Research

As a start for my research working with the signs of the template, the icon; the landscape. I ‘m going to start with some history; landscape art. At specially paintings, because they go a way back. I’m going to grab some examples what I can connect to the icon, the digital landscape.

El Greco, Mount Sinai, 1570

El Greco, Mount Sinai

‘The painting was probably made for the antiquarian Fulvio Orsini, librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, in whose palace the artist lived from 1570 to 1572. It shows the peaks of Mount Sinai, a place sacred to Judaism and Christianity, of special significance for Eastern Orthodoxy, and revered by Muslims. At the centre is Mount Horeb, where Moses received the tablets of the Ten Commandments from God. On the left is Mount Epistene. The peak on the right is St Catherine's Mount, where the early Christian Martyr Catherine had been buried. The small citadel at the foot of Mount Horeb is the monastery that to this day bears her name.’ http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/g/greco_el/03/0303grec.html

Cézanne, Ebene mit dem Mont Sainte Victoire, 1879-1880

Cézanne, 1904- 1906

What I notices when I was researching old landscape paintings, is that I couldn’t find a lots of mountains. The oldest was El Greco, Mount Sinai, which is typical of the romantic cartography of mannerism. Okay what has this to do with the digital landscape? Nothing.

An important part of landscape painting is to connect to the nature. They become a part of the nature. But when I got digitalized what happens to the landscape? Can I return it to the nature? Can it be part of the nature again?

Than halfway 1800 I found Paul Cézanne who was fascinated by the Mont Sainte-Victoire in southern France. In a lot of his ‘mountain paintings’ you see a transition from impressionistic to more cubist style. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

Georgia O’Keeffe. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico-Out Back of Marie’s II,1930.

Its maybe just one mountain and not two, but I’m getting closer to the abstract, minimal, digital mountain.

Even with the so called ‘mother of American Modernism’ Georgia O’Keeffe painted the nature.

File:Mondriaan Compositie in lijn.jpg

Mondriaan, Compositie in lijn, 1916-1917

Dutch landscape art became popular in the 17 century, and tended to make smaller paintings for smaller houses. But most of them do not included mountains, simple because there are none mountains in Holland. It gets interesting at the end of 19 century and early 20th centuries, when Mondriaan makes abstract landscapes in the name of modernism.

You actually don’t see a landscape, but this series of ‘Pier and Ocaan’ is based on Dutch landscapes during 1916. They also called ‘plus-minus’-series, because of the horizontal and vertical crossing each other.

‘I will try to speak of the beauty of shapes, and I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the shapes of living figures, and their imitations in painting, but I mean straight lines and curves and the shapes made from them, by the lathe, rules or square. They are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are, but are eternally, and by their very nature, beautiful, and give a pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of desire: and in this way colours can give a similar pleasure’ – In the Philebus of Plato, Socrates.

Maybe I’m asking too much of this digital landscape and connect them to greatest painters. But it inspired me to make this icon bigger than it is. My focus is to bring it back to nature, to turn the digital to physical, and to make it aesthetic. The history examples are my inspiration to create it.

Icon or Symbol?

‘Icon is used to represent a particular category of an object. Icon is similar to the actual product and anyone can tell what it stands for because of similarities. One thing to be understood is that icons can be made of real objects only, and concepts and feelings cannot be depicted using icons as there are no figures for these concepts (liberty, freedom, country, peace etc) and feelings (hatred, love, anger etc).’ - Posted on February 4, 2012 by Olivia, http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-icon-and-vs-symbol/

‘Real object only’, when I was searching for a picture with two mountains and a sun, I didn’t found even one picture, so the icon is not based on a real object, but something that could be real. In that case it’s more a symbol of mountains.

‘The signs, which have become known internationally, because of their association with an object or phenomenon over a long period of time, are called symbols. Symbols do not resemble what they stand for, and they have to be learned by people to know what they mean. A symbol represents products or ideas, whereas icon represents only items that are visible.’ - Posted on February 4, 2012 by Olivia, http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-icon-and-vs-symbol/

The ‘two mountain’ is also a sign that has to be learned by people to know what they mean, because the image itself does not resemble to the actual product. You don’t have to place similar images as the icon. So are the two mountains not a symbol? The symbol represents product or ideas, so ideas to place images on the two mountain sign.