Semi-abstract landscape prints suggest place through colour and shape rather than a fully literal view. Browse the Semi-abstract landscape collection when you are ready to buy.
| 75 works · 12 artists · 6 sizes · from £52.50 | |
| Most represented | Paul Duncan, 38 works |
|---|---|
| Shape of the collection | landscape 59 · portrait 4 |
| Best-suited wall | Wide. Above a sofa, sideboard or bed. |
One painter, half the collection
Thirty-eight of the seventy-five works here are Paul Duncan's, which makes this the most single-voiced collection on the site after the small artist editions — and it is worth knowing because his method is the clearest statement of what semi-abstract landscape means.
He works in bands. A field of colour in the lower frame, a pale sky above, and a thin strip of something between them doing all the work of telling you what you are looking at — rooftops in Mirror, a line of blue and green in Resound, broken lilac and cream strokes building an estuary in Reflect. The titles are single words and that is deliberate: the pictures are not about places.
Chris Forsey is the second contributor, with eleven works here, and comes at it from the opposite side — still recognisably a wood or a stream, but painted loosely enough that the colour leads. Spring walk, The Alne and Vibrant Purples are characteristic. If Duncan is landscape reduced toward abstraction, Forsey is landscape painted toward it.
Twelve artists in total. After those two the rest is a long tail — Tania Bello has eight, Dan Hobday four, and nobody else more than two — so a matched pair is straightforward in Duncan or Forsey and almost impossible anywhere else.
The point at which land stops being described
The category names a threshold rather than a style, and the threshold is useful: the land is still legible, but it is simplified into bands, colour fields and suggestion rather than description. You can tell it is a shore, or a field, or an estuary. You could not say which. Simplify a landscape and what remains is the horizontal — bands of land, water and sky stacked — and there is almost nothing for a vertical crop to hold on to.
Some of it is photographic rather than painted. Fall Impression uses vertical motion blur to turn a stand of aspens into streaks of white and orange — the camera doing what the brush does elsewhere in the collection.
Why it suits shared rooms
This is the practical argument and it is the reason the genre sells.
A recognisable landscape invites a conversation — where is it, have you been, is that near where you grew up. In a room where the audience is not only you, that can be a liability: a specific place is somebody else's memory and not theirs. A semi-abstract landscape gives you the feeling of somewhere without the fact of it, which is why it turns up in hotels, waiting rooms and open-plan offices more than any other genre.
The same logic applies at home in a sitting room used by a family, and it is why this is a safer gift than a photograph of a particular coast. It is the answer we would give most often for a sitting room two people are choosing together.
Reading one quickly
Three things tell you whether a semi-abstract landscape will work on your wall, and none of them is the subject.
Where the horizon sits. Low horizon means sky-dominated and light; high horizon means land-dominated and heavier. A low horizon lifts a dim room.
How wide the tonal range is. Work built on a narrow range is restful and needs good light to read; work with a genuine dark in it holds up under a single lamp. If the room is used mostly after dark, choose the second.
Whether there is an anchor. The strongest pieces have one small area of concentrated detail or contrast — the strip of rooftops, a dark stand of trees — and the eye goes there and rests. A picture with no anchor at all is decoration rather than a picture, and it stops being interesting faster than you expect.
How hard the edges are tells you the energy. Soft transitions are atmospheric; hard divisions are graphic and hold up better in poor light.
Scale and framing
These go large better than almost anything else here, because there is no detail to lose. A band of colour reproduced at a metre wide is still a band of colour, where a detailed photograph enlarged past its resolution is not. Landscape format outnumbers portrait here by roughly fifteen to one — the most extreme ratio in the catalogue — so this is emphatically wide-wall work. If the wall is narrow, this is the wrong collection and abstract is the right one. A matched pair or a run of three in Duncan's hand is the straightforward route to a hang that reads as one decision.
Keep the frame quiet and the mount generous. The compositions are built on empty space, and a wide mount reads as more of the same rather than as a border — which is exactly what you want. Classic and Deep Classic are 2 cm and suit this work better than the wider Venice or Swoop. A semi-abstract landscape at X-Large simply becomes more atmospheric, because there is no detail to lose.
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