As a contemporary mixed-media landscape painter, I am continually looking for ways to move beyond the traditional horizon line. My abstract landscape paintings begin with the natural world—rock, water, weather, erosion and changing light—but increasingly I am interested in artists who show me how landscape can be suggested without being literally described.

The painters I return to most are not artists I want to imitate. I look to them because they challenge the way I think about composition, material, space, color and the experience of place.

Per Kirkeby: Thinking Like Geology

I am particularly drawn to Per Kirkeby because his paintings often feel geological rather than scenic. Forms accumulate, fracture and overlap like rock strata or shifting terrain. Instead of relying on a distant horizon to create space, he builds paintings through masses, interruptions and layers.

That approach connects strongly with my own interest in stone, erosion and the physical processes that shape the landscape. In my mixed-media paintings, I often build and excavate surfaces through layers of paint, collage and texture. Kirkeby reminds me that a painting can suggest the natural world through its construction rather than through its depiction.

Joan Mitchell: Remembering Rather Than Describing

Joan Mitchell offers an entirely different model. Her paintings evoke landscape through gesture, color and memory rather than conventional perspective. The eye moves throughout the entire surface instead of being directed toward a single distant view.

That distributed energy interests me enormously. It suggests that a landscape can be remembered, sensed or emotionally reconstructed rather than observed from a fixed position. In my own abstract landscape work, I am increasingly interested in what remains after a specific place begins to dissolve into color, movement and atmosphere.

Julie Mehretu: Mapping Movement

I look at Julie Mehretu for her ability to create complex spaces through accumulated marks, lines and movement. Her paintings can feel almost like maps—spaces constructed through activity rather than neatly divided into foreground, middle ground and sky.

That idea encourages me to think differently about mark-making. A line can suggest a current, a fracture, wind, erosion or the passage of time. These marks do not have to describe the landscape directly; they can embody the forces that shape it.

Mark Bradford: Building Through Material

Mark Bradford is especially relevant to my mixed-media painting process. His surfaces are created through accumulation, collage, removal, sanding and excavation.

I am fascinated by the idea that the history of making can remain visible within the finished work. Because I frequently work with layered and recycled materials, Bradford’s paintings encourage me to push further—to cover, scrape back, interrupt and reveal. The physical surface itself can hold memory.

Vija Celmins: Eliminating the Horizon

Vija Celmins presents one of the most compelling alternatives to conventional landscape composition. Her oceans, skies and natural surfaces often extend from edge to edge, eliminating the familiar division between land and sky.

Her work makes me think about what happens when nature becomes a field rather than a view.

For a landscape painter, that is a deceptively radical idea. It shifts attention away from scenery and toward pattern, repetition, density and surface.

Amy Sillman: Allowing Uncertainty

Amy Sillman reminds me that a painting does not have to resolve itself neatly. Forms can shift between recognizable and abstract, structured and awkward, intentional and uncertain.

That freedom is important to me. Some of the most interesting moments in my own

contemporary landscape paintings occur when a recognizable place begins to disappear and the painting develops its own internal logic.

These six artists help me think less about how to paint a landscape and more about how a painting might behave like one.

Landscape itself is layered, unstable and constantly changing. Rock erodes. Water shifts. Weather obscures and reveals. Light transforms familiar forms. My goal is increasingly to bring those processes into the painting itself through layered surfaces, abstraction, color and mark-making.

Rather than reproducing a view, I want the finished work to carry something of the experience of being in the natural world: its complexity, movement, fragility and constant transformation.

That feels like a much more interesting place to begin.