Nature as a paradigm of the creative process. An approach to the art-nature relationship in contemporary painting

Abstract

This article establishes a series of relationships between specific painting practices and different concepts of nature, from which emerges a concrete and original approach to the art-nature binomial as an object of artistic research. Through these relationships, it delves into key aspects of the creative process, such as the idea of ​​transformation, necessary for understanding contemporary abstract, gestural, and organicist works, and certain related forms of landscape painting—works, in general, that are heirs to Romanticism. The text analyzes various examples of painting within a broad and current artistic context, revealing how its extraordinary qualities and expressive possibilities can show parallels with nature, allowing us to understand how nature manifests itself through the pictorial material. With the aim of offering a comprehensive view of the object of study, the art-nature relationship, currently subject to the parameters of contemporary art, has been extended to some expanded painting practices with a more hybrid and/or critical profile, as well as to expressions of contemporary drawing, whose creative processes reveal aspects common to those described.