Abstract Landscape

Works that draw on land, sea and sky through colour, gesture and structure rather than literal description.

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Abstract landscape keeps the sense of a place, its light, weather, horizon or rhythm of growth, while dropping the job of describing it. A band of blue can stand for a shoreline, a smear of grey for rain. The border between the two modes was never sharp: late canvases by J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet's water-lily panels already dissolve scenery into paint.

In the 20th century the approach became deliberate. Arthur Dove made small nature-based abstractions around 1910, and in Britain Ivon Hitchens spent decades turning Sussex woodland into long, sweeping brushmarks. Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, begun in 1967, distils the light and geometry of coastal Santa Monica, and the canvases Joan Mitchell painted after settling at Vétheuil, France, in 1968 carry remembered trees, water and sunflowers. Look for a horizon line that survives when everything else has gone.