AT THE GALLERIES: Landscapes of the mind

To paint a landscape means to paint a philosophy. Any landscape artist makes choices — this isn’t a photograph, after all, and the best landscape artists don’t aim for photorealism. That would be boring.

No, what he or she is really after is capturing the intangible beauty of nature, the aspect of the outdoors that speaks to the soul.

“Artists at Continent’s End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907” is a wonderful journey through the souls of a number of artists. The Laguna Art Museum presents an intelligent, informative exhibit that allows the viewer to ponder a remarkable range of approaches, techniques and talents found in this highly influential group of painters.

Some were aesthetes, intellectuals who looked at landscape as something that the artist could perfect in the studio.

Gottardo Piazzoni (1872-1945) abstracted the land down to its most fascinating shapes, blurring the colors to emphasize form. The title of one work says it all: “Untitled, Decorative Landscape with Architectural Forms.”

Piazzoni’s “Winter” is nothing but a bare hill and a dry riverbed — land and sky so empty it’s almost modernist.

These “intellectual” landscape painters — sometimes influenced by aestheticism, sometimes by the arts and crafts movement, sometimes by both — found a kind of religion in the painting itself. “Ars gratia artis”: art for art’s sake.

The painting serves a moral purpose, raising the level of intelligence and sophistication of the viewer just by looking at it, studying it (as well as the painter in painting it).

But others approached landscape with a more direct worship. Highly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, these painters were transcendentalists.

This philosophy was brought to the peninsula by artists from the East coast and Europe. It was perfect for painters, because it proposed that the human mind shapes all sensory experience (as opposed to sensory experience shaping the human mind).

You need only turn to the works of Raymond D. Yelland (1848-1900) to see this develop, even in Yelland’s style itself.

“A Pool Among the Rocks (at Monterey, California)” is technical, proficient — and dead. There’s lots of realism here, lots of accuracy in the rocks and water. The composition is simple and uninteresting, complete with the white gull floating in the middle.

But Yelland’s “Sunset at Cypress Point, Monterey” is a different matter. This is an attempt to grasp the very air of the place.

This is Monterey: that perfect, benevolent and loving sky; all things are illuminated by the orange sun we can’t see. We only know it’s there by the way it bestows orange underneath the boughs of the dignified cypress. Here, the artist has spoken through the landscape.

Similarly, George Inness (1825-1894) set out to grasp the meaning of a place with his use of color. Tonality (where colors and lines blend into each other in mere suggestion of form) is a metaphorical expression of an act of human creation. All things are present in the activity of the mind. Look at “California” — the blurred, easy confidence of Inness’s brush. The trees, the grass, the cattle and even the human figure are all united in the artist’s perception of them.

But as I said, there is a remarkable range in the show. There are examples of simpler approaches to landscape, like Elizabeth Strong’s “Monterey Deer,” or even some of the paintings of Jules Tavernier (1844-1889), one of the school’s founders.

Influenced by the Barbizon school in France, these artists were essentially realists using impressionist techniques, and it’s their influence that we mostly see in landscape painting today.

Such realism — presenting the subject as straight-forward as possible — can result in lots of brushstrokes and an impressive collection of detail, but little meaning.

Witness the collection of paintings by M. Evelyn McCormick (1869-1948), where you can count the leaves on the trees, the blades of grass or the spines on the cactus. The idea here is to be objective, radically different from a transcendentalist ideal.

The richness of meaning, the thoughtful and sometimes ecstatic depth of landscape painting in the past, is why landscape painting in the present often seems trite. When it’s technically proficient, it’s cold; and when it’s impressionistic, it seems derivative, or worse, sentimental.

Either way, it often seems totally devoid of meaning and could just as well be experienced as poster: flat, common, mass-produced.

This exhibit offers a chance to see how artists translate landscape into art, and the reasons why they make the choices they make.

It also gives the viewer a chance to witness something that’s rapidly disappearing in California and why a single cypress may be more important than any structure that might replace it. The exhibit runs through Oct. 1.