Another Contemporary Landscape: Why I Keep Making Landscapes (Even While Gently Mocking Them)

By Stephen Farnan

If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you’ll know one thing: I make a lot of landscapes! haha

Probably seventy percent of what leaves my studio begins with a horizon line, drawn from Ireland and beyond, then fired onto porcelain, printed on paper, or finished on aluminium. These landscapes are recognisable, decorative, functional, and yes, unapologetically commercial. People know exactly what they’re looking at, and I’m completely aware of that.

This isn’t a confession — more an acknowledgment. I’m not knocking the work, and I’m not pretending it belongs in some lofty, conceptual, head-scratching corner of contemporary art. Whatever “Art” is meant to be (eyebrow appropriately raised), these pieces usually live outside that conversation. And that’s absolutely fine.

A Landscape That Knows It’s a Landscape

The newest piece in this stream — A. N. Other Contemporary Landscape — leans directly into that awareness. The title says everything you need to know. The stormy sky, the moody brushstrokes, the inevitable lonely red boat… all the ingredients you’ll find in swishy, expressive landscapes hanging in cafés, galleries, studios, and gift shops from here to everywhere.

These images are literally everywhere. People love them. And here I am, making another one — knowingly, deliberately, a landscape fully conscious of its own clichés.
It’s a landscape with a wink.

Part of the Sketchy Thoughts Series

This work sits inside a new series titled Sketchy Thoughts — a playful, fast-moving body of work made entirely on my iPad, a roving sketchbook so to speak. These pieces arrive wherever I am: in the bath, on a plane, sitting in the car, or on a beach somewhere. They’re immediate, loose, and honest.

Each piece begins with:

• a passing emotion

• a lyric

• a fleeting idea

• or a moment of self-mockery (or indeed mockery of what I see in front of me)

Sketchy Thoughts is essentially a diary — a visual record of whatever’s happening in my head before the thought slips away. It parodies the kind of “art” we see everywhere today while also poking fun at myself and my own habits as a maker. They’re quick, expressive, slightly cheeky, and always rooted in the moment.

Why Landscapes Keep Appearing in My Work

So why do I keep making landscapes, even while satirising them?

Because they work.
Because people connect with them.
Because the Irish landscape is beautiful and impossible to ignore.
Because sometimes “functional” isn’t a dirty word.
And because not everything needs to be heavy or high-minded.

Sometimes art can simply be the thing you make — honestly, knowingly — and the thing people want to live with.

A Contemporary Landscape for the Contemporary Eye

A. N. Other Contemporary Landscape captures exactly that balance:
familiar yet self-aware, expressive yet tongue-in-cheek, commercial yet not cynical.

A landscape that knows it’s part of a long line of landscapes, and is perfectly comfortable being another one.

You can check out the full, and growing, collection here Sketchy Thoughts 

 

 

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