Abstract landscape painting: a beginner's guide to interpreting place, not just copying it
If you’ve ever stood in front of an abstract landscape painting and thought “I’d love to paint like that, but I wouldn’t know where to start” — this guide is for you.
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Abstract landscape painting is one of the most rewarding ways I know to respond to the world around you. It’s not about removing everything recognisable from a scene. It’s about interpreting your experience of a place rather than copying what’s in front of you. And that distinction — between copying and interpreting — is where everything changes.
I’ve been painting abstract landscapes for years now, and I still find it the most honest way to capture what it actually feels like to stand somewhere. The wind, the weight of a hill, the way light moves across water. A photograph records what a place looks like. A painting can record what it felt like to be there.
So if you’re curious about trying this, or if you’ve already started and feel a bit lost, let me walk you through how I think about it — from the very beginning.
What makes a landscape painting abstract?
This is the question that trips people up most, so let’s get it out of the way early.
Abstract landscape painting doesn’t mean you throw paint at a canvas and hope for the best. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing recognisable in the work. Most of the paintings I make have a clear sense of place — you can feel the land, the sky, the horizon. What makes them abstract is that I’m not trying to reproduce what I saw. I’m responding to it.
Think of it this way. When you stand on a cliff path and the wind is pushing against you and the sea is huge below, you don’t experience that as a neatly composed rectangle of blues and greens. You experience it as force, scale, movement, sound. Abstract landscape painting tries to get closer to that experience.
So abstract doesn’t mean “no subject.” It means the subject is your response to a place, not the place itself.
Why move beyond painting what you see?
If you’re anything like me, you probably started out trying to paint landscapes as faithfully as possible. And there’s nothing wrong with that — it teaches you a huge amount about colour mixing, tone, composition. It’s valuable work.
But at some point, a lot of painters hit a wall. The paintings look fine. They’re competent. But they don’t feel alive. There’s a gap between the experience of being in a landscape and the painting sitting on the easel, and no amount of careful observation seems to close it.
That gap is what abstract landscape painting addresses. It gives you permission to leave things out. To exaggerate. To respond to what moves you instead of recording what’s there. And when you start doing that, your paintings begin to carry something that no amount of careful copying can achieve — a sense of presence.
The role of observation — you still need to look
Here’s something that surprises a lot of beginners: abstract landscape painting requires more observation, not less.
When you’re painting representationally, you can lean on what you see. You look at the tree, you paint the tree. But when you’re interpreting rather than copying, you have to look much more carefully. You need to understand what you’re responding to before you can translate it into marks.
This is where sketching becomes essential. Not careful drawing — quick, rough, exploratory sketching. Five minutes with a pencil and a small sketchbook. I’m not recording detail. I’m looking for the big shapes, the dominant lines, the essential structure of what’s in front of me. Where’s the energy? What’s the rhythm of the land? What caught my eye in the first place?
A quick sketch strips away everything except the thing that matters. And that’s much closer to a painting than any photograph.
I’d encourage anyone starting out to spend time sketching outdoors before they ever try to make an abstract painting in the studio. Not because the sketches will be beautiful, but because the looking will change how you think.
Materials and approaches that help
You don’t need expensive or exotic materials to start exploring abstract landscape painting, but a few things make a genuine difference.
Work bigger than you think. If you’re used to painting small, try scaling up. Even going from A4 to A2 changes how you use your body, how your marks feel, how freely you can move. Small paintings tend to encourage tightness. Bigger surfaces give you room to be bold.
Try mixed media. Acrylic is a good starting point because it dries fast and you can layer over it. But don’t stop there — try working with charcoal over paint, or oil pastel, or collage. Introduce materials that force you to make different kinds of marks. The variety loosens you up.
Build layers and scrape back. One of the most powerful things in abstract painting is the idea that a painting isn’t made in one pass. You put something down, respond to it, cover parts of it, scrape back to reveal what’s underneath. Each layer carries information. The history of the painting becomes part of the painting.
Use tools beyond brushes. Palette knives, old credit cards, rags, your hands. Different tools make different marks, and mark making is at the heart of expressive painting. Experiment. Play. See what happens when you drag a piece of card through wet paint.
Common mistakes beginners make
I’ve worked with hundreds of painters through my courses and Noble Art membership, and I see the same handful of mistakes coming up again and again. They’re all completely understandable, and they’re all fixable.
Trying to be abstract from the start. This is the big one. People think abstract means you don’t need a subject, so they start with a blank canvas and no plan. The result usually feels empty or decorative. The best abstract landscape paintings are abstracted from something. You need a starting point — a place, a sketch, a memory, a feeling. The abstraction comes from how you interpret it, not from avoiding subject matter altogether.
Being too precious. If you’re afraid to cover up something that’s working, you’ll never discover what’s underneath. Abstract painting requires a willingness to lose things in order to find better things. Some of the strongest passages in a painting only emerge after you’ve painted over them and scraped back.
Not enough contrast. Beginners often stay in a comfortable mid-range — everything is roughly the same tone, the same scale of mark, the same energy. A painting needs tension. Dark against light. Big marks against small. Calm areas next to busy ones. That contrast is what gives a painting life.
Stopping too soon. Or sometimes stopping too late. Knowing when a painting is finished is genuinely difficult, and it takes practice. My advice: if the painting feels comfortable and safe, it probably needs more. If it feels like it’s about to fall apart, step back and look before you add anything else.
From landscape to painting — how my process works
Everyone develops their own way of working, but it might help to see how I move from standing in a place to having a finished painting.
I go to a place and I pay attention. Not with a camera, or at least not primarily. I walk, I look, I notice what draws me. It might be the sweep of a hillside, the texture of weathered stone, the way a horizon sits against the sky.
I sketch. Quick marks. Usually several small sketches from different angles or focusing on different things. These aren’t artworks — they’re notes. They capture the structure and energy of what I’m responding to.
I come back to the studio and I start. I’ll work from my sketches and my memory — not from photographs, if I can help it. Photographs flatten everything. Memory and sketches give you the essentials without the distracting detail.
I build the painting in layers. The first marks are big and loose — establishing the basic structure, the weight of the composition, the dominant colours. Then I respond to what’s there. Add. Take away. Scrape back. Introduce different materials. Let the painting develop its own logic.
I step back constantly. The painting tells you what it needs if you give it space. Some of the best decisions happen when you stop painting and just look.
Where to go from here
If any of this has sparked something for you, the best thing to do is start. Get a big sheet of paper, some paint, and have a go. Don’t worry about the result. Worry about the process — the looking, the responding, the willingness to experiment.
If you’d like more structured guidance, my Abstracted Landscape course walks you through the whole process step by step — from observation and sketching right through to finished paintings. It’s designed for painters who want to move from representational work into something more expressive and personal.
I also have course bundles if you want to explore different subjects, and the Noble Art membership is a brilliant community of painters all working through similar questions.
And if you want to see the process in action before you commit to anything, I’ve made a YouTube video that covers a lot of the ideas in this guide.
The most important thing I can tell you is this: you don’t need to be “good at abstract art” to start. You just need to be curious about what happens when you stop copying and start responding. Everything grows from there.
Lewis
See also:Abstract Landscape Painting — Guides, Courses & Inspiration
