What do we mean by abstract?

To me abstracting the landscape is about making marks, tones, shapes and colours to express some of the experience of being in the landscape. How much this looks like an obvious landscape is very much a convention of painting tradition, rather than any thing else.

What do we mean by representational landscape painting? Monet & Constable for example could both be seen as traditional landscape artists but they're wildly different. Do we perhaps mean something that could be photographic? However photographs aren't real either. They are a 2D image of a 3D world and can be manipulated to look like anything you want. This was true in the film days and is even more true today with modern technology.

Representational painting is really a matter of tradition and what we're used to & conditioned to seeing. Impressionists in their day were viewed with scorn by the prevailing tastes and institutions but with historical detachment, are by far the most popular today.

How does this help us? As painters in the 21stC we are able to do anything we want. All the rules have been broken and now we can pick and choose from the history of art. For me it's all about composition. The looking, drawing and painting are the ingredients for our compositions. Direct painting from the landscape grounds our work in reality because we were there, we experienced it.

Composing images from that work is when you can decide if your work is more or less abstracted. You can experiment by positioning elements anywhere in the frame. Or break out of the frame entirely.

Rotate your sketches & paintings or add things where they don't belong just to see if they work. (you can always tell if something feels right)

Combine marks from different sketches and places to represent the passage of time. It's all about making images that express something about your experience. A colour, a shape or line,

Being outside sketching is the reality, composition is the abstraction.