But if you’re shopping for art to outfit an important room, the work needs to be something with a bit of gravitas (and the right frame is important, too).Īdding a landscape painting to your home can introduce peace and serenity within the confines of your own space. Painters working in the photorealist style of landscape painting, for example, seek to create works so lifelike that you may confuse their paint for camera pixels.
Into the 20th century, landscapes remained a major theme for many artists, and while the term “landscape painting” may call to mind images of lush, grassy fields and open seascapes, the genre is characterized by more variety, colors and diverse styles than you may think. Paintings of natural scenery were increasingly realistic but romanticized too. The popularity of religious paintings eventually declined altogether, and by the early 19th century, painters of classical landscapes took to painting out-of-doors (plein-air painting).
Greeks created vast wall paintings that depicted landscapes and grandiose garden scenes, while in the late 15th century and early 16th century, landscapes were increasingly the subject of watercolor works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolomeo. The Netherlands was home to landscapes as a major theme in painting as early as the 1500s, and ink-on-silk paintings in China featured mountains and large bodies of water as far back as the third century. It could be argued that cave walls were the canvases for the world’s first landscape paintings, which depict and elevate natural scenery through art, but there is a richer history to consider.
His freeform, expressive style reveals the subjectivity of this memory and finishes the composition with a transient, dream-like atmosphere. Guided by his memory, Surdo recalls the trees as soft, gentle and calm, leaning in on each other in a tender embrace. Restricting the composition to only a portion of the tree trunks, Surdo accentuates their abstract forms and focuses on the simple beauty of their graceful movements. The light-colored trees are contrasted by a dark backdrop, a void of negative that isolates the trees in space and time. The horizontal motion of the sketch-like linework captures the striated texture of birch bark, punctuated by the irregular forms of its eye-shaped markings. Loosely drawn with short, lateral strokes, the drawing depicts the slow process of two trees fusing together as a graceful gesture of physical touch. This charcoal drawing entitled “Fusion” beautifully illustrates the collision of two young birch trees. Applying his mastery of figurative realism to the natural world, he experiments with form and texture to uncover the intangible spirits of trees. Depicting trees from personal encounters, Surdo’s latest body of work entitled “Tree Spirits” takes us on a foray into the forest, where leaves, branches and burls express something deeply personal.
With strong command of the human form, Surdo creates dynamic compositions of people and places that communicate a rich commentary on the world around him. Surdo is classically trained in drawing and oil painting in the tradition of Renaissance masters.
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