Landscape painting depicts the physical world that surrounds us and includes features such as mountains, valleys, vegetation, and bodies of water. The sky is another important element shaping the mood of landscape paintings. Landscape art ranges from highly detailed and realistic to impressionistic, romantic and idealized. While landscape oil painting predominates, acrylic, and even mixed media are common mediums. One can trace early representations of landscape to the Minoan period. In many ancient cultures landscape frescoes served as an extension of nature.
Although landscape paintings focus on the natural world, they are by no means simple, pretty images featuring greenery and sky. Landscape artists take a two dimensional canvas and create a beautiful three dimensional world. The impact landscape painting had during this time period was so powerful it required people “to assume that the appreciation of natural beauty and the painting of landscape is a normal and enduring part of our spiritual activity." Contemporary landscapes often feature the human hand; buildings, roads, fences. One of the popular trends in contemporary landscape painting is plein air painting, said to convey nature in a fuller way than studio painting.