\nA Talk Delivered at Hudson River Museum, October 6, 2019
\nBy
\nJames Lancel McElhinney \u00a9 2019<\/p>\nLet me open by expressing my sincere thanks to Masha Turchinsky, Laura Vookles and Saralinda Lichtblau for inviting me to speak with you today.
\nI want to talk to you about two big, intertwined ideas. First, that American landscape art \u2013 as manifested through drawing, painting and prints — was born in the Hudson Valley. Second, the artist’s appreciation of scenery went hand in hand with the mission of public access and the values of environmental responsibility. George Perkins Marsh, an early voice in the American conservation movement observed that,
\n\t\u201cVision is a faculty, seeing is an art\u201d
\nFew today know that one of the great American drawing academies was founded at West Point. Because the art of topographical rendering was de riguer in officer-training in Europe, it was written into the curriculum at West Point.
\nWhen Sylvanus Thayer became superintendent in 1818, he specified two hours of drawing a day, for all second and third-year cadets. Apart from knowing how to produce mechanical drawings and maps, military officers were expected to know how to think visually\u2014not just to produce chorographic views of new territories, but also to be able to discern anomalies and changes in the terrain, which could inform their decisions under fire. Thayer\u2019s drawing-master was French miniaturist Thomas Gimbrede, who noted that,
\n\t\u201cDrawing is all curved lines and straight lines. Anyone can draw a curved line. Anyone can draw a straight line. Therefore, anyone can draw\u201d.
\nOne of Gimbrede\u2019s students was career army officer General Seth Eastman, who was also a celebrated artist and Associate member of the National Academy of Design. Eastman\u2019s Manual of Topographical Drawing was published as a textbook for cadets at the military academy.
\nThese were heady times in American schoolrooms. Reformers like Rembrandt Peale, Hector Humphreys, Horace Mann and others promoted liberal arts and universal education, including drawing and penmanship. A working-person might know how to read a book, but not their master\u2019s longhand. Teaching cursive handwriting to all was another way to level the playing-field.
\nPeale observed that drawing and writing were reciprocal skills.
\n\t\u201cWriting is nothing more than drawing the forms of letters. Drawing is nothing else than writing \tthe forms of things\u201d.
\nHorace Mann called drawing \u201ca moral force\u201d. As the Young Republic began to form its identity, public demand for scenic vistas fueled a publishing boom\u2014at first in Philadelphia, then soon after in New York. Artists like William and Thomas and William Birch, Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Doughty and others specialized in river views\u2014at first along the Schuylkill and Delaware, and later the Hudson Valley.
\nWithin a couple of decades, the great North River had become a magnet for landscape artists.
\nA young Briton who had emigrated to Ohio, before moving to New York produced this painting of Fort Putnam in 1826, giving birth to what is known today at the Hudson River School. His name was Thomas Cole.
\nFive years earlier, Irish painter William Guy Wall and author John Agg had traveled from what was then believed to be the source of the Hudson River in the Adirondacks to New York Harbor.
\nOver the next four years, Wall and printmaker John Hill produced a remarkable series of hand-colored etchings, which were published with travel-narratives by Agg.
\nThe Hudson River Portfolio is divided between canonical picturesque views and natural wonders, including a preponderance of waterfalls. I wondered why. And then it occurred to me that people looking at these images in 1820 might have seen more than just thrilling scenery.
\nSome would have recognized these falls as untapped hydropower, perfectly suited to manufacturing.
\nWhile it is only a theory, it is possible that some of Wall\u2019s backers were looking to promote commercial development in the upper Hudson Valley. Tourism would not develop in these regions for another couple of decades, after canals and railroads had penetrated the wilderness.
\nYears later, two thousand miles to the west, upon meeting a group of prospectors entering the Boulder Valley in central Colorado, an Arapahoe chief named Niwot is quoted as saying,
\n\t\u201cPeople seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the \tundoing of the beauty.\u201d
\nIndeed, the steamboats and railroads that delivered travelers to upriver resorts, Lakes George and Champlain, to Adirondack camps and the White Mountains an American Grand Tour, dependent upon the same industrial economy that poisoned wild rivers and filled the air with soot from coal-burning vehicles, factories and cities. In his painting of the Lackawanna Valley, George Inness shows us the fate of the forest\u2014a field of stumps. The trees have been recycled as fence-rails and railroad ties. Distant Steamtown, with its fuming chimneys and brick-bound dystopia recalls the question posed by William Blake,
\n \t\u201cAnd was Jerusalem builded here
\n\tamong these dark Satanic Mills?\u201d
\nIn his epic poem The Lament of the Forest, painter Thomas Cole described the rape of the land, stripped of its beauty by human greed. Here are a few lines, which presage Richard Powers\u2019s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Overstory.
\n\t\u201cEcho, whose voice had answered to the call<\/p>\n
\tOf thunder or of winds, or to the cry<\/p>\n
\tOf cataracts \u2014 sound of sylvan habitants<\/p>\n
\tOr song of birds \u2014 uttered responses sharp<\/p>\n
\tAnd dissonant; the axe unresting smote<\/p>\n
\tOur reverend ranks, and crashing branches lashed<\/p>\n
\tThe ground, and mighty trunks, the pride of years,<\/p>\n
\tRolled on the groaning earth with all their umbrage.<\/p>\n
By the time Cole\u2019s student Frederic Church painted Niagara, the falls had already become a well-established tourist destination. Artists like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, who had accompanied railroad and mineral surveys of the American West helped sell the idea of national parks to Congress. Cole\u2019s lament and George Perkins Marsh\u2019s dire predictions helped shape the thinking of subsequent activists like John Muir, John Burroughs and Rachel Carson. In his 1907 essay The Art of seeing Things, John Burroughs wrote,
\n\u201cWhat we love to do we do well. To know is not all; it is only half. To love is the other half\u201d.
\nIf we are to preserve nature\u2019s treasures, we must continue to develop new ways to bring human beings into deeper contact with nature, without consuming it\u2014except as personal experience, while leaving no trace. One need not be an artist in order to benefit from writing, drawing, and journal-keeping. These are proven methods for transforming experience into knowledge. Pulling into a highway scenic overlook to snap a few pictures avoids any significant engagement with nature, which can be its own best advocate, if only people will take time to interact with it. Clean rivers, heritage itineraries, historic sites, improved hiking and rail-trails, and open spaces, let citizens reacquaint themselves with nature.
\nThe more profound their experience, the more likely they will be to discover how deeply they care about these resources, and perhaps take steps to protect them. Over the years, many artists have taken up the cause. Explorers and artists were always pathfinders. In many ways, they were the first tourists. They showed the world what America looked like.
\nOver the course of my life I have followed their example\u2014perhaps at an easel, or with sketchbook in hand\u2014the goal being to deepen the experience of nature, in ways that transform that experience into knowledge and ideas.
\nWith the rise of social media, and a new revolution in printed matter underway, there are countless opportunities for nature conservancies and preservationists to partner with the arts. Environmental humanities programs at University of Pennsylvania, Colby College, and elsewhere are rapidly discovering that the arts\u2014not just as individual expression, but more as personal engagement\u2014can provide common ground between science, history, and the communities they serve. This was true in the nineteenth century. It is still true today.
\nOne of my goals has been to promote engagement with nature, while making artworks more accessible and affordable.
\nA prominent Manhattan art-dealer told me that as I had revived a two-hundred-year-old artistic practice, I should use a two\u2013hundred-year-old marketing plan to get the work out there. Instead of bringing my sketchbooks back to the studio, to be mined for easel-paintings, I decided to unpack reiterations of their page-spreads in suites of prints. This allowed me to \u201cbreak\u201d the books without taking them apart.
\nWhat you will see in the show downstairs are the original books, based on my travels, together with prints drawn from their pages. The first limited-edition of fifty sets of seven prints, loose-bound in a handmade clamshell box was Hudson Highlands, published in November 2017.
\nThis was followed in 2018, by a suite of prints devoted to the Fairmount section of the Schuylkill River, now the subject of an exhibition at Independence Seaport Museum, through January 5, 2020.
\nEarlier this year I explored the upper reaches of the Rio Grande, as it crossed Northern New Mexico. This resulted in a show at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, that included my original journals, together with a series of monoprints produced by master-printer Michael Costello at hand Graphics. These analog prints used a chine-coll\u00e9 process, with archival pigment prints of line-drawing printed on Kitakata rice-paper by Tomas Park of Orion Studios, also in Santa Fe. The show was well received.
\nOn view here, at Hudson River Museum, is my most recent project, The Palisades; the second volume of my North River Suite. Publication of the limited-edition will take place later this year. A manuscript for the first in a series of field-guides to mindful travel through drawing and writing has just been delivered to a trade publisher. The book will be out next year.
\nMuch of this activity has concentrated my focus on rivers and watersheds. My hope is to call attention to the wonders around us, to set an example for how to engage them. It\u2019s not enough to be outdoors. One must attempt to engage with nature. Jogging on a rail-trail, earbuds blaring makes no deep connection. Stop. Take your time. Focus. Make drawings. Take notes. Describe your experience. Inscribe it onto your hard-drive. To know who we, we must first know where we are.
\n As Burroughs said, to know is only half. What we love, we do well, but we also take pains to care of what we love.
\nThat\u2019s the message. Thank you.<\/p>\n
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