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What Does Landscape Mean in a Changing Climate?

That Time of Night, original geometric abstract diptych by Shilo Ratner depicting a fractured horizon at dusk

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.

Why I Use Geometric Abstraction to Respond to Change

For me, this shift doesn't lead to more literal representation. It moves in the opposite direction.

I'm not interested in documenting a specific place or moment. I'm interested in translating what it feels like to stand within a landscape that is no longer entirely stable. That experience, of movement, imbalance, and recalibration, becomes the foundation of the work.

Geometry is how I hold that.

At first glance, structure might suggest control. Clean lines and organized planes can read as fixed or resolved. But in my process, geometry is not about imposing order onto the landscape. It's about responding to instability within it. Each composition is built through adjustment: shifting relationships between forms, testing balance, pushing against collapse, and rebuilding.

This is where geometric abstract landscape painting becomes more, not less, connected to reality.

Beyond Nostalgia: Landscape Painting in the Context of Climate Change

There's a tendency to associate landscape painting with nostalgia, a return to something pure or idealized. That's not what I'm after.

My work is not about preserving an image of nature as it was. It exists within the context of climate change art, where landscape is understood as something actively shifting. The horizon is no longer a passive divider between sky and land. It can tilt, fracture, compress, or expand. It holds tension rather than resolving it.

Color operates the same way. It's not decorative. It's structural. Blues, ochres, and greys are not just references to water, earth, or atmosphere. They carry weight. They suggest density, heat, distance, and environmental shift. They construct a space that feels lived rather than observed.

Finding Structure Within Environmental Instability

Even within this instability, there is still the act of construction.

Each painting is a process of finding structure within flux, not eliminating tension, but holding it. Not resolving change, but creating something that can exist within it. Constraint becomes generative. Edges become points of decision. Space becomes something negotiated rather than fixed.

Landscape, in this context, is no longer just a subject.

It becomes a condition, a field of relationships constantly adjusting between land and air, form and space, control and release. Painting becomes a way of entering that field and asking how we locate ourselves within it now.

The Work: Three Diptychs in Response to a Changing Landscape

This work explores the unstable edge where structure meets disruption. Three new diptychs, Between Two Forms, That Time of Night, and Sand Dune, each take a different landscape as their starting point and arrive at the same question: how do we construct meaning within conditions that are steadily shifting?

Between Two Forms holds two dominant fields in tension across a fractured horizon, built in blue and white. It reflects the shifting states of water, ice, and atmosphere, environments where boundaries between elemental states are becoming less defined.

That Time of Night captures the edge where day dissolves into night, color shifting faster than the eye can register. In the context of a changing climate, dusk is no longer a reliable transition. The geometry organizes that tension rather than erasing it.

Sand Dune extends horizontally across two panels, echoing the sweep of arid terrain increasingly shaped by heat, drought, and desertification. What appears grounded is, in reality, in flux.

Together, the three works form a body of response, not documentation. Each holds instability in balance without resolving it.

Explore the Work

Explore the current collection of geometric abstract landscape paintings to see how these ideas take form. Each piece is a response to a landscape in transition, constructed through color, structure, and the tension of change.

If you're beginning to collect, you can also read more about starting an art collection and how to choose work that holds meaning over time.

Read Also

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Beach 30x30 original geometric abstract painting by Shilo Ratner on white wall
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Most paintings get a title, a price, and a few sentences. This one takes a closer look. Beach is a 30 × 30 geometric abstract painting built from the logic of the shoreline, behavior, not appearance. This is a complete breakdown: where it started, how it was built, what changed, and what most people miss. See Beach in the collection → The Initial Idea The starting point wasn't a visual. It was a behavior. I kept returning to the way water moves at the shoreline, not the look of it, but the logic. The tide doesn't repeat exactly. Each wave recedes at a slightly different angle, leaves a slightly different edge, pulls back with slightly different force. There's a system operating, but it never produces the same result twice. A system needs enough repetition to be legible, but enough variation to stay alive. That tension between system and variation is what I wanted to build into a painting. Not a picture of the beach. A painting that works the way the beach works. Building the System The canvas is square, which matters. A square doesn't have a natural direction. It doesn't push the eye left to right or top to bottom the way a landscape format does. That neutrality was useful here, because the movement had to come entirely from the forms themselves, not from the shape of the support. The composition is built from horizontal bands that shift, compress, and interrupt each other. They function as tidal layers: each one moving at a different rate, overlapping without merging. The eye follows the edges rather than any single focal point. There's no center of gravity. The painting holds attention by distributing it. That relationship between rhythm and structure is something I explored more directly in Ebb and Flow Abstract Painting: When Surrender Becomes Creation. I also made a deliberate decision to keep the forms hard-edged. Soft edges would read as atmospheric, impressionistic, wave-like in a literal sense. Hard edges force the geometry to carry the movement instead. The result feels more like a diagram of the coast than a depiction of it. Color Logic The palette is blue and neutral, but the neutrals are doing most of the structural work. A range of warm and cool off-whites sits alongside the blues, and the temperature shifts between them create a subtle spatial push and pull. Warmer neutrals advance slightly. Cooler ones recede. That movement is quiet, but it's what gives the painting depth without relying on illusionistic perspective. The same principle is at work in How Josef Albers Shaped the Way I See Color. The blues are controlled rather than expressive. Some lean toward slate, others toward a washed cerulean, others toward near-gray. Each one is chosen for its relationship to the forms around it, not for emotional effect on its own. The emotion comes from the whole, not any single color. I also kept the value range relatively compressed. High contrast would have created drama. I was after something steadier, calm, but still in motion. The result is a kind of unsettled calm, like watching the tide without needing it to resolve. What Changed Along the Way The early version had more forms, more bands, more interruptions, more variation in width. It was busier, and that busyness worked against the system. I simplified. Removed two horizontal elements entirely. Widened two of the remaining bands so the rhythm slowed down. The painting became quieter, and paradoxically more active, because the eye had room to move between the forms rather than being crowded by them. The frame color also changed. The original frame was a cooler white that competed with the lightest tones in the painting. I switched to a warmer wood finish that separates cleanly from the canvas without pulling attention. What Viewers Don't Notice The edges of the forms are not perfectly parallel. This is intentional. If every horizontal band were exactly parallel, the painting would feel mechanical, static, like a striped field rather than a system in motion. The slight deviations, a degree or two at most, create the sense that the forms are shifting relative to each other. It reads as movement without being obvious about it. Most people also don't notice how few colors are actually in the painting. From a distance it reads as rich and varied. Up close, the palette is spare. That compression is part of the discipline: getting a lot of visual information from a small number of decisions. The bottom edge of the composition is slightly heavier than the top. The forms there are wider, the values slightly darker. It grounds the painting without making it feel weighted down. It's the visual equivalent of the shoreline itself, the place where everything settles before the next wave comes through. If that kind of movement resonates with you, Beach is available as a framed original, 30 × 30 inches, ready to hang. If you'd like to see it in your space before deciding, I'm happy to help with that. You can also browse the full coastal paintings collection for related works. View Beach →  |  Questions: shiloratner@gmail.com
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