Frederic Edwin Church Archives | Page 2 of 2

January 15, 2014

Aurora Borealis

Aurora Borealis, 1865, Frederic Edwin Church

Strange, fiery forms uprise
On the wide arch, and take the throngful shape
Of warriors gathering to the strife on high,—
A dreadful marching of infernal shapes,
Beings of fire with plumes of bloody red,
With banners flapping o’er their crowded ranks,
And long swords quivering up against the sky!

(John Greenleaf Whittier)

The Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, are caused by the collision of charged solar plasma with Earth’s magnetic field. The arc of darkness in Church’s painting, above, is not something I’ve ever seen here along Lake Ontario, but Church was painting from a a sketch and description from Arctic explorer Isaac Hayes. Apparently, the arc is caused by alignment to magnetic north.

You can tell the information was secondhand, because the color shifts in the Northern Lights are in reality layered one on top of another like rainbow jello. Church—a keen observer of nature—would not have made such an elemental error.

The wormy shapes in Church’s painting appear in no photograph I’ve ever seen of the Northern Lights, but they somehow convey the dancing motion better than any still photo does.

By the time Church painted his Aurora Borealis, scientists understood the displays to be connected to solar activity. However, that was new knowledge at the time of the American Civiil War. On September 1-2, 1859, the largest solar flare ever recorded caused visible Northern Lights as far south as the Caribbean. Another large solar flare, visible into Virginia, occurred on December 23, 1864. Even a rational people could be forgiven for seeing portents in these events.

Our Banner in the Sky, 1861, Frederic Edwin Church

Linking the Aurora Borealis and war and destruction is as old as the written word. Pliny the Elder wrote of it as a “flame of bloody appearance… which falls down upon the earth.” A spectacular Aurora Borealis that appeared in London in 1716 was linked to Jacobite rebellion in Scotland.

My sketch of the northern lights in Maine.

Today I sketched the Aurora Borealis over Owl’s Head Lighthouse. Although I have seen the Aurora Borealis many times, I must rely on photo reference for the lights themselves, for I now live in a city where light pollution obscures the Northern Lights. I’m taking artistic license in pointing my scene to the north, but only a native will realize that.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

November 5, 2013

Romanticizing the familiar

Niagara, 1857, by Frederic Edwin Church

Yesterday, I talked about the differences between what is actually present in a landscape and what an artist paints. This morning I thought I’d look at a subject I know intimately: Niagara Falls.

Distant View of Niagara Falls, 1830, Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole, the patriarch of the Hudson River School, was interested in celebrating the untamed American wilderness. In Distant View of Niagara Falls, he presses the forest up against the cataracts. Two noble savages observe the view; other figures are distantly present on the Canadian shore.

Although this picture was taken in 1858, it probably better represents what Niagara Falls looked like in 1830 than Cole’s painting does. It’s exactly contemporary with Church’s Niagara.

By 1830, Niagara Falls had been host to white settlement and exploration for almost two centuries. The cataracts themselves were surrounded by factories, thriving towns, and the hotels, shops and other businesses serving the tourist trade. A band of Tuscarora lived in a village on Goat Island (that bit between the cataracts), selling their handicrafts to tourists.

Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867, by Frederic Edwin Church. This view is so accurate to reality that it is no surprise to learn that he had a sepia photograph to use as reference.

In editing the real into the sublime, Cole made the forests and the sky his primary subject. He sets the viewer so far back from the Falls that the grandeur of the scene lies in its setting, not in the cataracts themselves.

Frederic Church’s most well-known canvas of Niagara takes an entirely different approach: he strips out the inconsequential, focusing on the rim of water. This corresponds so exactly to our psychological reaction that we locals think it’s triggering memory. In fact, a hundred thousand viewers flocked to see it in the first two weeks of its debut; most of them had probably never visited Niagara, but they all felt the roar of the Falls. From a strictly visual standpoint, however, it doesn’t reflect reality any more than Cole’s painting did, because Goat Island is much closer than he represented it to be.

The view (approximately) which Church painted in 1857.

Both Cole and Church sought to eliminate man’s touch on the landscape; both succeeded. Niagara Falls has been painted so many times, by so many first-rate artists, and they almost all share that goal. Here is Bierstadt’s painting, and here is William Morris Hunt’s.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

July 17, 2013

Top ten seascapes of all time!!!

A recent Guardian columnsought to identify the ten best sea pictures of all time. I propose an alternative list, not the “best”—because the idea of “top ten paintings” is in itself ridiculous—but ten equally brilliant and perhaps less famous seascapes, here presented in no particular order. (My apologies to Turner and Monet; I only omitted them because everyone knows they’re brilliant.)

Have you any to add to this list?

Fitz Hugh Lane, Becalmed Off Halfway Rock (Casco, ME), 1860

Fitz Hugh Lane painted a narrow repertoire—ships and the ocean—but he perfectly captured the atmospherics of the sea. Long after the fact, he and his contemporaries would be lumped together as “luminists.” It’s a good description of Lane’s aerial perspective on tranquil, hazy days.

Frederic Edwin Church, The Icebergs, 1861

Frederic Edwin Church is also called a luminist, but he’s very different from Lane in that his compositions are never tranquil. He was one of the first artists who actually traveled to see what he was painting. The Icebergs was done in studio from sketches he made during a one-month schooner cruise through the North Atlantic. (A painting which mines the same material but is stylistically different is Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice. Note that both include broken boats, symbolising the reaches of man’s endeavors.)

Richard Diebenkorn, Seawall, 1957

A first-generation Bay Area Figurative painter, Richard Diebenkorn moved from abstract expressionism to figurative painting back to abstract expressionism. His ability to simplify his paintings into brilliant, recognizable parts simply amazes me.

Jamie Wyeth, Smashing Pumpkins, Monhegan, 2007

Like the writer Haruki Murakami, Jamie Wyeth can make you simultaneously marvel at his technique and laugh out loud. When I saw this painting in person, I boggled at how convincing the water is; that is somewhat lost in this rendering.

Joaquín Sorolla, Bulls in the Sea, 1903

There is another version of Joaquin Sorolla’s Bulls in the Sea at the Hispanic Society in New York that I actually like better for its composition. But I can’t find a well-lighted version online. (No surprise there; the Hispanic Society gallery isn’t well lighted, either.)

Sorolla painted countless paintings of the sea, and it’s tough to choose a favorite. Work, play, child, adult, misery, fun—he catalogued it all. But I think I love these paintings as much for the sails as for the bulls.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Icarus” has to be the seascape about which the most poetry has been written. “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams is here, and W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” is here. Both are wonderful.

The painting employs Bruegel’s signature move: the most important part of the painting takes place in a relatively inconspicuous corner of the canvas.

Frank Carmichael, The Bay of Islands, 1931

Canada has more coastline than any other nation in the world (265,523 km) so it stands to reason that their Group of Seven painters made a lot of pictures of it. The Great White North is inseparable from the sea. I adore the Group of Seven, so I’ll give you two of them, including Frank Carmichael, above.

Lawren Harris, Off Greenland, Arctic Sketch XIX, 1930

Lawren Harris’ plein air field sketch, above, sold in 2011 for a whopping $1.77 million Canadian. (Gotta love that!) Like Rockwell Kent, Harris’ seascapes are deceptively simple.

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778

John Singleton Copley never visited Havana and probably never met a shark (seeing as this one has lips). But this commemorative painting—commissioned by Brook Watson, the shark attack victim—is compelling in its sheer liveliness. The young Watson was not rescued until the third try. He lost his leg in the attack. I bet he dined out on that story for the rest of his life.

Édouard Manet, Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne, 1869

Édouard Manet is another artist who frequently painted the sea. Would the stars indeed have been this bright in a port city in 1869? Does it matter?

I’m off to the sea myself in the morning, to teach the second of my Maine workshops. If you’re signed up for my July workshop in mid-coast Maine, you can find the supply lists here. There’s one more residential slot left; I’m dying to know who is going to fill it. August and September are sold out , but there are openings in October! Check here for more information.

June 2, 2013

Views and Duets

My painting for ABVI’s “Play It Forward.” I know how to defeat this painting for next time I’m asked, BTW.

When last I posted, I had just painted with my fellow NYPAP artists* at Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church. This event, spearheaded by Marilyn Fairman, is in honor of NYPAP’s founder, Ted Beardsley, who was the driving force who brought painters from all corners of our state together.

Last year, I left in the late afternoon, since I had to drive back to Rochester. I remember thinking, “It’s nice and I’ll come again, but I am not in love with the views.” (My feelings about grandiose historic homes are generally mildly negative; I mostly thank God I don’t have to maintain them.)

The Catskills are just so beautiful!

This year, I was near the house as evening approached and I suddenly understood the magic of Olana: it is organized around the evening sky. The colors Church caught in his Cotopaxipaintings are really no more magnificent than those he saw many evenings from his porch. Suddenly, as so often happens, my whole view of Church has undergone a sea change and I find myself studying his pinks and reds and considering them not as fantastical but as totally realistic.

But I—wretched creature that I am—had ignored Jamie Grossman’s warning that I didn’t want to paint though the whole day, and I had nary an ounce of energy to paint that fantastic, fantastic sunset.

This year’s waterfall painting… not a success. Last year’s is here.

The next day, many of us gathered at Jamie’s to paint waterfalls. Breakfast and then a brisk walk with friends, and I climbed down to the catchpool and set up. I was cautiously optimistic about this painting, since I’d painted a similar view last year with great success. Alas, it was not to be. Sometimes the mind is willing but the body is weak. I had a hard time concentrating; it was excessively hot; I was already tired and sore from a long day painting the day before. To cap it off I slipped on wet rocks and took a tumble.

But sometimes we are called away from man’s work to God’s work. I was asked a question I never hear in art circles: what does it mean to be ‘born again’? I did my best to answer, and all the way home to Rochester I second-guessed my answers, until I finally realized I am only here to play a very small part in an eternal duet between God and another soul.

I’m never happier than when teaching…

Back to Rochester: Saturday morning promised another hot day, but we met on the canal at Schoen Place, where there was shade and a breeze. It wasn’t a brilliant painting day for any of us, but I’m never happier than surrounded by students and it was no exception.

My tiny landscape of canal path near Schoen Place. I hate wee brushes; can you tell?

But Saturday evening turned out to be one of the weirder days of my art career. I had agreed to paint live at ABVI’s “Play It Forward” event, not realizing that I was actually going to paint indoors at a cocktail party. Well, I’m game for anything, but it was a tough challenge. I duly finished the painting and it was sold for a decent price, and we all went home happy. And when I got in, my husband told me I’d missed one of the worst electrical storms he’d ever experienced. Good thing I was indoors!

Once again, thank you so much, Jamie Grossman, for your hospitality this week. It means more than I can express.

*Remember, NYPAP painters: you have a special discount at my Maine workshops… just for being you. August and September are sold out for my workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME… and the other sessions are selling fast. Join us in June, July and October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.