Jurors drawn to freshness

With landscapes as far as the eye can see, the jurors of this year's "Color of the Land" art show had their work cut out for them, having to select eight winners from 291 entries.

The jurors — three seasoned artists from the Salt Lake area — know from experience what it takes to produce a superior landscape, and what to look for in the 2006 Days of '47/Deseret Morning News Landscape Art Show.

First, and most important, the best landscapes are created when the artist actually goes outdoors to paint. Copying from a photograph just won't cut it.

"Freshness seems to come out if they've painted it from life, but not so much if they've painted it from a photo," said Clayton Williams, who owns and operates Williams Fine Art in Salt Lake City.

Judging whether a scene came from a photo or life takes an expert eye, Williams said. "A photo doesn't give you an accurate test of the varying hues and values, so if a painting doesn't have that, you can usually assume it came from a photo."

In the art world, "values" are the varying shades of light and dark that make something real. The eye can capture these subtle changes in brightness but capturing them on canvas is a skill not easily mastered. "People will look out the window and look at the landscape, and they don't often notice the varying hues of light and dark. Once you understand that and are able to put it on a canvas, then a painting comes alive."

Another criterion for a winning landscape is strong drawing skills.

Jean Arnold, a landscape artist whose work is featured throughout the Intermountain region, said that no matter what medium the artist chooses, the underlying drawing skills determine the art's quality.

Also, observational skills are important. Arnold said those skills seem particularly strong in Utah artists — definitely more prevalent here than in, say, New Mexico, where more abstract landscapes are the norm.

But most of all, the winning landscapes in this year's show express each artist's personal voice. "I think the landscape itself, the notion that there's something out there that must be objectively captured, is not where it comes from," Arnold said. "I think it's what the artists project onto the landscape, their interpretation of it, their way of seeing it, that lets everyone who sees it understand what they (the artists) were really seeing."

For Doug Braithwaite, who won the Purchase Award in last year's show, a landscape needs to evoke some kind of emotion. "I think there are signals that a person can pick up on (in nature) that are maybe deeper than what you can verbalize," Braithwaite said. "When I'm out on the landscape painting, I can feel something that I can't see if I'm working from a photograph. And I think a good painter can capture those emotions."

Braithwaite said that this year's winners had structurally solid work, strong paint strokes and the craftsmanship that comes with experience. His advice for next year's hopefuls: paint, and then paint some more.

"I really think it's a numbers thing," he said. "You paint about a thousand paintings, and then you really start to feel it. And you paint about a thousand more, and you can show what you feel in the work."

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E-mail: jcloward@desnews.com