"Now I really feel the landscape, I can be bold and include every tone of blue and pink: it's enchanting, it's delicious." --Claude Monet
Velasco, Jose Maria Mexican Landscape with Cone of a Volcano (1887)
Asher Brown Durand 1859
The Catskills, The Walters Art Museum. Hudson River School
The Catskills, The Walters Art Museum. Hudson River School
Ansel Adams The Tetons and the Snake River (1942) Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
The landscape tradition is enigmatic and elusive, the physical world taken into perspective of the feelings of light, shadow, color, line, composition and place. The scene is ever changing and puzzling yet so revealing about the world that we see. Any lanscape is a displacement of time because the land will never look exactly the same again. The Velasco's Mexican landscape in oil on canvas (1887) is just as relevant as Adams' (1942) black and white photograph. Time is not relevant because that change is always constant.
The earth in all of its splendor can personify any given trait- calm, fierce, dynamic, beautiful, majestic etc. Because nature has all of these varying traits and they are usually more than one in any given landscape, it intensifies the contrasts. "The beautiful savage was radiant with smiles, as the ripening flower opens its petals, and she leant upon the shoulder of her warrior" (Alencar. 71) Anyone of these landscape examples can be termed beautiful but they are each savage in a way that man has not taken control and stripped the natural power from the scene. The flowers ripen and bloom and are in constant flux much like a river always flows or leaves change and fall. Nature can be savage and beautiful all at the same time. In submission and love yet in conflict. Just like our friend Miss Iracema. She represents this beautiful Mexican landscape- the unparalleled beauty but she too is so dynamic as she interacts with her warrior. Like Monet describes above, Iracema is delicious, enchanting, and terrible.
Velasco captures the essence of Mexican land in that one instant. But he does not have an impressionist glance or a topographer's factual rendering of the mountainside. It's the ideal beauty of the feeling within the moment while beholding such a landscape. Durand like Velasco was looking at a new frontier and seeing the vast beauty of America. He too painted the feeling of the land with all the possibility and grandeur. Adams had the advantage of the moment with photography so he just had to be more precise to capture the light in the right moment with his landscapes.
The landscape tradition is not constrained by culture or place. Many landscapes will look similar across the years because the feeling of open land, embodying beauty and savage at the same time, is only capturing the instant of the artist being in awe and wonder of such grandeur.
