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