Landscapes

Landscapes

5 November 2023

I have a fondness for landscape art.  They have a cross-cultural appeal for me; I mean that when I discovered East Asian landscapes I was, and remain, very taken by them.  Years ago I visited the Asian Arts Museum in San Francisco for a showing of Taoist art.  I recall a large landscape of a village under full moon light that radiated a feeling of energy, or chi, that was physically palpable.  One of the intriguing things about the painting is that the moon from which the moonlight poured over the village was behind the observer, the moon wasn’t actually in the painting.  This design made me feel like I was standing there with the full moon behind me, looking at the village.  The painting had a deeply serene and contemplative feeling, as if the painter was offering us a symbol of an interior state of contemplation.

Recently I was having a kind of reverie about some landscape paintings I have enjoyed.  One came to mind of a sunrise over a forest.  I don’t recall the artist, but there are lots of landscapes on this theme.  The sun was not at the horizon; the time was probably an hour or two after the sunrise began so that there was space between the sun and the earth.  In that space a flock of birds flies across the sky.  This means that there are three regions of the landscape: first was the sun and sky, the second was the flock of birds and the sky between the sun and the earth, the third was the earth which in this landscape was a forest with some hills and a flowing river which, if I recall correctly, was on the right hand side of the painting. 

Recollecting the painting I realized it was a symbol of the three hypostases that Platonism uses to depict, explain, and unpack the metaphysical cosmos.  The sun is often used as a symbol of the One.  Just as the One is the creator of all existing things, both visible and invisible, both material and non-material, so the Sun is the source of all things on the Earth by providing the Earth with energy and warmth that makes life possible.

The flock of birds function as a symbol of the Noetic; they are between the One and the third hypostasis of the Earth, as are clouds among which birds fly.  Flocks of birds often move in unison, turning together, for example, as if they have some kind of shared mind.  This symbolizes the nature of the unity that is found in the Noetic.

The Earth symbolizes material reality and its constant changes by seasonal and other cycles of time.  The huge variety of earthly things represents that this realm is the realm of differentiation.

In the painting I was recalling the rays of the sun are explicitly drawn so that the birds fly through them and they also touch the earth.  This emphasizes the symbolic nature of the landscape as a depiction of hypostatic reality.

I think my mind was prepared for seeing the painting in this way, in my mind’s eye, because I had been contemplating the three levels of reality, or hypostases, of the Platonic system; meaning I had used this structure as an object of focus while engaging in contemplation.  I think this allowed me to ‘see’ the painting in this symbolic way.

But who knows?  Maybe the artist was a Platonist and created the painting as a conscious effort to transmit to the observer metaphysical realities.  Probably not; but since metaphysical realities are beyond time and space, and since they permeate all of existence, perhaps these higher realities made their presence known to the artist in a spontaneous, or unconscious way.

I think I will start searching for that painting online and see if I can find it.  It would make a good addition to a sacred space devoted to contemplation.