Capturing the Spirit of Nature: Abstract Landscape Styles Explored
- Charlotte Wensley
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
Nature has always been a profound source of inspiration for artists. The beauty of landscapes, the changing seasons, and the interplay of light and shadow evoke emotions that transcend the literal.
Abstract landscapes take this inspiration a step further by transforming natural scenes into expressive forms and colours. This approach allows artists to capture the essence of nature without being confined to realistic representation.
I've been exploring this idea with en plein air sketching, printmaking from organic materials and exploring different ways to incorporate shapes that speak to me from the landscape, in my latest work.
This exploratory work has prompted me to take a look at the different ways abstract artists create a sense of place in their work and present their responses to landscape in paint.
| The Essence of Abstract Landscapes
Abstract landscapes tend to focus on the mood, movement, and energy of a scene rather than its exact details. Instead of painting every tree or rock, artists use shapes, lines, and often simplified blocks of colour colour to suggest features in the environment.
For example, an abstract landscape might use sweeping brushstrokes to represent rolling hills or bold splashes of colour to evoke a sunlit scene. The goal being to capture the feeling of being in nature rather than a photographic likeness of it.
As artists we often draw inspiration from specific locations but interpret them through our own unique perspective; resulting in a wide range of styles, from soft and subtle to vibrant and dramatic, but all with one thing in common - they are evocative of time spent in nature.
| Abstract Landscape Styles
Whilst its probably almost impossible to categorise the many and varied styles of abstract landscape painting - here are a few thoughts on commonalties of some visual styles found within the genre of abstract landscape.
Color Field Landscapes
This style is characterised by landscapes that are reduced to atmospheric washes, gradients, and broad colour blocks.
Tracy Helgerson’s abstract landscape style employs limited colour palettes and serves to explore colour interactions within simplified compositions. Her paintings capture the essence of natural environments rather than very literal depictions, using gentle forms and repeated motifs to suggest landscape features and terrain. There’s a meditative, atmospheric quality to her compositions, inviting you to experience the rhythm, movement, and emotional resonance of a place. Helgerson’s work balances intuitive expression with careful composition, creating landscapes that feel both dynamic and contemplative.
Minimalist / Reductionist Landscapes
Paintings in this abstract landscape style often feature stripped-back horizons and simple uncomplicated shapes with compositions which incorporate a strong sense of spatial balance, helping to evoke a feeling of calm and a sense of quiet. These paintings carry a gentle persuasion or suggestion of time and place.
Sandy Ostrau’s painting style often draws inspiration from natural landscapes and atmospheric phenomena. She uses layers of paint and subtle colour shifts to evoke a sense of space. Her paintings balance gestural energy with contemplative calm, capturing the essence and rhythm of a place rather than its literal appearance. Through her work, Ostrau explores the interplay between emotion, memory, and the natural world, creating compositions that feel both intimate and expansive.
Gestural / Expressionist Landscapes
These works are characterised by energetic marks and sweeping strokes, visually exploring what feels more like emotional rather than literal terrain, though the work is imbued with a strong sense of place.
Uk painter David Mankin’s work is rooted in expressive abstraction, exploring landscape and natural forms through coastal inspired colour and dynamic brushwork. His paintings balance energy and contemplation, with layers of pigment creating depth, texture, and movement. Rather than representing specific locations, Mankin conveys the feeling and atmosphere of a place, inviting you to engage emotionally with his compositions. His use of colour and form is intuitive, resulting in works that are both visually striking, evocative and often reminiscent of the sea and his coastal surroundings.
Geometric / Structured Landscapes
These landscapes are distilled into grids and planes with predominantly architectural shapes and structured compositions.
Vancouver-based artist Elyse Dodge reimagines local mountain ranges as otherworldly landscapes made of colorful geometric shapes. Inspired by British Columbia’s incredible beauty, Dodge reveals that her aim is to “capture the vibrant beauty of the landscapes that we call home.” Using a bold color palette, her contemporary landscape paintings explore the contrast between hard and soft by highlighting the diverse shapes found in nature. Cliffs, hills, and peaks rendered with crisp graphic lines are juxtaposed against the organic, soft textures of the trees.
Textural / Mixed-Media Landscapes
This abstract landscape style of surface-led works with are often laden with collage, textured layers of paint and mediums and organic matter creating opportunities for working into the surface with tools to create scratches and marks in the surface suggesting geography, topography and a sense of environment.
Dennis Alter’s work is known for its use of heavily textured surfaces often inspired by landscapes and natural forms. He layers paint to create textured, dynamic surfaces allowing the composition to physically emerge from the painting surface. Rather than depicting a scene literally, Alter conveys the feeling and atmosphere of a place, using texture and colour imbued with a strong sense of rhythm. His paintings balance spontaneity with compositional awareness, resulting in works that are both visually striking and emotionally resonant.
Tonal / Atmospheric Abstractions
Soft transitions, foggy horizons, light-driven, almost dreamlike paintings characterise this style of abstract painting. They carry a strong sense of emotion and atmospheric space.
Robert Roth’s work explores abstracted landscapes through bold colour, layered textures, and subtle gestural mark-making. He often emphasizes the emotional and atmospheric qualities of a place rather than literal representation, using expressive strokes and textured surfaces to evoke terrain, water, and sky. Roth’s compositions balance energy and calm, creating a sense of movement and depth that invites you to experience the rhythm and essence of the natural world. His approach merges abstraction with a strong connection to landscape, turning visual motifs into a language of feeling.
Organic / Biomorphic Landscape
These abstracts explore fluid shapes inspired by natural elements such as water and earth; often with themes that speak to growth, erosion and environmental atmosphere.
Muriel Napoli’s work is characterized by abstraction with fluid, gestural paintwork. She explores landscape and natural forms, using colour, layered textures, and dynamic movement to evoke an atmospheric sense of place. Her paintings balance energy and subtlety, creating compositions that feel both spontaneous and carefully considered. Napoli’s work invites you to experience the essence of a place—its mood, rhythm, and light—rather than a literal depiction.
Lyrical Abstraction Landscapes
These paintings typically have a gentle poetic feel with compositions that suggest place through colour placement. Shapes and forms speak to the environment with a sense of movement and rhythm, evoking a strong feeling of mood within the landscape.
Milton Avery (1885 - 1965) was an American painter known for his simple but powerful use of colour. His pared-down landscapes are poetic in their simplicity, letting each colour do the heavy lifting. There’s a timeless quality to his work, it's gentle but powerful. His placement of saturated colour guides your eye gently around the composition.
Symbolic / Motif-Based Landscapes
These landscapes are built from repeated shapes (often, but not limited to raindrops, arcs, loops, lines) that hold symbolic meaning for the artist.
Joan Miró’s symbolic landscapes transform natural forms into a playful, dreamlike abstraction. Using repeated motifs, organic shapes, and floating symbols, he evokes horizons, mountains, and skies without literal depiction. His compositions are poetic, rhythmic, and full of movement, turning the landscape into a visual language of emotion, memory, and imagination.
Hard-Edge Abstract Landscapes
These paintings often feature crisp boundaries, bold blocks of colour and refined geometric interpretations of land and sky, creating spatial abstracts that speak to a sense of place.
Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series is celebrated for its harmonious blend of abstraction and landscape inspiration. The paintings feature geometric planes, crisp lines, and layered fields of colour, evoking the light, space, and atmosphere of Southern California without depicting it literally. Diebenkorn carefully balances structure and spontaneity, creating compositions that feel both ordered and luminous. The works convey a sense of place, rhythm, and serenity, transforming abstraction into a visual meditation on landscape and perception.
Fragmented / Collaged Landscapes
Landscapes broken into obvious segments with overlapping fields, or assembled viewpoints are a feature of these paintings or mixed media works.
Etel Adnan’s work transforms landscapes into bold, simplified visions of colour and form. Using vibrant, flat planes she distills mountains, horizons, and skies into abstract compositions. Her paintings convey both a sense of place and an emotional resonance, capturing the essence of a landscape rather than its literal details. There’s a meditative and lyrical quality to her work, where colour becomes the language of memory, light, and atmosphere.
Horizon-Focused Abstractions
Paintings in this style often see the composition organised around the horizon line which result in the exploration of tension and balance through colour contrast, form and line.
Caroline Marshall’s work explores abstracted landscapes through layered textures, blocks of colour, and gestural mark-making. She often emphasizes the atmosphere and emotional resonance of a place, rather than its literal depiction finding horizons, colour and textures to evoke land, water, and sky. Her paintings balance energy and calm, inviting viewers to experience the rhythm, movement, and mood of natural environments. Marshall’s approach combines intuitive expression with careful composition, creating landscapes that feel both dynamic and contemplative.
Emotional / Intuitive Landscapes
These pieces tend to be process-led paintings where the sense of “place” emerges from a feeling about the work and personal response to it rather than observation.
Lewis Noble’s work blends abstraction with natural forms, creating landscapes that feel both grounded and ethereal. He often explores texture, layering paint to evoke the rhythms and patterns of land, water, and sky. His compositions balance fluidity and structure, suggesting the essence of a place rather than its literal appearance. There’s a contemplative quality in his work—a quiet energy that draws you into the subtle interplay of colour, form, and atmosphere.
Atmospheric Light Studies
These paintings are often focused on the interplay of light and colour with supporting composition to help imbue paintings with a strong sense of place, without literal representation.
Kate Trafelli's paintings use luminous colour expressive composition, and gestural brushwork to evoke emotion and narrative. Her work draws from personal memory, literature, music, magical realism, and both natural and built environments.
Contemporary Mixed-Axis Landscapes
These landscapes are often composed vertically, diagonally, from an aerial or distorted viewpoint or created in layers that appear to offer a combination of perspectives within the same painting.
John Olsen’s work is alive with movement, colour, and a sense of joyous curiosity. His paintings often feel like living maps—vibrating with meandering lines, pools of colour, and energetic marks that trace the rhythms of the Australian landscape. Rather than depicting place literally, Olsen captures its spirit: the heat, the buzzing life, the expansiveness, and the way water and sky intertwine. His work is playful yet deeply observant, celebrating the landscape as something dynamic, shifting, and full of character.
| Final thoughts
With such a diverse range of ways to interpret the landscape, it’s no wonder that landscapes lend themselves so beautifully to abstraction. We can explore texture, colour, and form to evoke the essence of a place rather than its literal appearance.
Whether through horizon-focused compositions, fluid gestures, symbolic motifs, or hard-edged planes, abstract landscapes invite viewers to experience the natural world in new, emotional, and imaginative ways.
The endless opportunities presented by the landscape for highly personal creative interpretation will ensure it remains a rich and inspiring subject and source of reference for abstract artists for the rest of time.
I look forward to seeing where my latest abstract interpretations of landscape take me, I'm up for the journey!
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