The sky is usually a main element, and weather often plays a key role in the overall total composition. Landscape paintings refer to the depiction of natural scenery, such as bodies of water, mountains, forests, and valleys. The tradition of contemporary landscape painting has been explored by artists such as Milton Avery, Peter Doig, David Hockney and Andrew Wyeth. Ironically, though, they had difficulty selling their works in the art market, which still preferred history paintings and portraits. By the beginning of the 19th century, the English artists held in highest esteem were landscapists, such as Constable and J.M.W. From the late 18th century through the 19th century, landscape paintings came to be linked with technical advances in painting, as the Impressionists in France and the naturalistic scenes of John Constable pushed the boundaries of the genre. Instead, they lauded the landscapes of artists such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin they did not attempt to capture a true landscape, but rather to compositionally organize nature in order to produce an emotional response from the viewer. These paintings were frowned upon by the French Academy, who saw scenes simply copying nature as lacking imagination. Dutch painters were responsible for the development of very subtle realist techniques for capturing light and weather with paint. His freeform, expressive style reveals the subjectivity of this memory and finishes the composition with a transient, dream-like atmosphere.Landscape backgrounds have appeared in paintings since the Middle Ages, but did not emerge as a specific genre until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Guided by his memory, Surdo recalls the trees as soft, gentle and calm, leaning in on each other in a tender embrace. Restricting the composition to only a portion of the tree trunks, Surdo accentuates their abstract forms and focuses on the simple beauty of their graceful movements.
The light-colored trees are contrasted by a dark backdrop, a void of negative that isolates the trees in space and time. The horizontal motion of the sketch-like linework captures the striated texture of birch bark, punctuated by the irregular forms of its eye-shaped markings. Loosely drawn with short, lateral strokes, the drawing depicts the slow process of two trees fusing together as a graceful gesture of physical touch. This charcoal drawing entitled “Fusion” beautifully illustrates the collision of two young birch trees. Applying his mastery of figurative realism to the natural world, he experiments with form and texture to uncover the intangible spirits of trees.
Depicting trees from personal encounters, Surdo’s latest body of work entitled “Tree Spirits” takes us on a foray into the forest, where leaves, branches and burls express something deeply personal. With strong command of the human form, Surdo creates dynamic compositions of people and places that communicate a rich commentary on the world around him. Surdo is classically trained in drawing and oil painting in the tradition of Renaissance masters.
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