In love with landscape

This isn't going to seem like it's about art at first, but I'll get around to it by the end.

I was pretty tired when I got home tonight. It was actually kind of a hard day at work, made worse by the slow-moving line of tourist traffic I got stuck behind on the way home. So when the sun set and a brisk breeze started blowing down the cove and whisked away the humidity, it seemed like a perfect evening to spend on the hammock next to the water.

It was. I can't express how lucky I am to call Beech Hill Pond my home. Can't express it. There's no better place, no better feeling, than watching dusk from the hammock with my dog at my feet and fireflies darting around me. For just a little while, I forgot about work, forgot about my dissertation, and forgot about the raging disaster that is my love life. I didn't watch TV, check my e-mail, listen to music, or even talk. I just looked at the sky and thought, this is one of those great moments in my life. The loons warbled, the frogs belched, and the crickets played tiny violins. The fading pink light gave way to Venus on the western horizon, hazy, yet still bright enough for its reflection to dance in the waves. The two maples trees framed the scene like the proscenium of a stage. What amazes me is that I've seen this particular performance thousands of times, for twenty years in a row, and yet it's still so beautiful it can move me to tears. The sun always sets in the same place, the waves always make the same sound when they hit the rocks, and the loons always nest in the same cove opposite our camp. The big rock, the one we always took our family pictures on, casts the same silhouette as it has forever. But it only gets better with time. I've been in love before, but this lake is my soul mate. My love for this landscape is not more or less than for any other element of my life--my family, my friends, or my career. It is intertwined with them. The beauty makes my heart fill to bursting with happiness every day I am lucky enough to spend here. I fear its destruction even more than I fear my own death.

This personal landscape of mine has inspired me to create art so many times. When I was little, I drew crayon pictures of it. My mediocre pictures from college photography class hang on the wall above the door out to the porch. I can't paint, but once I asked a friend of a friend to paint a scene of our camp for my parents' 25th anniversary (unfortunately, she never finished it). I even tried, with truly craptacular results, to paint the sunset over the dock on a ceramic crock at the paint-your-own-pottery place in downtown Bangor. However, I've always sucked at all art forms other than dance (much as I yearn to be creative, I'm more of an armchair advocate), and none of my attempts at capturing the scenery have ever been remotely successful.

But all of this made me realize why Frederic Church is my favorite painter. I think I recognize this same love that I feel for Beech Hill Pond in his paintings of Mount Katahdin. He traveled all around the United States and around the world--New York, New England, the South, Maritime Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Arctic--but he returned to Mount Katahdin almost every summer for over 40 years and painted dozens of canvases of it. My very favorite painting, Mount Katahdin from Millinocket Camp (the one permanently in the upper right corner of this blog--you can see it in person at the Portland Museum of Art), must have been his greatest labor of love. It's an intensely personal vision. At the time, in 1895, he was almost 70 years old, weak, sickly, and so arthritic he could hardly hold a paintbrush. It took him at least five years to complete it. It was his last major painting (he died five years later), and instead of selling it to a wealthy patron, he gave it to his wife for her birthday. In a sweet little note he wrote to her, he says that the figure in the canoe is himself, pausing in the shade to admire the sublime mountain and to contemplate the afterlife. He's not known to have included a self portrait in any other painting, and this tells me that Katahdin was probably his favorite landscape of all. He had painted it many more times before, but never like this. The luminous pink wash of the cloudless sky, the hint of gold at the mountain's base, the ethereal peak of Katahdin reflected in the still water--this is his version of heaven.

My version of heaven is the hammock by the lake at dusk in mid-summer, just as the stars are beginning to show. Oh, how I wish I could paint it.