Approaching the Landscape: Dylan Vandenhoeck on Joachim Patinir

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, Shaped top: central panel, overall, with engaged frame, 46 1/4”  x 32”; each wing, overall, with engaged frame, 47 1/2” x 14”, Oil on wood, 1515

One foundational aspect of an artist's work is their “approach.” For example: what is so-and-so’s approach to site-specific sculpture? Is it inextricable from its location, interrupting a habitual walking pattern, or just a photo opportunity to be contemplated on social media? It implies a mode of thinking with a medium or a process, which, when contextualized, can carry with it a whole philosophy. For landscape painting in particular, the approach is all-important.

When it comes to both looking at and making landscape paintings, I am asking that question: What is the approach? This, of course, can mean what is the approach to the act of painting itself: how is it made, how does it relate to other paintings, how is the landscape expressed or even transubstantiated materially? Absolutely. But what I’m particularly interested in is the approach in terms of pathways, entryways, pace and gait. How does one navigate the land in this painting, and what kinds of space does it embody?

Let’s look at Flemish painter Joachim Patinir’s The Penitence of St Jerome, 1512–1515, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Patinir is credited with inventing the Weltlandschaft, or world-landscape, which is typically a panoramic, seen-from-above perspective. It was later adopted by Bruegel and predated by a similar perspective used by Hieronymus Bosch. Patinir’s close friend Albrecht Dürer referred to him as “the good landscape painter,” perhaps even coining the genre for Western painting. Patinir would paint the landscapes and have different specialists and assistants paint the figures, a practice that continued in the Netherlands well into the Dutch Golden Age. Regardless of “firsts” and inventions—which is silly when zooming out and looking at millennia of East Asian landscape painting or even a map of the city of Nuzi from 2360–2180 BC— Patinir was painting the landscape well before it was calcified with convention in the Western world. Even his own approach is varied and can’t simply be summarized as a world-panorama picture.

The Penitence of St Jerome stands out to me. Patinir’s approach implies an open, shifting horizon of experience. Although it’s not the most materially compelling painting (at least compared to Patinir’s Flemish successors or Italian landscape-adjacent predecessors like Bellini) it is still a marvel in its ambition. It expanded what could be held in a landscape and imagined something more spatially fluid, more phenomenological. It’s not just a prototype of perspectival innovation, a stumbling precursor to one- and two-point perspective and lens-based space before the world “knew better.” It’s a surprising painting that embodies a situated, shifting engagement with the world as part of its pilgrimage structure.

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, (Detail)

The central panel’s lower portion is where this surprise happens. The upturn of the larger tree stump’s surface (a very Cézanne thing to do), the inner hollow carved in its side, the attention to plant life in fine naturalistic detail on the ground—all of this is engaging in a “walk up to it” kind of attention. As St Jerome kneels on the ground in penitence, we assume a different perspective altogether. The crucified Christ is almost toylike in miniature and skewed on the picture plane, and yet reads to me as life-size and in front, due in part to the context of the adjacent tree. The 90-degree-angle-tree next to the crucifix is not 90 degrees—it is towering in front of us, backgrounded by the stream flowing behind and around the face of the rock. There is another tree that fully hangs over this stream, again completely reading upright despite its odd angle. T. J. Clark has written about the “uprightness” of Bruegel, his sense for the ground, and the two-legged experience of the land. Patinir’s landscape is more angular than upright and yet he accomplishes a similar sense of the ground. He embodies landscape by allowing us to shift positions, to “enter.” We’re no longer surveying at a distance, or up close, but are embedded within. This “from-within” point of view leaks out from St Jerome’s vantage point and becomes embedded in the character of the rocks, trees, and landscape formations themselves. The figure of St Jerome, painted by an assistant as was often the case with Patinir’s figures, is in some ways humorously enlarged in his rock-bearing penitence—a kind of emblem of bodily burden. Even so, the cliff faces curve and rise around to enfold him (with yet another one of those angled-but-not-angled-at-all trees). The landscape is an expression of the Saint’s inner life as much as it is navigable space.

Saint Jerome was known for his translation of the Bible, but also for his years of self-imposed exile in the desert. There, he lived in isolation, battled earthly temptation, and sought to transcend the body through penance and contemplation. In painting, he likely became a popular subject not because of his theological legacy alone, but because he provided artists with a conveniently sanctioned reason to depict the (perhaps otherwise too lowly and secular) wilderness—to closely observe the textures of stone, the anatomy of trees, the effects of light and atmosphere. The subject of penitence—bodily mortification in service of spiritual clarity—became an excuse to paint the very flesh of the world. This is not unique to Patinir. Throughout the Renaissance, religious subjects were frequently used to justify a secular interest in the body, in nature, in perspective, and in vision itself. Susanna and the Elders offered a framework for painting the nude, for example. Saint Jerome’s story explicitly concerned withdrawing from the world due to his earthly struggles and yet, paradoxically, his image gave artists a pass to engage with it more deeply.

What results is a landscape of interiority made exterior. The rocks, the trees, the streams, and paths become the spatial correlate of Jerome’s self—his perception, his struggle, his consciousness. Cézanne once said, “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” Merleau-Ponty rephrased this with his phenomenology of perception: “I am in the world, and the world is in me.” Despite its Christian pretense, Patinir’s landscape quietly anticipates both. The shifting visual logic of his world landscape suggests a mind that does not look at the world from the outside, but always already from within it.

These days, we painters have the luxury of shedding the pretense of religious icons to justify an interest in the environment and our relation to it. We are, however, living in the fallout of a culture that still craves the Cartesian separation between spirit and body and is experiencing a distancing of humanity from the rest of the life-world. (To name a few examples: the dream of “uploading” consciousness with AI, disembodied spectacle culture, an oversaturated, ocular-centric image-world, and an extractive, growth-at-all-costs economic system wreaking havoc on non-human life.) Carving out a holistic, relational approach to the landscape in painting is arguably even harder now than it was 500 years ago. When I look at many landscape paintings today and I ask what the approach is, I often find that there isn’t one—not in the sense I mean. Painting-as-window, flatness, and the collapse of figure-ground relationships; lens-based space, mathematical perspective, and abstractions derived from image-world sources; all of these are legitimate visual strategies, but they are not approaches in the embodied, navigational, perceptual sense I’m after. This is what in my mind separates the landscape image, the stylized flatness of a painted “picture,” and a landscape that is a conduit for an encounter—an active threshold of experience.

Mernet Larsen, Intersection (After El Lissitzky), 46 3/4” x 63”, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 2020

David Hockney, Walking In The Zen Garden At The Ryoanji Temple, 39.8” x 61.8”, Photographic Print, 1983

There is, however, a very strong subset of painters who have followed Patinir in this situated, fluid, or altogether expanded approach to landscape painting. Mernet Larsen with her radically inventive reverse perspective, jumping off from El Lissitzky but ending up with something new. Her spaces are seemingly impossible yet completely natural, just like Patinir’s sideways trees. David Hockney in his “true to life,” walking-around sense of space, vigorously yet joyously explored through various media. Charles Burchfield, with his lifelong love of nature and an expanded sensory field approach to painting from life. Rackstraw Downes, with his steadfast commitment to onsite observation, and getting the turn of the head in space “right.” Ryan and Trevor Oakes with their stereoscopic drawing invention and ability to directly trace what it’s like to perceive with two eyes and a nose, over time. Esteban Cabeza de Baca, with his historically charged, socially engaged, and imaginatively inventive plein air paintings. Douglas Cooper, with his lived-map approach to drawing cities, especially Pittsburgh. Elizabeth Flood, painting in harsh winds, working in the material of the place she is painting from multiple vantages. There are many more I should mention (but not enough!) if I had the space here, so my apologies to those artists. Looking into a painting is not a fiction. We don’t have to think about it to experience it. As Goethe said, “optical illusion is optical truth.” All of these painters have made interesting advances in what a painting can contain and how we might, in turn, approach an environment.

Ryan and Trevor Oakes, Self-Portrait: Brunelleschi’s Duomo from Afar, 8” x 9” x 3”, Ink, cotton paper, museum board, linen tape, 2011

Elizabeth Flood, Night Watch (Hudson River), 44” x 48”, Oil on linen, 2024

In my own work, I have sought to put a holistic, embodied perspective into paint. My process includes painting from direct observation and studio paintings made from on-site drawings, voice memos, iPhone photos, and narrated videos. I include entoptic phenomena (the things seen within vision, distinct from hallucinations) like floaters, afterimages, the stereoscopic view of a nose or brow, and present them in the same field as the actualities of place, considering how that place is moved through and experienced over time with all the senses. I feel that point of view is not a point at all, but more a threshold of experience—to see from and to be seen. My approach to landscape is really not very different from Patinir’s, the “first” landscape painter with shifting vantages, points of view, moods, and ways of inhabiting space. Over 500 years later, from a vastly different earthly context, his approach still stands out as worth pursuing.

Dylan Vandenhoeck, Along the Army Corps Floodwall in Ardsley in Autumn, 66” x 96”, Oil on linen, 2024

Dylan Vandenhoeck (b. 1990; New York City) is a painter and musician. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 and MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include Right Under the Nose, at Jack Barrett Gallery (NYC, 2024), Inside Out, Outside In at Jack Barrett Gallery (NYC, 2022) and Reality Show at Matthew Brown (Los Angeles, 2021).