A few days ago I visited the Art League gallery on the first floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few minutes from downtown Washington, DC.

The Art League is one of the Greater Washington, DC area's largest arts organization (and one of the largest in the world), with several thousand artist members. This year they are celebrating their 30th anniversary; Congratulations! To join the Art League, click here.

But I went to catch their annual International Landscape Show, which this year was juried by Prof. Richard Crozier, from the McIntire Dept. of Art at the University of Virginia. Crozier selected 179 works for exhibition from a set of 709 pieces submitted by artists for his review. Crozier is also the author of the book Inventing the Landscape: From Plein Air Study to Studio Painting.

The genre of landscape art, which belongs mostly within the painting genre of the visual arts, has all but disappeared from contemporary art, where I submit the word "contemporary" has been kidnapped by those who dwell in the rarified upper crust of the arts world. In fact, I cannot recall the last time that I saw a contemporary landscape painting show in any of our area museums, although they are still quite common in independent commercial fine arts galleries here and there.

Landscape photography, for some reason, has escaped the total aversion shown by curators and critics to other forms of landscape art, and in fact, many of today's famous Teutonic surnamed photographers, with their gigantic, and mostly boring photographs adorning empty museums, could be categorized as landscape photographers.

But if your personal tastes draw you towards landscape art in general (and of a more intimate size), including painting, then there's no better show around this area than the Art League's annual landscape show.

Crozier awarded the Jay & Helen Risser Award to Drema Apperson for a piece titled "Spring Creeps Up the Mountain: May, Germany Vallery, West Virginia," while the Potomac Valley Watercolorists award went to Sidney Platt for a piece titled "Shadow Play," and the Washington Society of Landscape Painters award went to Audrey Hopkins for a piece titled "October Light."

Article Author: Lenny Campello

F. Lennox Campello is a widely published Washington, DC and Philadelphia based art critic, as well as an award winning artist and curator. He is also often heard on NPR and the Voice of America discussing visual art issues. …

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