Landscape art
depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. Landscape, first recorded in 1598, was borrowed as a painters' term from Dutch during the 16th century, when Dutch artists were pioneering the landscape genre. The Dutch word landschap had earlier meant simply "region, tract of land" but had acquired the artistic sense, which it brought over into English, of "a picture depicting scenery on land." Interestingly, 34 years pass after the first recorded use of landscape in English before the word is used of a view or vista of natural scenery. This delay suggests that people were first introduced to landscapes in paintings and then saw landscapes in real life.
Nature landscape types:
Skyscapes or Cloudscapes are depictions of clouds, weatherforms, and atmospheric conditions.
In art, a cloudscape (or skyscape) is the depiction of a view of clouds or the sky. Usually, as in the examples seen here, the clouds are depicted as viewed from the earth, often including just enough of a landscape to suggest scale, orientation, weather conditions, and distance (through the application of the technique of aerial perspective, which see).
Moonscapes show the landscape of a moon.A moonscape is an area or vista of the lunar landscape (generally of the Earth's moon), or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term "moonscape" is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated or flattened by war, often by shelling.
Seascapes depict oceans or beaches. Recent seminal use of this word in the UK: A combination of adjacent land, coastline and sea within an area, defined by a mix of land-sea inter-visibility and coastal landscape character assessment, with major headlands forming division points between one seascape area and the next. This approach to coastal landscape planning was developed jointly by Government environmental bodies in Wales (UK) and Ireland in 2000 to assist spatial planning for (at that time new) offshore wind farm developments.
Riverscapes depict rivers or creeks. A riverscape or river landscape comprises the features of the landscape which can be found along a river.
Cityscapes or townscapes depict cities (urban landscapes).
Hardscapes are paved over areas like streets and sidewalks, large business complexes and housing developments, and industrial areas. A cityscape is the urban equivalent of a landscape. Townscape is roughly synonymous with cityscape, though it of course implies the same difference in urban size and density (and even modernity) implicit in the difference between the words city and town. In urban design the terms refer to the configuration of built forms and interstitial space. In the visual arts a cityscape (urban landscape) is an artistic representation, such as a painting, drawing, print or photograph, of the physical aspects of a city or urban area.
Aerial landscapes depict a surface or ground from above, especially as seen from an airplane or spacecraft. (When the viewpoint is directly overhead, looking down, there is of course no depiction of a horizon or sky.) This genre can be combined with others, as in the aerial cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, the aerial moonscapes, or the aerial cityscapes. Aerial landscape art is painting or other visual art which depicts or evokes the appearance of a landscape as seen from above, usually from a considerable distance, as it might be viewed from an aircraft or spacecraft. Sometimes the art is based not on direct observation but on aerial photography, or on maps created using satellite imagery. Of course, this kind of landscape art hardly existed before the 20th century, with the advent of air travel and space flight. Famous or notable artists who created works variously inspired by aerial landscape.
Inscapes are landscape-like (usually surrealist or abstract) artworks which seek to convey the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space. [For sources on this statement, see the Inscape (visual art) article.] The word "inscape" is sometimes used, perhaps with a bit of poetic license, to refer to the domain of interior design, suggesting that the interior of a house or building is a kind of interior landscape, a counterpart to the landscape surrounding the structure. This is the sense suggested by the name of the interior design school Inscape Design College, which see. It could be, however, that this use of the term is intended as a double-entendre, evoking those other meanings of "inscape".
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