The Hammock Papers: Call.

20 March 2020

Call.

Collins, Eastholm Rocks at Dusk, 2008

The students of the Hudson River Fellowship also learn to rediscover American soil through the artistic and spiritual values of the 19th century Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford R. Gifford, and Albert Bierstadt. They defined the poetry of creation by painting outdoors – en plein air (“in the open air”) – creating a meditative piece for a wall indoors.This new tribe calls us to step outdoors and remember that where we tread is holy ground, vividly depicted in Collins’s Vinalhaven Sunset (2008) – treetops licked with sun-flames, both under a cloud-cathedral and below a mirror of water, a congregation of rocks.

He recognizes that “in the 20th century, we’ve become a little crazy with how we use the land – our willingness to carve a highway through anything and everything, and pour concrete over beautiful landscapes, and sprawl our way across the country.” Instead, he hopes we hear the prophetic call of these neo-Hudson River painters living in our commercial wilderness: Honor and protect the land; save it from ugliness!

It’s an invitation to survival. Poet Kate Daniels said, “Without art to translate for us the ambiguous intensities of our lives, we exist in a kind of emotional hell – whirling and spinning through the darkness of undifferentiated, undiscriminated feeling that declines to reveal any pattern to us.” When art only pitches its tent in the vast lands of modernism, it “belittles the complicated and powerful ideas of beauty” spoken in classical paintings.

CONNECT

In plein-air (don't miss his palette) ...

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL