“I am quite incapable of doing them [making landscapes], even the shadow. My trees look like spinach and my sea like heaven knows what.... [the Mediterranean landscape was] the devil to paint, precisely because it is so beautiful.”

— Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

young Lautrec comments his own paintings of the landscape, when he was c. 15 years old.
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 46 - remark to his friend Etienne Devismes - in Nice, 1879

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 13

French painter 1864–1901

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

as quoted in Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Drawings, Helaine Posner, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992
1965 - 1995

“Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape... All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it... And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 173

“It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.”

John Ruskin book Modern Painters

Volume III, part V, chapter II (1856).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

“Horses make a landscape look beautiful.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

“I am now mainly painting faces and landscapes; I am obsessed day and night by the vision of faces and colours. And the spiritual vision is my mystical world.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

Quote of Jawlensky from a letter to his brother Dimitri, c. 1917/18; as cited in Alexej von Jawlensky, Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam; exhibition catalog 25/9 – 27/11-1994, p. 150
1900 - 1935

“The new discovery that I have made in painting is the following. There are chords of colors, let's say a certain red and green, which move, shimmer when you look at them. Now if you're looking at a tree in a landscape, you can either look at the tree, or at the landscape, but not both, because of the stereoscopic effect. Now, when you are painting something three-dimensional, the chromatic sound which shimmers is the three-dimensional effect of colour, and when you paint a landscape, and the green foliage shimmers a little with the blue sky showing through it, that happens because the green is on a different plane from the sky in nature too. Finding the space-shaping energies of colour, instead of contenting ourselves with a dead chiaroascuro, is our finest task.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

in a letter to artist de:Hans Thuar, 1913, from Lake Thun in Switzerland; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145