Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Havellandschaft mit Segelbooten, c1898.
The graphic styled art work shown in these three examples was produced by the German artist and designer Walter Leistikow at the very end of the nineteenth century. The seeming simplicity of the artwork belies the intimate and emotive issues produced for and by the creative artist himself.
Leistikow produced a number of landscapes, both through painting and printing. Although spending most of his adult life in Berlin, the artist produced large sections of his work based on the area in which he grew up. His nostalgia for his childhood landscape gives us remembrances of his own character and memories. His perspective on his own familiar landscape gives these pieces a sense of practical and technical reality as they occupied real spaces in the environment. However, they were also imbued with a sense of his own personal time period and the thoughts and feelings that were associated with that specific mental space. This created an important additional perspective, one of almost dreamlike proportions. The landscapes therefore became both emotional and practical, forging a set of specific parameters in time and space that were of the artists own choosing.
Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Letzte Flugelschlage, 1890s.
In landscape interpretation in general it is perhaps the sense of the manipulation of time and environment that gives artistic creativity its special uniqueness. Whilst an onlooker can no doubt agree that a landscape produced by an artist is a definite, a specific point on the planet that truly exists within the day to day, it is also very much part of the particular and original thought of the artist. The two are not always the same thing and can often diverge and overlap giving the impression that a landscape is both there in real time but also part of an individual's personal, and therefore uniquely manipulated memory, a joining of the physical and the mental.
Sometimes landscape can appear near faultless, as if a photograph. Holding the creative interpretation against the real natural setting sees little difference apart perhaps from the movement of a tree to a better setting, or changing the curve of a shoreline to produce a better effect. However, often it is a matter of emotional content, content that is indelibly wrapped in a number of emotive layers that have to do with issues that are often rooted in a sense of personal belonging, balance, connectedness even with the physical landscape involved. Although these and other issues are not always foreseen by the artist, they are often present in the creative process, and certainly can be seen or felt in the finished piece.
Illustration: Walter Leistikow. Markische Landschaft mit Bauerngehoft und See, c1898.
To observe a landscape interpreted by a creative artist is one thing, to understand the connectedness that that particular artist has imbued into a specific landscape interpretation is another matter entirely. The observer can only be that, an observer. Even if they are familiar with the specific place and even perhaps the time, it will still be a matter of personal emotive issues that colour their own interpretation of the work, rather than a real connectedness with the artist.
In this way we can admire the landscape work of Leistikow for example, but we can never appreciate the full depth of meaning. We are strangers in an emotional landscape created by the artist, a marriage of one individual to an environment. As long as we are aware of this then it does not really alter our appreciation of the artist's creative work, but it does, in some ways, forever lock us out of the emotionally intimate connectedness that was only his to experience. That he agreed to pass on the more generalised connections to others and in some small way to pass on the experience, is his legacy.
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