American Progress?

The painting from class today that most piqued my interest was American Progress, which was painted by Asher Brown Durand, an artist of the Hudson River School, in 1853. I found the painting interesting because of its surreal and grand depiction of an idealized rather than realistic landscape, which we learned was characteristic of art of the Hudson River School.

To the left side of the painting, we see an uncivilized and unsettled wilderness--the forests seem overgrown and untouched relative to the tidy vegetation of the settled landscape to the right. In the distance, there seem to be smoke stacks, which suggests an urban landscape--the highest degree of civilization. As we follow the road forward and to the left, the landscape seems to become gradually less civilized--we see what appears to be a small town with a church steeple followed by a log cabin and finally the unsettled wilderness (if you don’t consider the native americans). We talked in class today about the role of time in art, which I think is especially relevant here. Although the painting depicts a specific moment, it also portrays changes in the landscape that could only occur over generations. Based on the direction of the wagons on the road, we conclude that the progression of the painting is from right to left (or, equivalently, east to west). This painting made me think back to Wandering Home, in which McKibben contrasts the relatively unsettled wilderness of New York with the more civilized, pastoral landscape of Vermont. The white church steeple in the distance seems especially reminiscent of Vermont.

It seems as if this painting does not perfectly parallel the settlement of the Adirondacks. In the painting, civilization seems to be a dominant and inexorable force--we are led to believe that the entire landscape will eventually resemble the city in the distance, even though the natives clearly present a challenge to this "progress". However, this was not the case with settlement in the Adirondacks. Early human attempts to conquer the wilderness were mostly unsuccessful. Moreover, the effort to preserve Adirondack wilderness suggests that the force of human settlement is not a strong as the painting suggests and a backward progression in time.

By the way, I could have written a similar post for the painting Manifest Destiny, which was painted about 20 years after American Progress by another American Artist, John Gast. Check it out--the composition and allegorical meaning of the two works are very similar.       

Georgia O'Keeffe

From 1918 to 1934, Georgia O'Keeffe lived for part of the year on Lake George in the Adirondacks. Georgia O'Keeffe, like Kent Rockwell, is a more recent Adirondack painter. There are definitely some similarities between O'Keeffe and Rockwell, especially with their use of color and shape. She differs from the more realistic landscape painters before her (like Durand or Tait) in that she pushed the boundaries between the descriptive and the abstract. Abstract shapes are important to her work. Her style generally emphasizes the feeling of the scene she paints, and not necessarily how it actually looked.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George Barns, 1926, oil on canvas
(http://www.afanews.com/articles/item/1860-modern-nature-georgia-okeeffe-and-lake-george)

Georgia O'Keeffe, My Shanty, Lake George, 1922
(http://www.wikiart.org/en/georgia-o-keeffe/my-shanty-lake-george)

Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George Autumn, 1927, oil on canvas
(http://collection.mam.org/details.php?id=5948)

O'Keeffe's paintings are concentrated versions of classic Adirondack paintings. They are not realistic, but the traditional orange-red coloring is vividly present in Lake George Autumn, and this painting portrays a classic Adirondack topic: a lake and mountains. O'Keeffe seems to only focus on what is most important to her, and that seems to be shape and color. Her paintings exude a lot of emotion and movement, and reflect the wild nature of the Adirondacks.

Lake George shoreline restoration

The attached news story popped up in my daily Adirondack Almanack email, and I thought I would pass it on.
To summarize: About 150 feet of shoreline was eroding into Lake George, largely due to the clay soils. This resulted in turbidity, which is a term for hazy water caused by suspended particles. The Lake George Association and the Friend's Point Homeowners' Association joined forces to prevent further shoreline erosion. People often repair shorelines using structural approaches such as concrete walls, but such approaches are expensive and environmentally harmful. Therefore, the LGA and the Friend's Point Homeowner's Association decided instead to use vegetation to stabilize the shoreline. The article refers to this technique as bioengineering. Since waves crash along the shoreline, they lined the new shoreline with a stormwater fabric called "Grow Sox" before planting native vegetation.
I am not sure how widely this method is used, but I am impressed by how involved and yet noninvasive it is.
http://blog.hulettsonlakegeorge.com/index.php/archives/3142?utm_source=Adirondack+Explorer+%26+Adirondack+Almanack&utm_campaign=bbbc688ba1-Adirondack_Almanack_RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b49eb0d11b-bbbc688ba1-47316029

Dudes in the Adirondacks

We have been talking a lot about people who go to the woods to experience life in a different way for a little while. These people weren't much different from the movement that happened at approximately that same time as ranchers out West began to supplement their income from ranching by also bringing in tourists so they could experience a little of what life was like on the prairie. The similarities are striking: you had a variety of options for the sort of experience that you wanted, from more rustic on a real working ranch to more carefree on a vacation oriented ranch, and just as the guides in the Adirondacks were romanticized and often characterized by a specific persona the cowboys of the vacation ranches were even asked to play the "cowboy" role. The most interesting difference to me is that the tourists out West were called "dudes" and the ranches they visited were called "dude ranches." "Dude" was a term applied to all tourists, regardless of age or sex. A side-note to this is that around the same time as white-tailed deer were being extensively hunted in the East, bison were being hunted equally vigorously out West. They have experienced a come-back similar to that of the beavers.  

But while looking up these ranches, I happened upon an article talking about dude ranches in the Adirondacks. Apparently, after the era of the great camps, and starting around 1930, a large number of ranches sprang up in Warren County (Lake George/Sacandaga area) to the point where Warren County was known as the dude ranch capital of the East. They basically provided a Western flavored vacation experience including horseback riding and some rodeo action. People would come from the cities to meet the cowboys and to be in that sort of vacation atmosphere. The ranches even imported some cowboys from the West, and remained popular until the 70's and 80's when the focus of the tourists changed yet again. Some continue to exist today with slightly changed business models.

While this may seem corny to most (it would to me too if I had never heard of a dude ranch), I would argue that it's just another way of experiencing "wilderness" that apparently had vast appeal!

 Picture of a dude ranch trail ride from the Adirondack Museum

Journal article on Dude ranches in the Adirondacks

Relevant portion on dude ranches from "Arizona and the West"

Winslow's Watercolors

As I was browsing through the powerpoint of Adirondack paintings, one of Winslow Homer's watercolors caught my eye. It was titled "An October Day," and was completed in 1889. Coincidentally, it was one of Ianna's slides today in her Winslow Homer presentation, so we got to further analyze it beyond what I had thought about the night before sifting through the powerpoint.

I had originally chosen that painting as my favorite in the powerpoint not because of what Ianna talked about in her presenation but purely on the aesthetics of the painting itself. I was really amazed about the way Homer was able to portray the glassy water. It's like the reflection of the trees was immaculately transcribed right onto the still surface of the lake. Also, the way the deer is majestically positioned in the lake, leaving a trail of disturbed water lapping behind him, brings a component of life into the otherwise isolated and pristine landscape.

Giving the image a second look, I noticed the little man in the boat in the lefthand corner. As we talked about in class, we don't know whether this man is just observing the deer, or whether he hunting the deer. Regardless, the inclusion of this man nonetheless brings a human presence into the wild. In some of these scenic landscape paintings, I think we sometimes tend to forget the impact that humans had on the park.

Being interested by this painting, I looked up some of Homer's other Adirondack watercolor paintings and each one was more beautiful than the previous one. Watercolor seems to lend itself very well to the subject of Adirondack painting.

All photos from: http://www.geocities.ws/coverbridge2k/artsci/winslow_homer_adirondack_watercolors_2.html

Adirondack Art

When visiting the Adirondack Museum, I loved looking at their art gallery. I thought their extensive collection was very impressive. I have always loved looking at art because just as we said in class, you cannot interpret a painting incorrectly. Art makes you feel a certain way due to our own frame of mind and I think that is wonderful.

In the Adirondack Museum, I took a picture of a painting entitled “Lake George” by Richard William Hubbard that stuck out to me. Richard William Hubbard was a member of the Hudson River School, known for their interest in painting majestic American landscapes. He was born in Connecticut, attended Yale College, and after pursued his painting career at New York University under Samuel Morse. He traveled to Europe briefly, reflected in his painting aesthetic upon his return. He frequently visited the Adirondacks and the Catskills, which he drew great inspiration from.

Another artist that struck me was Rockwell Kent. I did not see his painting specifically in the Adirondack Museum, but we did learn about him during our trip to Asgaard Farm, where he lived beginning in 1927. He was born in Tarrytown, New York and studied architecture at Columbia University.

Although he also drew inspiration from the Adirondacks, he has a different aesthetic than Richard William Hubbard. Kent uses a lot of broad, flat, colorful shapes while Hubbard is much more detailed and stylistic. However both conveyed to me a very similar message. I felt at peace in both paintings. I could almost hear the utter quiet very rarely experienced in our world today. Both these paintings brought me back to a specific moment at Litchfield Castle. On the Sunday morning before we left the Adirondacks, I ventured out to the back porch at Litchfield. I stopped and listened and for one of the only times in my life I heard absolutely nothing. There were no roads or houses near Litchfield, something that is hard to achieve, and we were completely alone in the wild. In both these paintings there are signs of human life, like the farm house in Kent’s painting or the boat in Hubbard’s, but to me it felt like I was that human presence and there was no other humans around, just like at Litchfield.

Rockwell Kent
Untitled: Asgaard Farm
http://www.adkmuseum.org/discover_and_learn/collections_highlights/detail/?q=rockwell+kent&cat=0&type=0&x=0&y=0&id=28 

Richard William Hubbard
Lake George, 1865
Adirondack Museum

http://www.questroyalfineart.com/artist/richard-william-hubbard

http://www.adkmuseum.org/discover_and_learn/collections_highlights/detail/?q=rockwell+kent&cat=1&type=0&x=0&y=0&id=28

Early Adirondack Photography

Today in Onno's class, we talked about some of the early Adirondack painters, including Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer. We talked a bit about the reasons for artists to paint the Adirondacks in the first place, and about how art was a way to advertise the Adirondacks, or to describe the wilderness to people who could not Htravel there. I wondered if photography also played a role in advertising the Adirondacks, so I did a little bit of research and found a lot of information about a photographer named Seneca Ray Stoddard who published an illustrated guide book of the Adirondacks in 1873. He was brought to speak to the NY State legislature and used photographs to help persuade them to create the Adirondack Park.

Photo by Seneca Ray Stoddard

The peak of romantic art in the Adirondacks, the late 19th century, was also a time when the camera was being used more and more frequently. I think it is interesting that both paintings and photographs were used to promote tourism and conservation in the Adirondacks. Photographs provided a concrete, obviously realistic image of something that actually existed in the Park, while paintings were an artists impression of an aspect of Adirondack Wilderness that was less "realistic" but allowed for a lot of artistic freedom. 

"Adirondack Evening", by Peter Corbin

Peter Corbin's painting has a similar subject matter to Stoddard's photograph. Although a viewer of the painting would not be sure that it is an accurate representation of the Adirondacks, its use of color in some ways makes the painting feel more realistic than the photograph. I wonder if the publications and advertisements of the time had a preference for photographs over paintings or vice versa, or if one type of image was considered "more valuable" or "more artistic" than the other.