A Return to Landscape
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
September 12th, 2026
By Diamond Kyle
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
An artist can spend decades unlearning how to paint a tree. He can dismantle perspective, abandon recognizable objects, separate colour from description and teach himself to regard the canvas as a thing rather than a surface for creation. Then, sometimes much later in life, the tree makes its way back. It happened to a surprising number of painters shaped by twentieth-century abstraction. What makes these paintings interesting is not simply that their makers eventually reconsidered landscape, because artists change subjects all the time, but rather after abstraction, landscape could no longer mean quite what it had meant before.
For painters who came of age in the middle decades of the twentieth century, this was not a small distinction. Abstraction had acquired a distinctive position in the art world. Painting was no longer obliged to describe the visible world; colour, gesture, surface and form could constitute a reality of their own. In certain circles, the abandonment of representation seemed less like one artistic choice among many than the logical destination of modern painting. Once the mountain had disappeared into colour and shape, putting it back into the picture could look suspiciously like turning around.
Landscape carried particular baggage. It was among the oldest and most familiar genres in Western art, and in Canada it had been asked to perform an unusually heavy cultural task. By the early twentieth century, wilderness imagery had become entangled with ideas of national character. The Group of Seven and their circle had helped establish a visual vocabulary of lakes, rock, forest and northern light that came to stand, however imperfectly, for something recognizably Canadian. The landscape was no longer merely a subject; it had become an argument about who Canadians imagined themselves to be.
That inheritance eventually became a problem of its own. A younger generation inherited not only the landscape but the expectation that Canadian art should somehow continue to explain Canada through it. By the postwar period, artists increasingly looked outward toward New York, Europe and an international modernism that seemed less burdened by national description. Abstraction offered entry into that wider conversation; it allowed a Canadian painter to participate in questions about colour, gesture, material and perception without having to produce yet another image of northern wilderness.
There was therefore a peculiar identity crisis embedded in the shift. Canada was still searching for a modern cultural identity, but the very imagery that had helped establish a distinctive national art could also make Canadian painting appear regional or provincial. To become more internationally modern, artists sometimes had to loosen their attachment to the visual language that had made Canadian art recognizable in the first place.
As the youngest member of the Regina Five, Ted Godwin was part of a generation that helped establish abstraction as a serious force in Canadian art. His work moved through Abstract Expressionism and into the highly structured Tartan paintings for which he became known, paintings in which colour and rhythm took precedence over recognisable subject matter. Decades later, however, Godwin turned increasingly toward the western Canadian landscape, particularly the Bow River.
Godwin’s later landscapes are not the work of someone who simply decided that abstraction had been a youthful error. The visual intelligence developed through abstraction remained intact: the organisation of colour, the movement of repeated forms, the push and pull of space and mass. Trees and reflections could now perform the work once carried by bands, grids and chromatic intervals. The landscape was the subject of the image, but abstraction continued to govern the way the image was built.
Kenneth Lochhead, another member of the Regina Five, followed a similarly complicated route. His career passed through gestural abstraction, hard-edge painting and colour fields before recognizable subjects reappeared. Later came gardens, birds, clouds and the densely wooded landscape around Gatineau. These works can look, at first, like evidence of a painter moving away from the rigours of modernism and back toward the visible world. Yet the more closely one looks, the less persuasive that division becomes.
A painter does not spend decades thinking about the independent life of colour and then suddenly forget it because he felt a closeness to landscape painting; the landscape is simply altered by everything that came before. A tree trunk becomes a vertical interval, a branch now becomes a directional mark, and areas of sky open and close the composition. The landscape is still a place, but it has also become an arrangement of energy and composition.
This is why using the word “return” can be misleading. It suggests that the artist retraces his steps and arrives somewhere familiar, when in fact the earlier place no longer exists. The subject may be old, but the eye, the perception is not.
In the early 1950s, Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings belonged to Abstract Expressionism. Then, in the middle of that decade, figures, interiors and landscapes suddenly reappeared. The move ran against the prevailing assumption that serious painting ought to be progressing away from representation, yet Diebenkorn did not paint California as though modernism had never happened. Roads became wedges, fields became slabs of colour, walls and horizons divided the picture with the severity of abstract composition.
Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #57, 1955. Oil on canvas, 149.4 × 149.4 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Years later, he would move back toward abstraction in the Ocean Park paintings. His career therefore refuses the neat sequence we often impose on artists: representation, breakthrough, abstraction, maturity. He moved in both directions; each passage altered the next.
There is something revealing in our desire to make artistic careers behave otherwise. Art history often rewards coherence. We look for the decisive moment when an artist finds the language that will become recognizably his own, and from there we expect development to proceed with some degree of consistency. Museums, critics and markets all benefit from the idea that an artist eventually becomes himself.
Artists, inconveniently, do not always cooperate. They abandon successful ideas, retrieve subjects they once dismissed, contradict statements made twenty years earlier. Occasionally they discover that what once seemed exhausted has become difficult again.
Age may be part of the explanation. Younger artists often work under intense pressure to locate themselves within the present; they inherit arguments about what art should be, what has already been done and which possibilities are still considered alive. To make a painting is therefore also, to some degree, to declare a position. In a period when abstraction carried tremendous intellectual prestige, painting a conventional landscape could appear almost ideological: a refusal of progress, or an admission that the artist had stepped outside the conversation.
That pressure does not necessarily survive an entire career. An older painter may have less need to prove that he belongs to the present because he has already lived through several versions of it. Movements once proclaimed as inevitable begin to look historical. The supposedly obsolete can become available again, not because the artist has become nostalgic, but because the prohibition has lost its authority, and there is an appealing freedom in that.
What returns, however, is not the landscape as it existed before abstraction. Once colour has been considered independently of objects, once a canvas has been understood as a field of relationships rather than a window onto the world, those lessons cannot simply be put aside, because they alter the act of looking itself. The tree may again be recognizable as a tree, but it is also an arrangement of verticals and diagonals; the river is water and horizontal movement; snow is a weather phenomenon and also an opening of negative space. Perhaps that is abstraction’s most enduring contribution to landscape painting, it did not kill the genre, it simply made innocence impossible.
Once painters had learned to see a canvas as a field of relationships, the world outside the canvas began to look different too. A road could simultaneously lead toward a distant place and cut an angular shape into the foreground. Dense woods could become repetition, rhythm and interruption. Reflections could fracture solid objects into unstable fields of colour. The visible world, looked at long enough, turns out to contain a remarkable amount of abstraction.
Takao Tanabe will celebrate his 100th birthday on September 16. To mark this remarkable milestone, Equinox Gallery has opened Spatial Abstractions, on view through October 17.
There is also a deeper tension between the two traditions. Abstraction often carried an aspiration toward universality. Geometry, gesture or colour might transcend a particular landscape, culture or narrative. Landscape does the opposite, because however loosely painted, it contains the possibility of here: this river rather than another, this line of hills, this quality of light. It is geographically specific.
There is another reason landscape may acquire a different significance later in an artist’s life. A place known for decades is not the same place each time it is encountered, trees disappear, buildings rise, rivers alter course, and familiar views accumulate their own history. The painter changes alongside them.
This may be one reason landscape exerts such unusual pressure on artists late in their careers, it contains time without having to illustrate it. To paint a place repeatedly is also to measure the distance between the person who first saw it and the person who now stands before it.
None of this means that every abstract painter who later turned toward landscape was engaged in the same project. Willem de Kooning, for example, complicates the category almost immediately, as landscape entered his work repeatedly, particularly after his move to Long Island, but it never returned in the straightforward sense of recognizable scenery replacing abstraction. Nature instead permeated the abstraction itself: light, water, roads, vegetation and bodily movement became entangled in paint. Jean Paul Riopelle poses a similar problem. The natural world was never entirely absent from his abstraction, which makes it difficult to say that he ever truly came back to it.
The closer one looks at painters who supposedly returned to landscape, the harder it becomes to determine exactly what they returned from, perhaps the division between abstraction and representation mattered most while artists were actively fighting over it. From a greater distance, the boundary becomes surprisingly porous. A painting can describe a forest and remain intensely concerned with the autonomous behaviour of colour. A mountain can be recognisable and still function primarily as shape. The artist does not have to choose between seeing the world and seeing the painting.
That may explain why the later landscapes of these artists seldom feel like acts of retreat. They have not gone backwards to recover something abandoned in youth. They have arrived at an older subject carrying everything learned in the meantime. An artist can spend decades trying to get the world out of painting, only to discover eventually that the world was never the problem; the real question was how to see it. And after abstraction, even the tree that comes back is no longer the same tree.
We also wanted to draw attention to Intricate Terrain at Marion Scott/Robert Kardosh Gallery, which brings together works on paper by Zachari Logan and Qavavau Manumie, including collaborative drawings that grew out of Logan’s 2025 residency at Kinngait Studios. The exhibition places these joint works alongside individual pieces by both artists, creating a thoughtful dialogue between two distinct practices. Robert Kardosh has hung the exhibition with his characteristic elegance and restraint, giving each work enough space to register while maintaining a strong sense of rhythm and cohesion throughout the gallery.
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