In Southern Spain, one of the great sights in Europe casts a mysterious spell on all who visit: the Alhambra. I visited this opulent Moorish palace in 2000, and its magic still resonates within me.

Under a warm Andalusian sun, my wife and I made our way into the palace, after 4 hours soaking up the exotic ambience  of the surrounding gardens. From the outside, the Alhambra is modest, simple, and understated.

Then you step inside, and enter another world.

We slowly wandered through halls and courtyards, past reflecting pools and inner chambers in  this otherworldly palace. Everywhere, across almost all surfaces, spectacularly ornate, complex carvings and geometric reliefs catch the sunlight… and fool the eye, like an architectural magic show. Time after time I got up close to look at the elaborate relief carvings covering the walls and ceilings.

The patterns are hypnotic.

At one point, I stood in front of a section of fantastically complex carving, and tried to focus my eyes on which areas of the pattern were actually concave, or hollow, and which were convex. Couldn’t do it. Mister visually trained, yours truly,  the 3D guy, could not reliably resolve the 3 dimensional order of the forms I was looking at.

The sun lit this particular section at such an angle that the eye’s sense of depth shifted back and forth, like an M.C. Escher drawing. Only this was real.

As a 3D animation professional, trained thoroughly in fine arts back in the 70’s, experienced in design, illustration and computer graphics and then animation, over more than three decades working in advertising, I was humbled. And dazzled. Cross-eyed dazzled, in fact, by a close-up view of an incredible pattern of optical illusion, built right into the architecture itself.

The whole experience really did cast a visual spell. And that’s the interesting thing…

Not all magic is cheap trickery. Some of it is real. The artisans and sculptors who created the Alhambra conjured up real visual magic.

In a sense, their complex patterns of delicate carving are the ancestors of the pixels we work with today. All digital imagery is in fact made from patterns. Patterns of tiny picture elements, hence the word “pixels”.

Using contemporary digital tools, there are opportunities for artists to cast something of a spell too.

That’s been my aim for a long time.

The prairies tend to be neglected in landscape art, and art in general. I hope to change that decisively with an ongoing series of abstract-like prairie landscapes, originating in the digital realm, and realizing tangible form in a series of art prints.

My aim is to bring new life and original feeling to the landscapes of the prairies and rolling farmland, beginning the creative process with digital tools and all the rich potential they have to re-imagine prairie art into a more modern, abstract feel.

Personally, as an artist I find prairies and rolling farmland to be some of the most compelling subjects for landscape art.

Driving through rolling farmland is a sensual delight. One experiences the cadence, meter and rhyme of all the natural visual textures at a much more heightened level of sensitivity than if we walk. At a walking pace, the changing rhythms don’t dance the way they do when one smoothly flows through the landscape in a car.

The long sightlines bring a sense of peace and well-being, quite unlike the city, where buildings crowd the view, and the average optical range is much more close-up. Obvious when you think about it, but, as many who travel out of the city on summer weekends to country homes and cottages will agree, profound in feeling.

There’s a reason so many love to take to the wide open spaces after a week in the city. Even if they love the city!

A lot of very static, formulaic art has been created around a kind of desolate flatness and unchanging character of land and sky, with each generally occupying half of the view, and very little counterpoint of texture or rhythm. Many are the modern offspring of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings, which are both more original and sophisticated.

My own work brings a different set of natural rhythms into prairie landscape art, and tends to feature more flowing terrain. I have a much more lyrical take on prairie farmland.

Rolling hills impart a grand sweeping rhythm to my art, and tend to invoke the feel of classical music, with it’s cyclical undulation and graceful flow of line. And I find clusters and streaks of vegetation in farm country to be very painterly looking, like broad brush strokes and dabbled or even poured paint. Far from being uninteresting, rolling farmland and plains have their own rich tapestries of texture.

My working method is perfectly suited to this subject matter.

It originates with the smooth flow of reflections and refractions in 3 dimensional digital forms, very glass-like. It’s a perfect source for prairie art to take form and shape from. The graceful lines of reflections, once they are digitally finessed, translate naturally into the landscape of rolling hills with subtle ebb and flow.

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Rolling farmland and the prairies are such magnificent places. I am working steadily to re-imagine prairie art into a more contemporary, abstract art form.

Rhythms of form, color and pattern… visible from our cars.

I believe the rhythms of form and color and pattern visible from our cars is a truly modern subject matter in contemporary art.

I often drive through farmland on the way to visit family in southern Ontario where I live. And, pun intended, it’s a driving force in my landscape art.

I pass through stunning landscapes that inspire me with rich tapestries of abstract color and texture. And I believe that most people driving those same routes miss the real beauty that’s passing them by, streaking past them in their time-challenged hustle.

While there are for sure stretches of highway, especially along the major 4 or 6-lane routes, that can get numbingly repetitive and plain boring, I find once I get onto the country highways, the visual rhythm of the land changes. It becomes richer, more complex.

Even the rise and fall of the land gets more pronounced on country roads than on the major freeways, because those express routes are designed to be as smooth as possible. Speed rules. The straight line is almost the ideal for those routes, but that same line tends to impose somewhat of a mechanical order onto the landscape it passes through.

But secondary routes are prime source material for the landscape artist.

Country roads as lines in a vast drawing

Think of country roads for a moment, as lines in a vast drawing. Curving lines, full of grace and fun to drive, make for quite a different experience. When I create art, those passages bubble up in my memory, carrying up into consciousness the textures and large scale swaths of color that the lines draw across, releasing them up like bubbles in champagne.

There are spectacular forms and textures, all the stuff of great art, that stream by, slow enough to savor, yet quick enough to animate into a rhythmic flow. That’s what I try and release into my landscape artwork. They arrange into an animated flow of tapestry when I sit down to draw upon my memory and imagination to create landscape art. As I improvise, these textures seem to naturally come to life.

So many of us pass through stunning landscapes like these on the highway, yet remain disconnected from them through a grim focus on where we are going, and how fast we can get there, without savoring the journey itself, and all the visual grandeur we pass through.

Opening our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape

If we’ll just take our eyes off that hypnotic point on the road in the middle distance in front of us when we drive, we’ll open our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape.

It seems to take something like a work of art to wake up our sensibilities. So one of my artistic goals is to inspire us to open our eyes while we drive through vast stretches of our country, to receive the vital spark of life that courses through the lands we most take for granted.

Some of the vegetation we often characterize as scrubland, with its drifts of weeds and bush, are to me like brushstrokes.

The sweep of the plains, the grand scale of rolling hills, are the vast structures that seem to come to life when one drives, as opposed to the static view of painters past.

I soak up the scenes outside the windows of my car and savor them to the max. I hope you’ll do the same.