Abstract Landscape

I was so pleased about this week's Abstract Thursday theme: I love looking at and photographing landscape, I love framing the patterns and shapes I find around me to create more abstract compositions, and much of my favourite art evokes landscape at the boundary between figuration and abstraction. I love Klee's coloured blocks and triangles assembled into cityscapes or forests, Georgia O'Keefe's bright bands of watercolour depicting mountains or desert skies, Monet's late water gardens, painted as failing sight shifted him into increasingly undefined hazes of shimmering light, shade and colour, or Patrick Heron's vivid camellia gardens and parks or his stripes of colour derived from land and seascapes. It was therefore inevitable that I would find it impossible to capture what I imagined when I set off up the hill. I knew which bit of the valley I wanted to frame, where the varied colours of fields outlined by hedgerows and narrow lanes meet in bands and triangles and the texture of woodland contrasts with the regularity of wheat fields. It was a cloudy, hazy day, and I don't have a really long lens; the optical zoom on my compact is not bad, but the image quality was disappointing, and attempts to adjust contrast and colour balance did not work well for the greens. I also, as always, end up asking myself what is abstract, and hope that if the intention is to detach a little piece of landscape from its geographical and human context and focus on its shapes, colours, patterns and textures, then the image slips towards abstraction.