Aerial landscape art

For example, Australian Aborigines, beginning in very ancient times, created "country" landscapes—aerial landscapes depicting their country—showing ancestral paths to watering holes and sacred sites.

Centuries before air travel, Europeans developed maps of whole continents and even of the globe itself, all from an imagined aerial perspective, aided with mathematical calculations derived from surveys and knowledge of astronomical relationships.

The artist Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), who wrote extensively on the aesthetics and philosophy of modern art, identified the aerial landscape (especially the "bird's-eye view", looking straight down, as opposed to an oblique angle) as a genuinely new and radicalizing paradigm in the art of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, as in a Jackson Pollock or a Mark Tobey painting, such images often have an "all over" distribution of interest that defies any attempt to decide on a "correct" orientation or focal In addition to Malevich, many other modern and contemporary artists have produced work inspired by aerial views of landscapes, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Susan Crile, Jane Frank, Richard Diebenkorn, Yvonne Jacquette, and Nancy Graves.

O'Keeffe's monumental aerial cloudscape, Sky Above Clouds IV (1965), is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.