Painting #21 - Stillness

Stillness

oil on canvas

6 x 8 inches

©Ann Thompson Nemcosky

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This is a scene from Price Park off the Blue Ridge Parkway, one of our favorite locations for a leisurely walk with our dogs. The trail follows a creek for a ways, then meanders off through an open field before coming back along the creek again. Our springer loves splashing in the water. Our corgi, not so much.

Back in January I mentioned my reading list for the year that is in part connected to my interest in landscape imagery and my 100 painting project. These books include, The American Transcendentalists, Essential Writings by Buell, American Wilderness by Millhouse, and Nature and Culture by Novak (which I have not yet begun reading). I am still working through these books, since I read more than one book at a time, and in spurts, leaving space to take in what I have read. I have also added Goat Song by Kessler, which isn't so much about landscape, yet it is in the same sense that the writings of Annie Dillard and Thoreau are about the landscape, or rather our relationship with nature. So I thought it may be a good time to share some of the discoveries I have made so far in my studies of the American Transcendentalist movement and the Hudson River School Painters. As I progress in these readings, maybe I will be better able to work out just what it is about the landscape, and natural objects, that continues to captivate me, keeping me coming back in drawing and painting.

* It is a Transcendentalist claim that the human self is inherently divine.
* Hudson River painter Asher Durand defined the artist's mission as one to depict nature as it may have been at the time of Creation.
*The Transcendentalists' interest in nature created a greater interest in landscape painting in the public's view and landscape imagery moved from the idea that it was an inferior art to one of great popularity.
*The untamed American wilderness spoke to the ideal of landscape as an unspoiled paradise.
* In 1841, the invention of the tin paint tube allowed artists to paint in the field and Asher Durand's paintings were causing a stir as he was exhibiting studies done in the field as finished works that followed nature's arrangement as opposed to conventional modes of composition.

Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past, an unachievable land, an unattainable state. It elicits nostalgia and longing and sometimes bitterness.

Maybe the Garden is within or exists in the holiness of daily labor, the body making food for itself, or maybe it surrounds us every second if only we open our eyes.

-Brad Kessler, Goat Song