The most straightforward way to present a landscape in a painting is to go out, find a pleasant view, and paint.
I still do that, and tbh, those pictures seem to be popular.
BUT - all those hours standing and gazing at the world around me and I have come to realise that more or less everything I see is at least clothed through the actions of the people who have been here before us. And, after all, the reason I paint, as with every other artist, is for people to want to look at the painting.
Here is the dilemma - with the world facing this climate crisis, artists have an opportunity (a responsibility?) to use their art to put out a call on what is being done to the planet, but - will anybody want to hang such a painting on their wall?

Delacroix urged us to create ‘a feast for the eye’.

So here is the crux - can a landscape painting be pleasing to the eye while at the same time posing a reminder of the global challenges we face? Or does that push the work away from ‘pleasing’ into ‘interesting’?
This consciousness is resulting in my paintings are becoming less representational of pleasant scenes, but my natural style is vibrant and colourful. I have tried dark and gloomy, but that is just not me. my palette definitely flows toward ‘feast for the eye’.
My journey through landscape painting certainly began  with pleasant, representational pieces, but has progressed - this desire to make the viewer react to what they see with something beyond the warm glow of real or imagined evocation from nature has caused me to ‘extrapolate’ - to put real world features into a created setting - my purpose is to create an object (the painting) which will stand in its own right, not simply as an image of a place.
We are who we are, children of our times. I (happily) have not lived through the horror of war, but I can look to those who did to see art which is more challenging than ‘interesting’, conveying the experiences of the artist to put those issues large and central in front of the viewer.
For example, Guy de Montlaur created work which even now, 80 years later, challenges the horrors of war based on his lived experiences.  Rooted in cubism and flowing into abstract expressionism, his work is not about the landscape at all. He was of his time. My own journey is in my time when the landscape can and should be the site of OUR challenge - what to do about the climate?
A previous period when Landscape painting found its way to the top,was the early 19th century - Constable presented lovely reminders of the passing of the rural idyll. Caspar David Friedrich used his painting to pose questions  about the place of people in relation to the divine - the romance of infinity, mortality.
These artists succeeded in presenting pictorial spaces which resonated, obliging their viewers to use their own frames of reference, to pause for reflection and arrive at their own interpretation.
Maybe this is the next horizon on my own journey.