For landscape design in the Picturesque manner, the wild and unruly natural world was the accidental ingredient that required thoughtful subtraction and taming toward a picture-like result.
For this project, sampled painted depictions of a natural setting are overlaid on images of artifacts connected with 19th century brick making machinery to create “invented landscapes.
The romantic notion of the picturesque is certainly under duress.
Crispin Sartwell writes in the August 2021 issue of “Splice Today” that climate change is the new sublime. It puts the original 18th century aesthetic of the Picturesque on its head. Instead of being faced with the awe inspiring grandeur of nature as well as its softer side, we are flooded with tragic images of the dangerous power of a natural world that we ourselves have reshaped. One can also add the ravages of the war in Ukraine.
