A look at how contemporary landscape painting is shifting in response to climate change, and why abstraction is becoming a critical language for it.
Landscape Is No Longer Stable
For most of art history, landscape has been treated as something stable, observed, interpreted, and translated into image. Even when stylized or abstracted, it carried an underlying assumption: that the natural world followed rhythms we could trust. Seasons returned. Light shifted in familiar ways. Horizons held.
That assumption no longer feels fixed.
Today, landscape exists in a state of visible change. Weather patterns are less predictable. Coastlines shift. Heat, drought, and rising water alter environments that once felt enduring. The experience of being in nature has changed, and with it, the question of how to approach contemporary landscape painting.