The art of landscape imposes organization upon the chaotic, it is the human discovery of pattern and principle within prima materia. Renaissance landscapes would often feature a city upon the horizon, to announce man’s defining presence. Landscape subdues the wild, the unknown, the lair of the lion and the wolf.
Landscape can be neutral, blank; the mirror waits for a face to fill it.
Nothing moves, nothing intrudes, the forest and the fields contain their disorder and do not render it balanced.
The horizon is exact, even the picture of a lion that peers from dark shadows,
he stares impassively from the mouth of the cave that is his home.
The lion is at home within the moment of the forest.
The outlines of the crests of the trees, the branches, the leaves
melt into trunks that dwindle into an infinite reduction of light and shadow,
brush stroke and pigment. We delight to believe we discern order,
the hierarchy of meaning, it is apparent as we behold the landscape;
not as we render it in the gut grip moment of apprehension what is the wild.
Peterborough Poets 