I am an artist who is simply fascinated by the land. I am not an art historian nor any kind of specialist. My focus is to be an observer of the landscapes I find myself in whether hiking, fly fishing or breaking trail through deep snow in the high alpine. I do a great deal of research on land history, geology, culture, natural resources, water and the flora and fauna of the land. I understand the importance of art within the environment, of the role art plays in sharing ideas, of storytelling and of bringing about awareness. All art makes a difference be it drawing, painting, printmaking. filmmaking, photography, writing, music, poetry, all of the arts share their own
timeless form of communication.
Art shares messages of beauty, grit, imagination and important ideas that get passed along from generation to generation. Art also contains fascinating histories about the origins of color and their precious land based resources and how cultures used these resources within their specific geographical landscapes.
I thought I’d touch on a few ‘color’ stories that fascinate me. Specifically colors & materials that I use in my studio. Materials that tend to have more meaning to me when I know where they have come from.
In her book, ‘Color: The History of the Palette’ Victoria Finlay, travels to far reaches of the globe to trace the origins of specific colors. Her lengthy journey to the mountains of Afghanistan leads her to the caves where the highest quality Lapis Lazuli has been guarded for centuries. Lapis is a deep blue metamorphic rock used as a semi precious stone. For eons it has been coveted, worshipped & mined from these caves, and was first imported to Europe during the Middle Ages. When ground down Lapis created Ultramarine, the finest of blue pigments, often deemed more precious than gold and highly desired by painters such as Michelangelo, Vermeer and Titian. Some painters simply couldn’t afford it and left sections of their paintings unfinished, others couldn’t resist it, using it so liberally as to leave their families in debt. It was the most widely used blue for the robes of the Virgin Mary and was coined the blue ‘of the heavens’.
I draw almost every day and one of my other favorite color stories actually has to do with sheep and pencils.
In the hills of the Lake District in the 1500s, lore has it that ‘there was a mighty storm’ that uprooted a large oak tree. When a local farmer discovered the fallen oak he peered down into the ground and saw a glistening black substance beneath. Unbeknownst to him he had found the purest stash of graphite so far discovered in the world. The local sheepherders began marking their sheep’s backs with chunks of this grey stone as a way to designate their flocks. The name graphite wouldn’t actually be coined until the 1800s. Over time this graphite was used for marking more than just sheep. Ingenuity ensued and eventually string was wrapped around thin chunks of the graphite to form the first pencils. By the 17th century wood casings replaced string and the pencils with much the same design as today were manufactured. News traveled quickly and the art schools of Italy wanted to import this new pencil. Graphite, a form of pure elemental carbon, is shiny dark grey and very soft providing a wide range of greys and blacks for drawing, levels of tonal variety not found in silverpoint or Conté crayon, the tools most widely used for drawing at that time.
Pencils are still manufactured in these hills under the name Derwent Cumberland Pencil Company. The children’s book artist Beatrix Potter lived nearby and I visited her home and studio years ago while hiking. I’d like to believe that her beautiful drawings of Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher, adored by so many, were initially drawn with pencils from Derwent. I wish I’d known about the story of graphite years ago when I was there.
Colors come from natural resources that are harvested from the earth. They have remarkable histories and like anything that’s deemed highly coveted or valuable, if precious, cultures tend to guard them with their lives. It’s odd to think that ‘colors’ actually created booms quite similar to what we remember from stories of the gold rush.
But what about the role of art in actually helping preserve landscape?
There were some important artists who helped do just that and I’ll mention just a few who were pivotal in both art and conservation specifically here in the United States.
Thomas Moran of the Hudson River School and The Rocky Mountain School of artists began his career as a young wood engraver in Philadelphia. In his free time he would defer to his love of watercolors as he found engraving tedious. Moran was hired by Scribners Monthly as an illustrator, choosing to draw his images instead of the traditional printmaking methods used in publishing at that time. His career skyrocketed when he was promoted to chief illustrator. Cameras were not available to the general public yet. They were cumbersome, not particularly portable and mainly used in indoor portrait studios. The Kodak Company wouldn’t promote its first personal cameras until 1888.
Etchings, engravings and illustrations were the primary methods of sharing the beauty of remote landscapes in publications such as Scribners and Harpers magazines.
In 1871 Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson, joined the US Geological Survey on an arduous expedition to the remote wilderness known as Yellowstone.
Over a month in the wilderness they were able to document over 30 specific sites as well as their daily progress of the expedition. Jackson hauled his large format camera & hundreds of
glass plates, some measuring 18×22, all of which were packed into a horse drawn wagon that bumped along for miles over rough terrain. The wagon also served as his portable dark room often using ingeniuos methods of development enabling him to make hundreds of photographs in the field.
Moran and Jackson worked as an artistic team and their paintings, drawings and photographs provided visuals that went beyond written description. Images of remarkable landscapes that easily persuaded President Grant and Congress to establish Yellowstone as the first National Park in 1872.
Edward S Curtis was young when these expeditions were unfolding.
Curtis was interested in photography early on and opened a portrait studio after moving west to Seattle. He quickly became enamored with the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. In 1895
Curtis met Princess Angeline, Chief Seattles eldest daughter and member of the Duwamish tribe She agreed to have Curtis photograph her a few months before she died in 1896, she was 76 years old. A few years later three of his early photos, including Princess Angeline, were shown at the National Photographic Society. These images won him recognition and he was then invited on a variety of expeditions as photographer to Mt Rainier, Alaska, and Montana to photograph and immerse himself among the Blackfoot Confederacy.
By 1906 JP Morgan offered Curtis a large sum to “produce a series on Native Americans. Morgan desired 20 volumes comprised of 1500 photographs. Curtis received no salary or expenses for developing the work, Morgan’s sum barely covered initial field costs, but the project would snowball into a 20 year passionate endeavor for Curtis. He garnered extra funding and support, and gradually lived up to his contract with JP Morgan.
Curtis journeyed across the west, the Pacific North West, Alaska and British Columbia. He lived with many tribes and recorded their songs, languages, and ceremonies when allowed. He noted their stories, their history, their art and everything about their cultures and was extremely respectful while doing so.
He eventually published 222 complete sets of photographs, his introduction to each simply stated:
“The information that is to be gathered…respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost.”
A tremendous accomplishment of beauty, a tribute to land, culture and mankind. We can’t go back in time but we do have remarkable collections of art that help us appreciate how far we’ve come, understanding our past helps us move forward with deeper knowledge.
Ansel Adams was given his first camera at the age of 12. It was an Eastman Kodak Brownie gifted to him by his father during their first trip to Yosemite. Adam’s was in awe of Yosemite’s beauty and he focused completely on capturing what he saw. He developed his first photographs as a member of the Sierra Club & returned to Yosemite numerous times with more professional equipment. He was one of few photographers who invented the black and white tonal Zone System. A series of techniques that fine tuned pure focus allowing Adam’s to create his iconic black and white images. The Dept of the Interior contracted him to take photographs of national parks as a means of documenting them. At the time of his first visit Yosemite was already a national park, but Adams worked tirelessly over his lifetime to continue to protect larger areas of land surrounding the park. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980 for his integrity and desire to preserve the landscapes he deemed special. As a key advisor to the Museum of Modern Art, Adams helped establish the photography department, something that brought photography to a higher level of institutional and national significance. So why is all of this a part of our conversation here today, how does all of this relate to what I do?
We are all concerned about the environment and about our footprint that we create during the course of daily lives. We all have very different interests, talents & passions. The gift that I received as a child was being part of a large artistic and literary family who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Early on I was exposed to hiking, gardening and farming and we shared our creative endeavors whenever we got together. It was a combination of land stewardship, creativity and in many ways storytelling, that helped me forge my path today. I read a great deal and have been influenced by many authors, but these words from Barry Lopez have resonated with me for years.
“to really come to an understanding of a specific American geography, requires not only time but a kind of local expertise, an intimacy with place few of us ever develop. If you want to know you must take the time.”
My goal has always been to take the time to get to know & study landscapes & places that intrigue me. I continue to visit the theme of the horizon line over and over again. A definition of ‘horizon’ I refer back to states, ‘the line marking that apparent junction of earth and sky. And the ‘apparent horizon’ refers to our individual range of outlook or experience.’
I’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing writers, conservationists, water specialists, river guides, filmmakers, farmers, curators & artists. All of these experiences have enriched my outlook and always lead me to my next place of study. I will always be focused on water, the water cycle, watersheds, geology, geography. I’m fascinated by and have great respect for the ocean but oddly feel more comfortable along interior ancient inland seabeds, to me these are some of the most starkly beautiful places. Fragile yet tough, these remote places often get tossed aside with the exclamation, ‘but there’s nothing there!’ I’ve studied areas of Great Salt Lake and the western most edge of the Great Basin in Oregon. I’ve revisited MT Monadnock in Southern New Hampshire numerous times as it was the first mountain I hiked up as a young child. Henry David Thoreau visited Monadnock numerous times. It seems I’ve followed his path a few times as I was also invited to canoe down the Penobscot River in the North Maine Woods for 5 days. Our goal as a paddling group of artists and philosophers was to discuss changes in the environment while following the route Thoreau took in the 1850s.
And now I seem to be focused on the Snake River Plain in Southern Idaho. Shaped like a smile it moves from the Wyoming border across Idaho to the Oregon border. Lava flows, prairies, hot springs, antelope migration paths, deep basalt canyons, all of which were formed by the Lake Bonneville Flood of the Pleistocene. These are the geographies and land histories I find fascinating. I seem to be a magnet to the edges of places, to ecotones where habitats merge and share the most diversity in nature.
Pam Houston’s quote,
“And I imagine sometimes, often, we will get it wrong. But I’m not celebrating the earth because I’m an optimist – though I am an optimist. I’m celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration. I am celebrating because how in the face of this could I not?”
Deep Creek, p.85.
Thomas Moran 1837-1926
Edward S Curtis 1862-1952
Ansel Adam’s 1902 – 1984