Landscape

Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.

Color landscapes blend artificial elements like buildings, roads, and pavements with natural features such as mountains, forests, plants, sky, and rivers.

First, the traditional color landscapes in some cities have been heavily influenced by natural geography, climate, local materials, ethnic culture, religion, and socioeconomic factors.

Second, the growing problem of "color pollution" - through bright, solid-colored buildings, billboards, and lighting clusters - adversely affects people physically and psychologically.

Third, homogenization of colors between cities is causing a loss of cultural identity, as many modern buildings share similar palettes, diluting local characteristics.

Researchers have proposed more unified cityscape approaches to address these color landscape issues and help cities preserve their distinctive identities and create vibrant, emotionally engaging urban environments.

John A. Wiens[17] opposes the traditional view expounded by Carl Troll, Isaak S. Zonneveld, Zev Naveh, Richard T. T. Forman/Michel Godron and others that landscapes are arenas in which humans interact with their environments on a kilometre-wide scale; instead, he defines 'landscape'—regardless of scale—as "the template on which spatial patterns influence ecological processes".

[25][26] It recognises that, for example, one river basin can supply water for towns and agriculture, timber and food crops for smallholders and industry, and habitat for biodiversity; the way in which each one of these sectors pursues its goals can have impacts on the others.

[25] Proponents of integrated landscape management argue that it is well-suited to address complex global challenges, such as those that are the focus of the Sustainable Development Goals.

[32] Cultural landscapes, on the other hand, are environments that have been altered in some manner by people (including temporary structures and places, such as campsites, that are created by human beings).

[41] Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth's surface in delimited areas.

Landscape architects work on all types of structures and external space – large or small, urban, suburban and rural, and with "hard" (built) and "soft" (planted) materials, while paying attention to ecological sustainability.

George Crabbe, the Suffolk regional poet, also wrote topographical poems, as did William Wordsworth, of which Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey is an obvious example.

One important aspect of British Romanticism – evident in painting and literature as well as in politics and philosophy – was a change in the way people perceived and valued the landscape.

[62] The changing landscape, brought about by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, with the expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influences on the growth of the Romantic movement in Britain.

The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts, and the pollution of the environment all led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialisation and a new emphasis on the beauty and value of nature and landscape.

Scott's influence was felt throughout Europe, as well as on major Victorian novelists in Britain, such as Emily Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, as well as John Cowper Powys in the 20th-century.

Landscape images were present in the early Shijing and the Chuci, but in later poetry the emphasis changed, as in painting to the Shan shui (Chinese: 山水 lit.

Shan shui painting and poetry shows imaginary landscapes, though with features typical of some parts of South China; they remain popular to the present day.

Notable landscape photographers include Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell, Edward Weston, Ben Heine, Mark Gray and Fred Judge.

The earliest forms of art around the world depict little that could really be called landscape, although ground-lines and sometimes indications of mountains, trees or other natural features are included.

For a coherent depiction of a whole landscape, some rough system of perspective, or scaling for distance, is needed, and this seems from literary evidence to have first been developed in Ancient Greece in the Hellenistic period, although no large-scale examples survive.

Both the Roman and Chinese traditions typically show grand panoramas of imaginary landscapes, generally backed with a range of spectacular mountains – in China often with waterfalls and in Rome often including sea, lakes or rivers.

In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits, typically suggesting the parks or estates of a landowner, though mostly painted in London by an artist who had never visited the site.

In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late 19th century, is probably the best-known native development in landscape art.

The work of Thomas Cole, the school's generally acknowledged founder, has much in common with the philosophical ideals of European landscape paintings — a kind of secular faith in the spiritual benefits to be gained from the contemplation of natural beauty.

Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis (with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration) on the raw, even terrifying power of nature.

Although certainly less dominant in the period after World War I, many significant artists still painted landscapes in the wide variety of styles exemplified by Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Milton Avery, Peter Doig, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney and Sidney Nolan.

The term neo-romanticism is applied in British art history, to a loosely affiliated school of landscape painting that emerged around 1930 and continued until the early 1950s.

Artists particularly associated with the initiation of this movement included Paul Nash, John Piper, Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, and especially Graham Sutherland.