Arne Borring

Born in Norway 1956

Arne Borring and the Landscape Painting
By Tore Kierulf Nss
Catalogue Preface to the Exhibition at Gallery Tonne, October 2004

In art history, the origin of landscape painting is attributed to a small group of painters who in the second half of the 1840s congregated in the vicinity of the small village of Barbizon on the outskirts of the Fontainebleau forest north of Paris. Prior to this, there was a long tradition of painters drawing sketches and painting studies under the open skies. However the Barbizon painters led by Theodore Rousseau, insisted on carrying both easel and canvas outdoors, ideally completing their pieces on site, in front of their motifs. The idea being that this procedure would add life and a richness to the paintings which would not be possible when painting from sketches and studies at home in the studio.

The ideals of the open air landscape painting, of creating a canvas by means of continuous dialogue with the subject matter, gained a large following through both the era of realism and that of impressionism. Nevertheless, when realist painting again surfaced on the established art scene, after abstractionism felt spent around 1960, the landscape aspect was by a...