss only Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, two other men would be relevant to a longer discussion about the picturesque: William Gilpin and Humphry Repton (1752–1818). ↵
• As we will see in the next section on the sublime, Kant’s theory of judgment places beauty in the minds of the spectator. ↵
• The first reference to the sublime is thought to be Longinus: Peri Hupsous/Hypsous. The sublime was said to inspire awe. Aristotle believed that horrific events (in tragic plays) call upon fear and pity, resulting in a catharsis in the spectator. Elements of this view can be found in many theories of the sublime. ↵
• See also Shaftesbury ([1709] 2010) ↵
• Burke believed that anything that contained one or more of the following attributes could be perceived as sublime: (1) Obscurity, (2) Power, (3), Privation (4), Vastness, (5) Infinity, (6) Succession, (7) Uniformity ([1757] 2008, 61–76). ↵
• Please note that I have skipped over the nineteenth century aesthetics of nature here. In G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) aesthetics, philosophy of art expressed “Absolute Spirit” and nature was relegated to a footnote. Only a handful of Romantic thinkers thought and wrote on the aesthetics of nature, and many of these were in the United States. For a good introduction read Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) “Autumnal Tints” (Thoreau [1862] 2012), George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) ([1865] 2018), and the environmentalist John Muir's (1838–1914) “A View of the High Sierra” (Muir 1894). ↵
• An introduction to Carlson’s cognitive model for the aesthetic appreciation of nature can be found in his “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” (Carlson 1979). For an introduction to Holmes Rolston III’s cognitive model, please see his “The Aesthetic Experience of Forests” (Rolston III 2004). A good introduction to Marcia Muelder Eaton can be found in her “Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature” (Eaton 2004). ↵
• Carlson also draws upon Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” (1970) in which Walton argues that we need art historical information to make well-informed aesthetic judgments. For example, if I were to judge Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Swan” as a failure of minimalist sculpture, I wouldn’t be attending to the properties of “Balloon Swan” which makes it a successful piece of (non-minimalist) contemporary pop sculpture. In order to appreciate “Balloon Swan” appropriately, I must categorise it appropriately. ↵
• While Carlson gives priority to appreciation informed by scientific knowledge, he does acknowledge the role of common sense in our aesthetic appreciation of nature. ↵
• The “object model”—as Carlson calls it—asks the appreciator to take the object out of its natural environment and observe its formal properties such as symmetry, unity, etc. When we do this, we appreciate the natural object as an art object, thus only appreciating a limited set of aesthetic properties, namely those formal properties that we find in art. In rejecting this model, Carlson demands that our appreciation of a natural object requires us to place it in its natural context. For example, we should see the honeycomb as part of the bee life cycle and appreciate the purpose and role it plays in nature. ↵
• The “landscape model” asks us to aesthetically appreciate a natural landscape as we would appreciate the painting or picture of that natural landscape. We are asked to attend to the scenic qualities of the landscape, to appreciate its lines and form. Unlike a painting, which is already presented to us as a framed object, we should likewise frame the landscape. This model reinforces the subject/object distinction, by asking us to place ourselves outside or in opposition to the landscape that we are trying to appreciate. ↵
• Non-cognitive accounts may further be divided into imagination accounts (Brady) and immersion accounts (Berleant). While I focus here on imagination accounts, Berleant’s immersion account is instructive. Berleant argues that the appropriate way to appreciate nature is through engagement; this non-conceptual model (of engagement) correctly emphasises humanity’s continuity with the natural world and nature’s boundlessness where other models do not. ↵
• Brady details four different types of imagination: (i) exploratory, which is the imaginative search for unity in perception, (ii) projective, where we intentionally see something as something else, (iii) ampliative, which moves beyond mere imagination to draw upon other cognitive resources, and (iv) revelatory , where the ampliative imagination has led to the discovery of an aesthetic truth (Brady 1998, 163). ↵
• The First Moment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment tells us that judgments of taste (which are judgments about beauty) are “disinterested.” Kant details a few different ways in which these judgments are disinterested: we must not ask if the object is good (or good for something), we shouldn’t invoke sensations of the agreeable, and we shouldn’t care about the real existence of the object. Let’s take these three forms of interest in turn. First, when looking at something beautiful (let’s say a flower) I shouldn’t care if the flower is good for something (such as being good for medicinal purposes). I shouldn’t also care if the object is morally good. Second, when I make a judgment of beauty, I am not saying that the object is “agreeable” or pleasing to me. Going back to our flower example—Kant doesn’t want us to say something like, “this flower is agreeable to me since it is the kind my mother used to give me when I was sick.” Finally, we shouldn’t care whether or not the object is real. A mirage of a flower and an actual flower should hold the same judgment of beauty. In this sense we are disinterested in whether the object is real or imaginary. ↵
• Those who argue for “associative” models of aesthetic experience might include Archibald Alison (1790), who argues that objects spur “trains of ideas of emotions”; John Dewey’s discussion of “trains of ideas” ([1934] 2005); and Emily Brady on “Imagining Well” (1998). ↵

What Makes Nature Beautiful? Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Scarbrough is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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The Close Connection Between Art And Nature

By Team Mojarto

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his language.

-Henry Matisse

There seems to be a close relationship between nature and art. Nature has become a central theme in many famous artists’ artworks. Nature has proven to be one of the most treasured muses known to man. It provides endless inspiration to artists, where they can bring life to nature in their paintings. Many famous artists like Van Gogh and Monet celebrated nature in their artworks. Nature in art is glorified for its sublime and picturesque manifestation on canvas. It is cherished for its intricacy and beauty. 

Some philosophers including Aristotle lauded that art can mimic nature. It embodies as a true reflection of the artist’s inner soul. Aristotle even once wrote that “Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies”. This can be interpreted as art not only recreating the natural world but also creating new ways in which to see it in another light. In other words, art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. Here’s a look at some beautiful artwork that can mesmerize one’s soul and convey a sense of deeper thoughts and perspectives.

The idea offered by nature is endless. It is seen as a way to appreciate nature and bring out the complex human connection to nature. From time immemorial artists and poets have connected nature to human characteristics and mood. Earlier artists used art as a medium to bring out the spirituality in nature. They portrayed every landscape, flower, and insect with a touch of divinity, which was largely attained by the use o light and shade. Art was also a way to explore the world of nature. It brought out the beauty and importance of nature. Many artists portray nature as realistically as possible, which led to the emergence of many movements surrounding art. 

Photorealism to abstraction, nature is depicted in every art style. Art movements like Tonalism, naturalism, Plein air, Danube school, and Ecological art were based solely on nature and the natural world. 

Landscape Paintings depict natural scenery in art, which is why it is also referred to as nature paintings. Artists have been enamoured by the beauty of nature and have tried to capture nature in all her glory through beautiful landscape paintings. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the Earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes that are also depicted extensively in art, such as moonscapes, skyscapes, seascapes among others.

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• Published: 31 October 2017

The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities

• Remco Roes 1 &
• Kris Pint 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  8 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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What could be the place of artistic research in current contemporary scholarship in the humanities? The following essay addresses this question while using as a case study a collaborative artistic project undertaken by two artists, Remco Roes (Belgium) and Alis Garlick (Australia). We argue that the recent integration of arts into academia requires a hybrid discourse, which has to be distinguished both from the artwork itself and from more conventional forms of academic research. This hybrid discourse explores the whole continuum of possible ways to address our existential relationship with the environment: ranging from aesthetic, multi-sensorial, associative, affective, spatial and visual modes of ‘knowledge’ to more discursive, analytical, contextualised ones. Here, we set out to defend the visual essay as a useful tool to explore the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human culture, both in the still developing field of artistic research and in more established fields of research. It is a genre that enables us to articulate this knowledge, as a transformative process of meaning-making, supplementing other modes of inquiry in the humanities.

Introduction

In Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011), Tim Ingold defines anthropology as ‘a sustained and disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life’ (Ingold, 2011 , p. 9). For Ingold, artistic practice plays a crucial part in this inquiry. He considers art not merely as a potential object of historical, sociological or ethnographic research, but also as a valuable form of anthropological inquiry itself, providing supplementary methods to understand what it is ‘to be human’.

In a similar vein, Mark Johnson’s The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding (2007) offers a revaluation of art ‘as an essential mode of human engagement with and understanding of the world’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 10). Johnson argues that art is a useful epistemological instrument because of its ability to intensify the ordinary experience of our environment. Images Footnote 1 are the expression of our on-going, complex relation with an inner and outer environment. In the process of making images of our environment, different bodily experiences, like affects, emotions, feelings and movements are mobilised in the creation of meaning. As Johnson argues, this happens in every process of meaning-making, which is always based on ‘deep-seated bodily sources of human meaning that go beyond the merely conceptual and propositional’ (Ibid., p. 11). The specificity of art simply resides in the fact that it actively engages with those non-conceptual, non-propositional forms of ‘making sense’ of our environment. Art is thus able to take into account (and to explore) many other different meaningful aspects of our human relationship with the environment and thus provide us with a supplementary form of knowledge. Hence Ingold’s remark in the introduction of Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013): ‘Could certain practices of art, for example, suggest new ways of doing anthropology? If there are similarities between the ways in which artists and anthropologists study the world, then could we not regard the artwork as a result of something like an anthropological study, rather than as an object of such study? […] could works of art not be regarded as forms of anthropology, albeit ‘written’ in non-verbal media?’ (Ingold, 2013 , p. 8, italics in original).

And yet we would hesitate to unreservedly answer yes to these rhetorical questions. For instance, it is true that one can consider the works of Francis Bacon as an anthropological study of violence and fear, or the works of John Cage as a study in indeterminacy and chance. But while they can indeed be seen as explorations of the ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, the artworks themselves do not make this knowledge explicit. What is lacking here is the logos of anthropology, logos in the sense of discourse, a line of reasoning. Therefore, while we agree with Ingold and Johnson, the problem remains how to explicate and communicate the knowledge that is contained within works of art, how to make it discursive ? How to articulate artistic practice as an alternative, yet valid form of scholarly research?

Here, we believe that a clear distinction between art and artistic research is necessary. The artistic imaginary is a reaction to the environment in which the artist finds himself: this reaction does not have to be conscious and deliberate. The artist has every right to shrug his shoulders when he is asked for the ‘meaning’ of his work, to provide a ‘discourse’. He can simply reply: ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I do not want to know’, as a refusal to engage with the step of articulating what his work might be exploring. Likewise, the beholder or the reader of a work of art does not need to learn from it to appreciate it. No doubt, he may have gained some understanding about ‘human existence’ after reading a novel or visiting an exhibition, but without the need to spell out this knowledge or to further explore it.

In contrast, artistic research as a specific, inquisitive mode of dealing with the environment requires an explicit articulation of what is at stake, the formulation of a specific problem that determines the focus of the research. ‘Problem’ is used here in the neutral, etymological sense of the word: something ‘thrown forward’, a ‘hindrance, obstacle’ (cf. probleima , Liddell-Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). A body-in-an-environment finds something thrown before him or her, an issue that grabs the attention. A problem is something that urges us to explore a field of experiences, the ‘potentials of human life’ that are opened up by a work of art. It is often only retroactively, during a second, reflective phase of the artistic research, that a formulation of a problem becomes possible, by a selection of elements that strikes one as meaningful (again, in the sense Johnson defines meaningful, thus including bodily perceptions, movements, affects, feelings as meaningful elements of human understanding of reality). This process opens up, to borrow a term used by Aby Warburg, a ‘Denkraum’ (cf. Gombrich, 1986 , p. 224): it creates a critical distance from the environment, including the environment of the artwork itself: this ‘space for thought’ allows one to consciously explore a specific problem. Consciously here does not equal cerebral: the problem is explored not only in its intellectual, but also in its sensual and emotional, affective aspects. It is projected along different lines in this virtual Denkraum , lines that cross and influence each other: an existential line turns into a line of form and composition; a conceptual line merges into a narrative line, a technical line echoes an autobiographical line. There is no strict hierarchy in the different ‘emanations’ of a problem. These are just different lines contained within the work that interact with each other, and the problem can ‘move’ from one line to another, develop and transform itself along these lines, comparable perhaps to the way a melody develops itself when it is transposed to a different musical scale, a different musical instrument, or even to a different musical genre. But, however, abstract or technical one formulates a problem, following Johnson we argue that a problem is always a translation of a basic existential problem, emerging from a specific environment. We fully agree with Johnson when he argues that ‘philosophy becomes relevant to human life only by reconnecting with, and grounding itself in, bodily dimensions of human meaning and value. Philosophy needs a visceral connection to lived experience’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 263). The same goes for artistic research. It too finds its relevance in the ‘visceral connection’ with a specific body, a specific situation.

Words are one way of disclosing this lived experience, but within the context of an artistic practice one can hardly ignore the potential for images to provide us with an equally valuable account. In fact, they may even prove most suited to establish the kind of space that comes close to this multi-threaded, embodied Denkraum . In order to illustrate this, we would like to present a case study, a short visual ‘essay’ (however, since the scope of four spreads offers only limited space, it is better to consider it as the image-equivalent of a short research note).

Case study: step by step reading of a visual essay

The images (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) form a short visual essay based on a collaborative artistic project 'Exercises of the man (v)' that Remco Roes and Alis Garlick realised for the Situation Symposium at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne in 2014. One of the conceptual premises of the project was the communication of two physical ‘sites’ through digital media. Roes—located in Belgium—would communicate with Garlick—in Australia—about an installation that was to be realised at the physical location of the exhibition in Melbourne. Their attempts to communicate (about) the site were conducted via e-mail messages, Skype-chats and video conversations. The focus of these conversations increasingly distanced itself from the empty exhibition space of the Design Hub and instead came to include coincidental spaces (and objects) that happened to be close at hand during the 3-month working period leading up to the exhibition. The focus of the project thus shifted from attempting to communicate a particular space towards attempting to communicate the more general experience of being in(side) a space. The project led to the production of a series of small in-situ installations, a large series of video’s and images, a book with a selection of these images as well as texts from the conversations, and the final exhibition in which artefacts that were found during the collaborative process were exhibited. A step by step reading of the visual argument contained within images of this project illustrates how a visual essay can function as a tool for disclosing/articulating/communicating the kind of embodied thinking that occurs within an artistic practice or practice-based research.

Figure 1 shows (albeit in reduced form) a field of photographs and video stills that summarises the project without emphasising any particular aspect. Each of the Figs. 2 – 5 isolate different parts of this same field in an attempt to construct/disclose a form of visual argument (that was already contained within the work). In the final part of this essay we will provide an illustration of how such visual sequences can be possibly ‘read’.

First image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Second image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Third image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fourth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Fifth image of the visual essay. Remco Roes and Alis Garlick, as copyright holders, permit the publication of this image under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Figure 1 is a remnant of the first step that was taken in the creation of the series of images: significant, meaningful elements in the work of art are brought together. At first, we quite simply start by looking at what is represented in the pictures, and how they are presented to us. This act of looking almost inevitably turns these images into a sequence, an argument. Conditioned by the dominant linearity of writing, including images (for instance in a comic book) one ‘reads’ the images from left to right, one goes from the first spread to the last. Just like one could say that a musical theme or a plot ‘develops’, the series of images seem to ‘develop’ the problem, gradually revealing its complexity. The dominance of this viewing code is not to be ignored, but is of course supplemented by the more ‘holistic’ nature of visual perception (cf. the notion of ‘Gestalt’ in the psychology of perception). So unlike a ‘classic’ argumentation, the discursive sequence is traversed by resonance, by non-linearity, by correspondences between elements both in a single image and between the images in their specific positioning within the essay. These correspondences reveal the synaesthetic nature of every process of meaning-making: ‘The meaning of something is its relations, actual and potential, to other qualities, things, events, and experiences. In pragmatist lingo, the meaning of something is a matter of how it connects to what has gone before and what it entails for present or future experiences and actions’ (Johnson, 2007 , p. 265). The images operate in a similar way, by bringing together different actions, affects, feelings and perceptions into a complex constellation of meaningful elements that parallel each other and create a field of resonance. These connections occur between different elements that ‘disturb’ the logical linearity of the discourse, for instance by the repetition of a specific element (the blue/yellow opposition, or the repetition of a specific diagonal angle).

Confronted with these images, we are now able to delineate more precisely the problem they express. In a generic sense we could formulate it as follows: how to communicate with someone who does not share my existential space, but is nonetheless visually and acoustically present? What are the implications of the kind of technology that makes such communication possible, for the first time in human history? How does it influence our perception and experience of space, of materiality, of presence?

Artistic research into this problem explores the different ways of meaning-making that this new existential space offers, revealing the different conditions and possibilities of this new spatiality. But it has to be stressed that this exploration of the problem happens on different lines, ranging from the kinaesthetic perception to the emotional and affective response to these spaces and images. It would, thus, be wrong to reduce these experiences to a conceptual framework. In their actions, Roes and Garlick do not ‘make a statement’: they quite simply experiment with what their bodies can do in such a hybrid space, ‘wandering’ in this field of meaningful experiences, this Denkraum , that is ‘opened up’: which meaningful clusters of sensations, affects, feelings, spatial and kinaesthetic qualities emerge in such a specific existential space?

In what follows, we want to focus on some of these meaningful clusters. As such, these comments are not part of the visual essay itself. One could compare them to ‘reading remarks’, a short elaboration on what strikes one as relevant. These comments also do not try to ‘crack the code’ of the visual material, as if they were merely a visual and/or spatial rebus to be solved once and for all (‘ x stands for y’ ). They rather attempt to engage in a dialogue with the images, a dialogue that of course does not claim to be definitive or exhaustive.

The constellation itself generates a sense of ‘lacking’: we see that there are two characters intensely collaborating and interacting with each other, while never sharing the same space. They are performing, or watching the other perform: drawing a line (imaginary or physically), pulling, wrapping, unpacking, watching, framing, balancing. The small arrangements, constructions or compositions that are made as a result of these activities are all very fragile, shaky and their purpose remains unclear. Interaction with the other occurs only virtually, based on the manipulation of small objects and fragments, located in different places. One of the few materials that eventually gets physically exported to the other side, is a kind of large plastic cover. Again, one should not ‘read’ the picture of Roes with this plastic wrapped around his head as an expression, a ‘symbol’ of individual isolation, of being wrapped up in something. It is simply the experience of a head that disappears (as a head appears and disappears on a computer screen when it gets disconnected), and the experience of a head that is covered up: does it feel like choking, or does it provide a sense of shelter, protection?

A different ‘line’ operates simultaneously in the same image: that of a man standing on a double grid: the grid of the wet street tiles and an alternative, oblique grid of colourful yellow elements, a grid which is clearly temporal, as only the grid of the tiles will remain. These images are contrasted with the (obviously staged) moment when the plastic arrives at ‘the other side’: the claustrophobia is now replaced with the openness of the horizon, the presence of an open seascape: it gives a synaesthetic sense of a fresh breeze that seems lacking in the other images.

In this case, the contrast between the different spaces is very clear, but in other images we also see an effort to unite these different spaces. The problem can now be reformulated, as it moves to another line: how to demarcate a shared space that is both actual and virtual (with a ribbon, the positioning of a computer screen?), how to communicate with each other, not only with words or body language, but also with small artefacts, ‘meaningless’ junk? What is the ‘common ground’ on which to walk, to exchange things—connecting, lining up with the other? And here, the layout of the images (into a spread) adds an extra dimension to the original work of art. The relation between the different bodies does now not only take place in different spaces, but also in different fields of representation: there is the space of the spread, the photographed space and in the photographs, the other space opened up by the computer screen, and the interaction between these levels. We see this in the Fig. 3 where Garlick’s legs are projected on the floor, framed by two plastic beakers: her black legging echoing with the shadows of a chair or a tripod. This visual ‘rhyme’ within the image reveals how a virtual presence interferes with what is present.

The problem, which can be expressed in this fundamental opposition between presence/absence, also resonates with other recurring oppositions that rhythmically structure these images. The images are filled with blue/yellow elements: blue lines of tape, a blue plexi form, yellow traces of paint, yellow objects that are used in the video’s, but the two tones are also conjured up by the white balance difference between daylight and artificial light. The blue/yellow opposition, in turn, connects with other meaningful oppositions, like—obviously—male/female, or the same oppositional set of clothes: black trousers/white shirt, grey scale images versus full colour, or the shadow and the bright sunlight, which finds itself in another opposition with the cold electric light of a computer screen (this of course also refers to the different time zones, another crucial aspect of digital communication: we do not only not share the same place, we also do not share the same time).

Yet the images also invite us to explore certain formal and compositional elements that keep recurring. The second image, for example, emphasises the importance placed in the project upon the connecting of lines, literally of lining up. Within this image the direction and angle of these lines is ‘explained’ by the presence of the two bodies, the makers with their roles of tape in hand. But upon re-reading the other spreads through this lens of ‘connecting lines’ we see that this compositional element starts to attain its own visual logic. Where the lines in image 2 are literally used as devices to connect two (visual) realities, they free themselves from this restricted context in the other images and show us the influence of circumstance and context in allowing for the successful establishing of such a connection.

In Fig. 3 , for instance, we see a collection of lines that have been isolated from the direct context of live communication. The way two parts of a line are manually aligned (in the split-screens in image 2) mirrors the way the images find their position on the page. However, we also see how the visual grammar of these lines of tape is expanded upon: barrier tape that demarcates a working area meets the curve of a small copper fragment on the floor of an installation, a crack in the wall follows the slanted angle of an assembled object, existing marks on the floor—as well as lines in the architecture—come into play. The photographs widen the scale and angle at which the line operates: the line becomes a conceptual form that is no longer merely material tape but also an immaterial graphical element that explores its own argument.

Figure 4 provides us with a pivotal point in this respect: the cables of the mouse, computer and charger introduce a certain fluidity and uncontrolled motion. Similarly, the erratic markings on the paper show that an author is only ever partially in control. The cracked line in the floor is the first line that is created by a negative space, by an absence. This resonates with the black-stained edges of the laser-cut objects, laid out on the desktop. This fourth image thus seems to transform the manifestation of the line yet again; from a simple connecting device into an instrument that is able to cut out shapes, a path that delineates a cut, as opposed to establishing a connection. The circle held up in image 4 is a perfect circular cut. This resonates with the laser-cut objects we see just above it on the desk, but also with the virtual cuts made in the Photoshop image on the right. We can clearly see how a circular cut remains present on the characteristic grey-white chessboard that is virtual emptiness. It is evident that these elements have more than just an aesthetic function in a visual argumentation. They are an integral part of the meaning-making process. They ‘transpose’ on a different level, i.e., the formal and compositional level, the central problem of absence and presence: it is the graphic form of the ‘cut’, as well as the act of cutting itself, that turns one into the other.

Concluding remarks

As we have already argued, within the frame of this comment piece, the scope of the visual essay we present here is inevitably limited. It should be considered as a small exercise in a specific genre of thinking and communicating with images that requires further development. Nonetheless, we hope to have demonstrated the potentialities of the visual essay as a form of meaning-making that allows the articulation of a form of embodied knowledge that supplements other modes of inquiry in the humanities. In this particular case, it allows for the integration of other meaningful, embodied and existential aspects of digital communication, unlikely to be ‘detected’ as such by an (auto)ethnographic, psychological or sociological framework.

The visual essay is an invitation to other researchers in the arts to create their own kind of visual essays in order to address their own work of art or that of others: they can consider their artistic research as a valuable contribution to the exploration of human existence that lies at the core of the humanities. But perhaps it can also inspire scholars in more ‘classical’ domains to introduce artistic research methods to their toolbox, as a way of taking into account the non-conceptual, yet meaningful bodily aspects of human life and human artefacts, this ‘visceral connection to lived experience’, as Johnson puts it.

Obviously, a visual essay runs the risk of being ‘shot by both sides’: artists may scorn the loss of artistic autonomy and ‘exploitation’ of the work of art in the service of scholarship, while academic scholars may be wary of the lack of conceptual and methodological clarity inherent in these artistic forms of embodied, synaesthetic meaning. The visual essay is indeed a bastard genre, the unlawful love (or perhaps more honestly: love/hate) child of academia and the arts. But precisely this hybrid, impure nature of the visual essay allows it to explore unknown ‘conditions and potentials of human life’, precisely because it combines imagination and knowledge. And while this combination may sound like an oxymoron within a scientific, positivistic paradigm, it may in fact indicate the revival, in a new context, of a very ancient alliance. Or as Giorgio Agamben formulates it in Infancy and history: on the destruction of experience (2007 [1978]): ‘Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged from knowledge as ‘unreal’, was the supreme medium of knowledge. As the intermediary between the senses and the intellect, enabling, in phantasy, the union between the sensible form and the potential intellect, it occupies in ancient and medieval culture exactly the same role that our culture assigns to experience. Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis , and is, indeed, the condition of their communication—that is to say, of knowledge’ (Agamben, 2007 , p. 27, italics in original).

And it is precisely this exploration of the mundus imaginabilis that should inspire us to understand artistic research as a valuable form of scholarship in the humanities.

We consider images as a broad category consisting of artefacts of the imagination, the creation of expressive ‘forms’. Images are thus not limited to visual images. For instance, the imagery used in a poem or novel, metaphors in philosophical treatises (‘image-thoughts’), actual sculptures or the imaginary space created by a performance or installation can also be considered as images, just like soundscapes, scenography, architecture.

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Roes, R., Pint, K. The visual essay and the place of artistic research in the humanities. Palgrave Commun 3 , 8 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0004-5

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Intimate Landscape Photography from Northern California & Western United States.

Human/Nature — A photo essay

People love to love nature. We go through great expense and trouble to leave our cities and put ourselves into natural environments where we can enjoy these beautiful places. In this photographic project, “Human/Nature,” I explore the relationship between people and the landscapes we love.

Throughout history, our aesthetic for the landscape has evolved. For example, during the mid-17th century, Europeans considered the wilderness to be ugly and unbridled. Travelers passing through mountainous and untamed landscapes during those times pulled the drapes closed in the carriages so as to not offend their eyes. The most admired landscapes in those times were fertile pastures.

These days, humans are more enamored with the wilderness. Many people treasure these wild places and fight fiercely to protect them. We go on safaris, flock to national parks, and take our children to zoos. However, do we regard ourselves as part of nature, or is nature something to be consumed?

About the photographs

In this photographic series, the landscape remains motionless in relationship to the people buzzing through it. Using some photographic magic, I hold a up mirror so we can see how we look as we interact with the natural places we love. Lines are blurred between human and nature. And, while the landscape is still and unmoving, people appear as ghosts in the scene, as if Mother Nature knows that our place here on this planet is transient.

I made the first three photographs in Yosemite National Park, one of the most popular parks in the USA. People travel from around the globe to see this breathtakingly beautiful place. Yet, most visitors rarely stray far from the pavement.

In the fourth photograph, made at a lesser known Northern California waterfall, a woman pauses momentarily to touch the cool water falling from high above — an intimate connection with nature is made.

About the prints

These prints are available as limited editions, carefully crafted one-by-one in my studio and shipped directly to you from me. They are made using the finest archival materials available, and rated to last 250 years if stored under glass and out of direct sunlight. You can see purchasing options on my website, https://www.charlottegibb.com/human-nature .

charlottegibb

Charlotte Gibb is a contemporary fine art photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area specializing in landscapes of the Western United States. Her images are often taken in familiar places for the well-versed landscape photographer, but she prides herself on her keen eye toward the subtle and sometimes overlooked beauty of the natural world. Growing up among the beautiful mountains of Northern California, she considers herself a student of life, learning about people, nature, music, and photography along the way. But always, her life-long passion for the wilderness shines through it all. Charlotte earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has exhibited her work in several solo shows throughout California. Her darkroom, long gone now, has been replaced with digital darkroom tools, and her style has evolved from a somewhat journalistic approach, to one that pays tribute to the natural world. 

Yosemite Renaissance 35

A New Way of Being: Sheltering in Place

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Charlotte, I love this series. I want to see many many more. I also love the idea of this series as a way to shed light on your question you posed relating to our relationship with the wilderness. I think it is unfortunate that many people now see it as something to be consumed, but I guess its hard to expect less in our current economic culture.

I struggle with this concept, Matt. I realize that I am also part of the problem. As a photographer, am I not also “consuming” the landscape in a way? Isn’t it interesting now, as we all collectively sit at home to “shelter in place,” that the planet is starting to have cleaner air and water? It is as if the Earth is getting a much needed breather.

The saddest thing is, people cannot have a relationship with wilderness while present in quantity. An essential aspect of wilderness is the absence of people; therefore I think wilderness can only be experienced by a person when that person is alone. This is now very very difficult to achieve.

So very true. There are just too many of us on this planet.

Nature Essay for Students and Children

500+ words nature essay.

Nature is an important and integral part of mankind. It is one of the greatest blessings for human life; however, nowadays humans fail to recognize it as one. Nature has been an inspiration for numerous poets, writers, artists and more of yesteryears. This remarkable creation inspired them to write poems and stories in the glory of it. They truly valued nature which reflects in their works even today. Essentially, nature is everything we are surrounded by like the water we drink, the air we breathe, the sun we soak in, the birds we hear chirping, the moon we gaze at and more. Above all, it is rich and vibrant and consists of both living and non-living things. Therefore, people of the modern age should also learn something from people of yesteryear and start valuing nature before it gets too late.

Significance of Nature

Nature has been in existence long before humans and ever since it has taken care of mankind and nourished it forever. In other words, it offers us a protective layer which guards us against all kinds of damages and harms. Survival of mankind without nature is impossible and humans need to understand that.

If nature has the ability to protect us, it is also powerful enough to destroy the entire mankind. Every form of nature, for instance, the plants , animals , rivers, mountains, moon, and more holds equal significance for us. Absence of one element is enough to cause a catastrophe in the functioning of human life.

We fulfill our healthy lifestyle by eating and drinking healthy, which nature gives us. Similarly, it provides us with water and food that enables us to do so. Rainfall and sunshine, the two most important elements to survive are derived from nature itself.

Further, the air we breathe and the wood we use for various purposes are a gift of nature only. But, with technological advancements, people are not paying attention to nature. The need to conserve and balance the natural assets is rising day by day which requires immediate attention.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conservation of Nature

In order to conserve nature, we must take drastic steps right away to prevent any further damage. The most important step is to prevent deforestation at all levels. Cutting down of trees has serious consequences in different spheres. It can cause soil erosion easily and also bring a decline in rainfall on a major level.

Polluting ocean water must be strictly prohibited by all industries straightaway as it causes a lot of water shortage. The excessive use of automobiles, AC’s and ovens emit a lot of Chlorofluorocarbons’ which depletes the ozone layer. This, in turn, causes global warming which causes thermal expansion and melting of glaciers.

Therefore, we should avoid personal use of the vehicle when we can, switch to public transport and carpooling. We must invest in solar energy giving a chance for the natural resources to replenish.

In conclusion, nature has a powerful transformative power which is responsible for the functioning of life on earth. It is essential for mankind to flourish so it is our duty to conserve it for our future generations. We must stop the selfish activities and try our best to preserve the natural resources so life can forever be nourished on earth.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [ { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “Why is nature important?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Nature is an essential part of our lives. It is important as it helps in the functioning of human life and gives us natural resources to lead a healthy life.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How can we conserve nature?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “We can take different steps to conserve nature like stopping the cutting down of trees. We must not use automobiles excessively and take public transport instead. Further, we must not pollute our ocean and river water.” } } ] }

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Essay on Art Is Not Nature

Students are often asked to write an essay on Art Is Not Nature in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Art Is Not Nature

Understanding art and nature.

Art and nature are two separate entities. Art is a creation of human beings while nature is a creation of God. Art is a way for humans to express their thoughts, emotions, and ideas. Nature, on the other hand, is an expression of the divine.

The Role of Humans

Humans play a significant role in art. They use their creativity and imagination to create art. They can control every aspect of it. In nature, humans are just observers. They can admire and study nature, but they cannot control or change it.

Imitation and Inspiration

Art often imitates nature. Artists get inspired by the beauty of nature and try to capture it in their works. But no matter how realistic the art is, it can never be the same as nature. It is always an interpretation, not a replication.

Art’s Limitations

Art has its limitations. It can only capture a moment or a specific aspect of nature. Nature, on the other hand, is limitless. It is ever-changing and full of surprises. Art can never match the complexity and diversity of nature.

In conclusion, art is not nature. It is a human creation inspired by nature. It has its beauty and value, but it should not be confused with nature. Nature is a divine creation that is far beyond human control and understanding.

250 Words Essay on Art Is Not Nature

Art and nature are two different things. Nature is everything that surrounds us. It includes trees, mountains, rivers, animals, and more. Art, on the other hand, is something humans create. It can be a painting, a song, a dance, or a sculpture.

Art plays a big role in our lives. It allows us to express our feelings and thoughts. We can show our happiness, sadness, anger, or love through art. It can also help us to understand the world better. For example, a painting of a war can make us think about peace.

Nature’s Role

Nature also plays a big role in our lives. It gives us food, water, air, and shelter. It is essential for our survival. Nature is also a source of beauty. We can enjoy the beauty of a sunset, a flower, or a mountain. We can also learn from nature. For example, we can learn about the cycle of life from a tree.

Art Is Not Nature

While art and nature both play important roles in our lives, art is not nature. Art is a product of human creativity. It is made by humans. Nature, on the other hand, is not made by humans. It exists on its own. We can use art to reflect nature, but it can never be nature itself. For example, a painting of a tree can never be a real tree.

In conclusion, art and nature are both important but they are not the same. Art is a human creation, while nature exists on its own.

500 Words Essay on Art Is Not Nature

Art and nature are two different things. Nature is everything that surrounds us, like trees, animals, and mountains. Art, on the other hand, is something humans create. It is a way to express feelings and ideas. Artists use paint, clay, words, sounds, and many other things to make art. They use these tools to create something that wasn’t there before.

The Difference Between Art and Nature

Nature is something that exists without any human effort. It is there, whether we see it or not. A tree grows from a seed, a river flows down a hill, and the sun rises every morning. These things happen naturally, without any human help.

Art is different. It is not natural, it is man-made. An artist decides to create a painting, a sculpture, or a song. The artist uses their skills and imagination to create something new. This is what makes art different from nature.

Art Imitates Nature

Even though art and nature are different, they are closely related. Artists often use nature as inspiration for their work. They might paint a beautiful landscape, or write a poem about the sea. This is because nature is full of beauty and mystery. Artists try to capture this in their work.

But even when art is inspired by nature, it is not the same as nature. A painting of a tree is not a tree. It is a representation of a tree, created by an artist. The same goes for a song about the sea, or a poem about a mountain. These are works of art, inspired by nature, but they are not nature itself.

Art as Human Expression

Art is a way for humans to express themselves. Through art, we can share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with others. We can tell stories, make people think, or simply create something beautiful to look at.

Nature, on the other hand, does not express human thoughts or feelings. It simply exists. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, but it does not tell human stories or express human emotions. That is why art is not nature.

In conclusion, art and nature are different but related. Nature is a source of inspiration for artists, but art is a human creation. It is a way for us to express ourselves and share our experiences with others. While we can appreciate the beauty and wonder of nature, we should also appreciate the beauty and creativity of art. Because while art may imitate nature, it is not nature itself. It is something uniquely human.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Why Is Art Not Nature?

There are a lot of discussions these days about the blurred lines between art and nature. Some people believe that anything created by humans is an act of art, while others feel that only objects found in nature can also be considered as such. 

In this blog post, we will explore the definition of art and discuss why some people believe that it cannot be compared to nature. We will also provide our own opinion on the matter!

What is Art?

What is nature, how to tell if it’s nature or art, related posts:, why art is not nature.

The first reason why art is not nature is that art is a product of the artist’s imagination. It doesn’t exist in the real world until the artist creates it. Nature, on the other hand, has always existed and will continue to exist long after we are gone. To elaborate this further, let’s take a look at the definition of each.

Art is often defined as the expression or creative application of human skill and imagination. This is usually in a visual form such as painting or sculpture. It can also be found in many other forums such as music, poetry, drama, and many other forms that can be modified.

It’s important to note that art is not only limited to paintings and sculptures. It can be found in pretty much anything that has been created by humans!

Nature, on the other hand, is defined as the physical world and everything in it that is not made by humans. This includes all living things, such as plants and animals, as well as non-living things, like rocks and water.

There are also some natural formations that some people mistakenly categorize as art such as:

• The Sleeping Giant in Ireland
• Fairy Chimneys in Turkey
• Deer Cave in Malaysia

These are all nature-made wonders that have been around for centuries!

Now that we know the definition of both art and nature, let’s explore how to tell if something is one or the other. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Is the object man-made?
• If so, was it created to be art?
• Does the object exist in the natural world?
• Is the object a part of nature or has it been modified by humans?

Asking yourself these questions can help you determine whether something is art or nature. However, at the end of the day, it is up to you to decide what you consider to be art!

Final Thoughts

We hope that this article has helped you understand the difference between art and nature. They may seem similar at first, but they are quite different. Art is a product of the artist’s imagination while nature has always existed. Thanks for reading!