Sacajawea Mountain -- Oil on Canvas: 12x12

The words one chooses to describe a particular item or concept are important, and with the flexibility and adaptability of the English languge, we who speak this tongue are frequently able to choose the precise word we need to accurately convey our message.

With this in mind, I want to look at the term landscape in view of its meaning in the art world. A composite of land and scape, the obvious sense of the word is the representation, somehow, of land -- trees, mountains, hills, rivers, meadows, grasslands -- elements involved with the earth. To distinguish from ocean scenes, which don't have a lot of land in them, we use the term seascapes or oceanscapes when the view involves a lot of water; marine art also gives the reader a reasonable idea of what to expect.

Now, however, we enter the realm of urban scenes -- buildings, streets, subways, buses, sidewalks, shops, alleyways, graffiti, park benches. Are paintings that represent these scenes landscapes?

If you look at contemporary competitions and artist magazines, the answer would appear to be yes, since many of these venues showcase "landscapes" that focus on the inner workings of the modern metropolis.

As a painter who appreciates the rapidly disappearing tracts of unspoiled land, however, I take umbrage at this lumping of manmade environment in with the natural one, annoucing that all of these are landscapes, only, in the case of cityscapes, the skyscrapers replace mountains, the municipal water system represents rivers, the acres of glass stand in for sky, Any land involved in these scenes is pretty much confined to the dust on pedestrians' shoes.

Despite this era of poltical correctness, there is fortunately still no official language police, so whether to call a cityscape a landscape is a personal choice -- and my personal choice is, no, a cityscape is not a landscape, because its primary focus is not to highlight the elements of land, but rather, to focus on the engineering feats and lifestyle energy of a place where a lot of people live. To deny that that there is a difference between the two is misleading and marginalizes the sometimes intense feelings that different people have about the environment in which they choose to live -- rural people have some pretty strong feelings about where they lives, as do their urban counterparts -- and these feelings go back a long way, as evidenced by the children's fable, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

This mouse enjoys the coutnry -- that's why I paint it.