The Art of Wild Places

Asher Brown Durand "Woods"

Asher Brown Durand brought us the woods as we would always like to walk them. With his friend Thomas Cole, Durand spent his summers on sketching trips in the Catskill, the Adirondack, and the White Mountains, producing hundreds of sketches and oil drawings from which he generated his final pieces. The Eastern mountains in the 1840's were not the cultivated, benign hills they are today, and the artist laboured from a tent and campfire, to capture the overarching trees, and the winding stream depicted in this painting.

Evocative as the oils of Durand may be, and upon Cole's death in 1848, Durand was considered the master of American landscape painting, he was but one example of the outdoor dynamic of the painters of the Hudson River School. Frederic Edwin Church, a student of Cole's and technically, in my opinion, the greatest of the Hudson River School artists, spent spring through autumn hiking and sketching the wilds of New York and New England. In 1853, he went so far afield as Columbia and Ecuador, traveling into the high Andes, not an easy task in those years. Far from being the delicate mincing masters of the drawingroom, an image which many have of bygone artists, these painters were accomplished outdoorsmen; and some, like Albert Bierstad, might fairly be considered historians and explorers.

So, where are their like today? Well, they may be found in unlikely places. Artists today seldom have the support of wealthy patrons, nor can they usually sustain a family on the income of their art,

Nathan Kennedy “Insane Versus Cataloochee"

but they are out there still, walking the woods, fishing the streams, and bringing the beauty home for us to enjoy. One such is Nathan Kennedy, a civil engineer by day, "Hawgdaddy" by choice. His eye for the ethereal in the wild is immediately apparent from the superb composition of this photo entitled “Insane Versus Cataloochee". More of Hawgdaddy's work may seen at The Tennessee Valley Angler.

To enjoy more of the works of the Hudson River School, click on any of the thumbnails below:

John F. Kensett "Waterfall"

Thomas Moran "Solitude"

Frederic Church "Natural Bridge"

Asher Durand "Cold Spring"

or visit The Artchive











© Reed F. Curry 2006