The Art of Acrylic Landscape Painting

acrylic art of mongolia
Yumjirdulam0501, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Introduction: The Arrival of Acrylic in the Landscape Tradition

Landscape painting has long been one of the most cherished and enduring forms of visual expression. 

From the soft washes of watercolor to the luminous oils of the Impressionists, artists have sought to capture the essence of the natural world in countless ways. The 20th century brought a dramatic innovation to this tradition: acrylic paint.

Invented in the mid-20th century, acrylics combine the fast-drying qualities of watercolor with the vibrancy and permanence of oil. The result is a medium that is both versatile and accessible, enabling artists to experiment with texture, layering, and bold coloration. For landscape painters, acrylics opened new horizons: the ability to paint with immediacy outdoors, to layer glazes without long drying times, and to capture nature’s fleeting moods with both speed and intensity.

Today, acrylic landscapes range from naturalistic depictions to abstract impressions, each benefiting from the medium’s adaptability. In the following pages, we will explore the ease of using acrylics for landscapes, detail seven important acrylic landscape paintings by masters, and reflect on how these works are valued, where they are displayed, and how mastery of this vibrant medium can be achieved.

The Ease of Using Acrylics in Landscape Painting

Acrylics have become beloved among landscape painters for several reasons:

1. Fast Drying Time – Unlike oil paints, which may take days or weeks to dry, acrylics dry within minutes to hours. This allows artists to layer colors quickly, ideal for building the depth and atmosphere of landscapes.

2. Versatility – Acrylics can be thinned with water for a watercolor-like transparency or applied thickly for an impasto effect. This flexibility makes them suitable for capturing skies, water, mountains, forests, or fields with equal success.

3. Durability – Once dry, acrylics become permanent and resistant to yellowing or cracking, ensuring the longevity of a finished landscape painting.

4. Portability – Because of their rapid drying and lack of toxic solvents, acrylics are particularly suited for plein air painting. Artists can take them outdoors to capture changing light and weather directly from nature.

5. Accessibility – Acrylic paints are affordable, widely available, and easy to clean up with water, making them accessible to both beginners and professionals.

Acrylic painting by artist Constance Baltuck
Education Specialist, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For landscapes, these qualities make acrylics particularly rewarding. Artists can work rapidly to capture shifting skies, apply glazes to suggest atmosphere, or experiment with textural brushwork to render trees, rocks, or waves.

Seven Acrylic Landscape Masterpieces

Below are seven notable public domain acrylic landscape paintings, each described in depth (~200 words each).

1. David Hockney – A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998)

David Hockney, one of the most recognized contemporary artists, embraced acrylics for their intensity of color and versatility. His monumental A Bigger Grand Canyon is an acrylic panorama composed of multiple canvases, stretching across an immense scale.

The painting does not aim for photographic realism; instead, it revels in bold, saturated hues—purples, reds, oranges, and greens—that convey the canyon’s majesty and vastness. Hockney uses acrylic’s fast drying time to layer flat, bright colors in geometric patches, emphasizing rhythm over detail. The landscape becomes both natural and abstract, suggesting the overwhelming sensory experience of standing at the canyon’s edge.

This work exemplifies how acrylics can transform traditional landscape subjects. Their vibrancy allows colors to radiate with a clarity difficult to achieve in oils or watercolor. Acrylic also enabled Hockney to work quickly across multiple canvases, maintaining a visual unity while experimenting with compositional variations.

Displayed in national museums, A Bigger Grand Canyon is valued not only for its scale and innovation but also for how it demonstrates acrylics’ unique ability to reimagine landscape. It represents a turning point where acrylic landscapes became central to modern art, bridging tradition and contemporary vision.

2. Helen Frankenthaler – Mountains and Sea (1952)

Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea is often cited as a revolutionary work in the history of acrylic painting. Although it appears abstract, it is rooted in the landscape—a memory of a trip to Nova Scotia, where the ocean met rolling hills.

Frankenthaler thinned acrylic paint with turpentine and allowed it to soak into raw canvas, creating translucent washes of blue, green, and pink. The effect resembles watercolor but on a monumental scale. Forms are not delineated but suggested, evoking the rhythms and moods of land and water.

The painting demonstrates acrylic’s remarkable flexibility. By treating it as a staining medium, Frankenthaler achieved a luminous depth impossible with oils. The work feels atmospheric, as though the viewer were immersed in shifting mists and light.

Though abstract, Mountains and Sea is valued as a landscape because it captures nature’s essence—the sense of vastness, movement, and fleeting impression. Today, it is housed in major collections and considered a milestone of postwar art, influencing countless painters. It shows how acrylic landscapes can transcend realism, embracing suggestion and sensation rather than literal depiction.

3. Richard Diebenkorn – Ocean Park No. 54 (1972)

Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, painted largely in acrylics, stands as one of the great achievements of modern landscape-inspired abstraction. Ocean Park No. 54 exemplifies how landscape can be distilled into geometry and color.

Inspired by the coastal environment of Southern California, Diebenkorn used acrylic’s layering capacity to build fields of soft blues, greens, and ochres. Each layer is scraped, adjusted, and reworked, creating depth and transparency akin to atmospheric haze. The geometry suggests aerial views of ocean, land, and architecture, though it remains abstract.

What makes this work significant is its balance between structure and light. Acrylic’s quick drying allowed Diebenkorn to apply successive layers rapidly, experimenting with composition until the right balance emerged. The painting evokes both the openness of the Pacific horizon and the human imprint of grids and neighborhoods.

Displayed in major American museums, Ocean Park No. 54 is valued not only for its beauty but also for its place in modern art history. It demonstrates how acrylics can capture landscape not by imitation but by evoking its essence through color, light, and form.

4. Bridget Riley – Cataract 3 (1967)

Though Bridget Riley is best known for Op Art, her acrylic painting Cataract 3 can be seen as an abstracted landscape. Its undulating waves of blue, red, and green create a rhythmic visual field that evokes flowing water and shimmering light.

Painted with acrylics, the work relies on the medium’s clarity and flatness of color. Acrylic allowed Riley to produce unbroken, vibrant stripes without the blending or brush texture typical of oils. The result is an optical vibration that feels both natural and dynamic, like the shifting currents of a river or the glimmer of sunlight on waves.

While not a literal depiction, Cataract 3 reflects how acrylics can translate the essence of landscape into abstraction. Its value lies in its experiential quality: viewers feel immersed in rhythm and motion, much like standing beside a river.

Today, Riley’s works are displayed in leading institutions, valued for their innovation and visual impact. Cataract 3 shows that acrylic landscapes can exist beyond traditional naturalism, exploring how the human eye perceives nature’s energy and movement through pure color and form.

5. Sam Francis – Untitled (Blue) (1958)

Sam Francis, an American abstract painter, used acrylics to explore landscapes of light and space. His Untitled (Blue) is dominated by splashes and washes of cobalt and ultramarine, suggesting sky, sea, or infinite atmosphere.

Francis embraced acrylic’s fluidity, pouring and dripping paint to create organic patterns. Unlike oils, acrylics could be thinned without losing brilliance, enabling luminous veils of color. The resulting image feels expansive, like an aerial view of earth or the depths of the ocean.

Though non-representational, the painting conveys landscape in its vastness and openness. Acrylic here becomes a medium not of depiction but of sensation—inviting viewers to experience space, light, and freedom.

Displayed in major modern art collections, Francis’s acrylics are valued for their vibrancy and energy. Untitled (Blue) exemplifies how acrylic landscapes can transcend realism, embodying the emotions and immensity of the natural world rather than its literal features.

6. Patrick Caulfield – After Lunch (1975)

Patrick Caulfield’s After Lunch demonstrates another approach to acrylic landscape painting, one rooted in stylization and simplicity. The work depicts a restaurant interior with a framed landscape view—mountains and trees painted in bold, flat colors.

Acrylic’s opacity and clarity allow Caulfield to create smooth, even areas of color with crisp edges. The landscape within the scene becomes iconic, almost cartoon-like, yet retains the essence of nature’s forms. It contrasts the artificial interior with the timeless serenity of landscape beyond.

What makes this painting significant is its conceptual approach. Rather than painting a landscape directly, Caulfield uses acrylic’s flatness to present the landscape as an image within an image—commenting on how we perceive and frame nature in modern life.

Valued for its wit and precision, After Lunch is displayed in international museums. It highlights acrylic’s role not only in traditional naturalistic landscapes but also in conceptual explorations of how we view and depict the natural world.

7. Charles Sheeler – Golden Gate (1955, Acrylic on Board)

Charles Sheeler, known for Precisionism, used acrylic in works such as Golden Gate. This landscape of the iconic San Francisco bridge and its surrounding waters combines modern industrial structure with natural grandeur.

Acrylic enabled Sheeler to achieve the hard edges, flat planes, and crisp clarity characteristic of Precisionism. The sky is painted in smooth gradients, the water in reflective planes, while the monumental structure dominates the horizon. The landscape here is not wild but modernized—nature and human engineering combined.

The fast drying and permanence of acrylic made it ideal for Sheeler’s meticulous technique. Unlike oils, which could smudge or yellow, acrylic preserved the exactness of his vision.

Displayed in American collections, Golden Gate is valued as both a landscape and an icon of industrial modernity. It shows how acrylics allowed landscape painting to adapt to the 20th century, encompassing not only natural beauty but also the built environment that reshapes our view of the land.

The Value and Display of Acrylic Landscapes

Acrylic landscapes occupy a unique place in the art world. Because acrylic is a relatively new medium, many of its masterpieces belong to the modern and contemporary canon. Paintings by Hockney, Frankenthaler, Diebenkorn, and others are exhibited in leading museums across the world, where they are celebrated as landmarks of postwar art.

In the art market, acrylic landscapes can achieve extraordinary prices. Works by Hockney, for example, have sold for tens of millions, reflecting their cultural significance and visual impact. At the same time, acrylic landscapes are highly collectible by private individuals because the medium is durable, stable, and easy to preserve.

Museums often highlight acrylic works in exhibitions exploring modern innovation. Because acrylics resist yellowing and cracking, they maintain their vibrancy better than oil or watercolor, ensuring they remain visually striking decades after creation.

Mastery in Acrylic Landscape Painting

To achieve mastery in acrylic landscape painting, artists must learn to balance the medium’s unique properties with their creative intent. Key steps include:

1. Learn Basic Techniques – Practice washes, glazing, dry brushing, and impasto to understand acrylic’s versatility.

2. Experiment with Timing – Acrylics dry quickly; learning when to blend, when to layer, and when to let areas dry is crucial.

3. Study Color and Light – Landscapes demand sensitivity to atmosphere. Acrylics’ vibrancy allows bold exploration of light effects.

4. Use Mediums – Acrylic gels and retarders expand possibilities, from extending drying time to creating texture.

5. Practice Plein Air – Painting outdoors hones observation skills and develops speed—perfect for acrylic’s fast drying.

6. Observe the Masters – Studying works by Hockney, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler, and others reveals how acrylics can serve diverse visions.

7. Consistency and Patience – Mastery arises through continual experimentation, learning from both successes and mistakes.

Conclusion

The art of acrylic landscape painting bridges tradition and modernity. From Hockney’s vast panoramas to Frankenthaler’s lyrical abstractions, from Diebenkorn’s atmospheric geometries to Sheeler’s precision, acrylics have proven themselves as a medium capable of both bold innovation and deep sensitivity to nature.

Their ease of use—fast drying, vibrant colors, durability—makes them uniquely suited for landscapes, where capturing fleeting light and atmosphere is essential. Valued in major museums and collections, acrylic landscapes today stand alongside oils and watercolors as significant contributions to art history.

For artists, acrylic landscapes offer not only technical versatility but also a profound opportunity: to engage with the natural world in a medium as dynamic, flexible, and enduring as the landscapes themselves.