What is landscape

If not shovelled land?

Land that has been altered in some way by human intervention. An abstract mass. Landscape can also describe regions of space that make up both our inner and outer worlds. It is mutable.

It has indivisible boundaries exerting invisible influences that are our connections to the environment. It has peaks and troughs and rivers that flow within and around it. We inhabit it, and it dwells within us and is part of a shared memory, both local and massive. The experience of being in landscape leaves an indelible mark on a person, so I almost always work from memory and away from it all, separated off in a studio somewhere.

Like land, paintings change over time. They undergo constant (re-)development. They become transient, a build-up of layers of lost spaces. The past gets obscured as the surface takes priority, processed via the serial influence of the preceding layers. These different spaces continually influence one another. A painting therefore is a landscape and one that bridges the inner-outer divide between us and the world. It is a way to process and visualise how the world around affects you.

Abstract landscapes can therefore be a way to express the relationship between space and control. And perhaps also the relationship between conformity and landscape, explored through the lens of All-over painting that emerged in the mid-twentieth century.  The active attempts to cover the future past by smearing the present has contemporary political resonance.
There's an excellent book I discovered that dissects various properties of landscape with liguistic deftness and with references that have real-world reliability. I encourage you to seek it out and read it if interested!