Hebrew below

Yehuda Armoni is a landscape painter. Some people might think that this is a rather unproblematic affair. Being a landscape painter is akin to being a still-life painter, (indeed, many realist painters do both landscapes and still-lifes, as well as portraits). Naively, one might think that a still-life painter takes a given object, like a lemon, and paints it. In a like fashion, the landscape painter goes out to a given site and paints what’s out there. This naïve way of thinking also makes naïve-way-of-thinking people think that these painters are making pictures of given objects (the lemon, the landscape), and this makes them wonder why all the bother? That’s what cameras are for, so they think… naively. But problems abound with this naïve way of thinking. First of all, the still-life painter does not paint the lemon. He creates an image of the lemon. The treachery of images is such that we tend to confuse images and real things. Point at the still-life painter’s picture of a lemon and ask anyone: “What is that?”, and the answer is more than likely to be “It’s a lemon”. But, as Rene Magritte so clearly demonstrated in 1929, a picture of a pipe is not a pipe . And yet, we have difficulty in distinguishing between the image “in here” and the object “out there”, so much so that French philosopher Jean Baudrillard theorized that we, as a culture, are slowly but surely replacing the object for its image, what he calls the simulacrum.

But we have gone too far. Let us get back to the simple task of painting the still-life of the lemon. The painter places the lemon on a chosen surface, with a chosen backdrop, moving it around endlessly, looking for just the right angle in just the right light. He is making an awful lot of decisions, and spending a great deal of time on these preparations. If one wants a picture of the lemon, one bemuses again, get a camera and push a button! Ah, but it is becoming clearer that a snapshot of the lemon is not what the painter seeks. To boot, an artistically-oriented photographer would behave precisely as does the painter with our humble lemon. The artist-photographer, like the artist-painter, stages the lemon, works out the lighting, lenses and filters, angles and resolutions, and much more. The artist-photographer, like the artist-painter, does not simply want an image of the lemon. She, too, is after something else. Such considerations as these apply to the landscape painter, as well. The painter expends a good deal of time and energy working out the frame, the light, the atmospherics, the contrasts, the tonality, and more. It is not a simple matter of “painting what is out there”. He is looking for something.

Yehuda Armoni is a landscape painter. He takes his 4×4 out to the countryside, finds a potential site, and stops. He stands by his car, hands on hips, as he surveys the lay of the land. He brings his hand up to his brow to block the glaring Israeli sunlight, and squints into the vista. He surveys the land carefully, but not really looking for trees, hills, fields with red-roofed farmhouses. He spends many an intense minute scrutinizing a multitude of aspects, like light and shade, hard and soft contrasts, tonality, rhythms and patterns… So, what is he looking for? The answer is that he is looking for a painting.
As odd as that answer is, it is a good one. To get a grip on it, we return to the still-life painter, for the same answer to the same question applies to that case. The still-life painter, in arranging the objects to be painted – even if it is but a humble lemon – is looking for a painting. Specifically, he is looking for a still-life. There are lemons in nature, as there are lobsters, skulls, silver candlesticks and pewter jugs. But there are no still-lifes in nature. Indeed, the French term alludes to the opposite, it is “dead nature” that the painter deals with (nature morte). In the same vein, there are no landscapes in nature. There are trees, and mountains, and fields with red-roofed farmhouses, but there are no landscapes. In a very basic, yet illusive, sense, Yehuda cannot paint an image of the landscape, because there is no landscape out there. Indeed, there are no landscapes “out there” any more than there are still-lifes out there (or portraits, for that matter).

Thus, we might wish to conclude, that landscapes, still-lifes and portraits are all “in here” sorts of entities, “in here” being the mind. But that is not quite the case, either. Our painters do not have landscapes in their heads, any more than they have trees, mountain ranges or lemons. In fact, most artists would agree that they do not “see” their finished works of art “in their heads”, before they have actually created them. One thing, however, we might be able to suggest with reasonable clarity and confidence: Whatever goes on inside the artist’s head, once he has painted the landscape, it becomes an object, an art object. We can examine it, scrutinize it, study it to our heart’s content. The landscape as a painting is a clear enough entity. We might not see landscapes in nature because they don’t exist there, and we might not know what is going on in the artist’s head, but we do know what landscapes look like, because we know paintings of them.

We seem to be presented with a poser. On the one hand, the landscape itself is not a natural entity, as there are no landscapes in Nature. On the other hand, it is reckless to say that the landscape is a mental entity (an ideal one, to use the philosopher’s jargon), for one cannot say with any degree of intellectual responsibility what the painter has in his head. And yet, the landscape as a painting is a clear and definite entity. Fortunately, that is the solution to our little problem: A landscape is an Artworld object. The painting is the landscape. The painting is the still-life. The painting is the portrait. Landscapes, still-lifes and portraits do not exist in the objective world of nature, nor in the subjective world of a person. They exist in the cultural world of Art.

Now we revisit Yehuda’s position, and it looks quite different. Yehuda goes out to nature. He seeks a certain kind of arrangement of the things out there, a certain atmosphere, a pattern of colors and a rhythm of lights and shadows. He is looking for a landscape to paint. A landscape is a painting. Ergo, Yehuda is “out there” in nature looking for a painting that he would like to paint. And that is the truth of the matter.

For the sake of greater clarity, let us entertain a very widespread notion. Let us say that landscape paintings capture and show us “the beauty of nature”. The painter works hard to do this, actually scaping the land, framing it, noticing all sorts of things that we usually do not notice, rendering precise tonal qualities and atmospheric effects. If nature’s beauty were such an obvious and clear affair, then one would not need the landscape painter at all, let alone have the poor fellow work so hard. To be honest, as a layman, I would admit that it is quite unclear to me just what beauty in nature is. What is it in nature that moves my mind? Again, the “out there” and the “in here” are both basically unclear. Landscape paintings, however, are quite clear, we said. For instance, let us assume we look at a natural vista, a lake’s edge or some such, and admire it for its beauty. We say, “Ah, what a beautiful landscape!”. Now we ask, as one stands there looking at the beautiful lake, where does the beautiful landscape begin and end? Do not say that it is “endless”, because it is going to be night in few hours, and you would feel the right fool standing in the dark wondering where everybody else went. So, where does the “natural landscape” begin and end? The landscape painting is framed. The question of where it begins and ends is answered with complete clarity. It is simple example, but the point remains. Another example, we are back at the vista, admiring the colors of the sparkling lake before us. There is a patch over there, perhaps a rock lay just beneath the surface… what color is that? Blue, green, I think I see yellow…? Which is the right color? Now that is one hefty question, and we shall return to it. For now, however, the point is this: Both in nature and in one’s mind, the answer to what is the right color is perennially unclear. It is the task of the landscape painter to answer that question, as he makes a decision and puts down a certain, specific hue. Whatever it is, the painter has mixed some specific hue on his palette, scooped it onto his brush and laid it down on the canvas for all to see (three extremely important decisions, by the way). The painter makes the call, and for better of worse, “right” or “wrong”, the painting is clear. It is, in a word, definitive.

Yehuda Armoni is a landscape painter. We now take this to be a much more complicated and serious affair than at first. He creates landscapes. He answers questions like “where does the beautiful view of nature begin and end?”, “what is the right color of that patch of water?”, “what is the quality of the air between the eye and the land?”, and countless others. All in all, and again, for better or worse, landscape artists answer these questions, and only they answer them. That makes their answers definitive. Oscar Wilde understood this quite some time ago:

“Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”

What Wilde is saying, and without putting too fine a point on it, is that without Yehuda and his fellow landscape painters, we would see no beauty in nature at all. The naïve view seems to have it the wrong way around. Landscape paintings do not imitate the way we see nature; the way we see nature imitates landscape paintings. A good landscape does not look like your favorite holiday photograph. On the contrary, I would wager that your favorite holiday photograph looks like a good landscape, and that is probably why it is your favorite.

As a landscape painter, Yehuda is a kind of hunter. He hunts landscapes in nature. That is why he looks for paintings in the land scape, and he tries to capture them. And not only is he looking for a painting in the land scape, he is looking for a good one. Happily, what constitutes a good landscape painting has not changed all that much since the heyday of the great Romantic and Realist landscape painters a couple of centuries ago. George Frost (1754–1821) was an English landscape painter who lived in Ipswich, Suffolk. He was considered to be a pretty good one. Upon his death, the author of his obituary spelled out with admirable precision what made him a good landscape painter. The obituary reads:

“…[H]e studied nature with the closest attention, and in his attempts to delineate her beauties, was eminently successful. He was an accurate observer of her in all her appearances, and possessed a characteristic touch for all her forms. The subjects which he selected were such as did credit to his taste and judgment; and whatever came from his pencil bore the impress of originality and truth, and evinced, in a bold and masterly manner, the local character and features of the County in which he resided.”

Word for word the same can be said of Yehuda (as we wish him a long life and good health). He is an accurate observer of nature, very attuned to peculiarities of his locale. Yehuda knows the Israeli light, the Israeli treelines, the Israeli fields and Israeli air. The subjects he selects do credit to his taste and judgment. His works bear the impress of originality and truth. That last clause is probably the clincher. Yehuda’s landscapes are convincing because they ring true. That truth consists in a correspondence between certain aspects of the painting and parallel aspects of nature. The relationships between the light and the shade in the painting faithfully reflect those in the natural scene. The tonal qualities must be correct. The atmosphere must just right. The formal composition of the painting holds together the same way as the lay of the land. The colors in the painting play off each other as they dance around the open field. The landscape might not be out there in nature, but the truth is.

Landscape painting is an open dialogue between “out there” Mother Nature and the “in here” way we capture her. Both sides of the dialogue are perennially unclear and inherently problematic. The landscape painting resolves all issues, one way or another. The painting is the embodiment of the dialogue between person and world. It is an incarnation of the impossible relationship between the “in here” and the “out there”, between the particular and the universal, between the specific and the general. In the end, the painting has the final say, for better or worse. Our minds are vaporous and ephemeral, Mother Nature is fickle and fleeting, while the painting stands fast. As an embodiment of our “in here” reality and nature’s “out there” reality, the landscape painting constitutes a firm and steadfast reality we can always relate to, refer to, perhaps even count on. Landscape painters determine that reality. Again, for better or worse. Luckily for us, there are those who do better.
Yehuda Armoni is a landscape painter. Luckily for us.

David Graves
The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo
July 2017