Albert Serino: Landscape Across The Centuries

Who is Albert Serino?

Albert Serino is a Brooklyn-based painter, specialized in landscape, one of the Western’s art principal types or genres of subject.

Serino draws his inspiration from the art historical traditions as diverse as Chinese landscape painting, Surrealism and Folk Art. This painter is widely recognized as one of New York’s most important plein air impressionist artists. He began his career as an art director in Brooklyn, New York. Later, for over 12 years, Serino served as instructor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His paintings have been presented to a number of exhibitions in the most prestigious galleries across the USA, Canada and Europe. Recently, he is preparing an exhibition in Brooklyn to present his new series of paintings. Serino dedicates to painting full-time, since 1990’s as well as to conducting landscape painting classes out of his studio in Brooklyn. Moreover, Serino has been studying the evolution of landscape painting across the centuries.

Here, the painter shares some information about this genre.

The Evolution of Landscape Painting Across the Centuries Explained by Serino

According to Albert Serino, the appreciation of nature for its own sake, and its choice as a specific subject for art, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Landscape was confined to the background of portraits or paintings, until the seventeenth century, dealing principally with religious, mythological or historical subjects.

As Albert Serino explains, the landscape background began to dominate the history subjects in the work of the seventeenth-century painters Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin. The history subjects were the ostensible basis for the work. However, their treatment of landscape was highly stylized or artificial. These painters tried to evoke the landscape of classical Greece and Rome. Their artworks became known as classical landscape. Meanwhile, a much more naturalistic form of landscape painting was developed by Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruysdael, based on what they saw around them.

Also, in the seventeenth century, the French Academy classified the genres of art. Landscape has been placed fourth in order of importance out of five genres. However, although the classical idea predominated, landscape painting became increasingly popular through the eighteenth century.

Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century there was a remarkable explosion of naturalistic landscape painting. It was partly driven by the notion that nature is a direct manifestation of God and also partly by the increasing alienation of many people from nature by growing industrialization and urbanization.

As Albert Serino shares, the two outstanding contributors to this phenomenon are John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, from Britain.

Then, the baton passed to France. There in the hands of the impressionists, landscape painting became the vehicle for a revolution in Western painting (modern art) and the traditional hierarchy of the genres collapsed.

Furthermore, Albert Serino points out that the definition of landscape was challenged, over the second half of the twentieth century. The genre expanded to include urban and industrial landscapes. Artists began to use less traditional media in the creation of landscape works. Land artists, such as Richard Long, over the course of the 1960s, radically changed the relationship between landscape and art by creating artworks directly within the landscape.

Serino's Overview of Today's Landscape Painting

Nowadays, landscape continues to be a major theme in art. As Serino claims, in order to explore the ways we relate to the places we live in and to record the impact we have on the land and our environment, many artists, use documentary techniques such as video, photography and classification processes.

Serino studies the nature, observing the ever changing light of day. He takes photos and brings them to his atelier in Brooklyn to paint.