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Artists create the visual record that has preserved our landscape.
That thought was in my mind as I began to write this essay. Throughout art history, artists have given us a continuum of pictorial and philosophical description. Certainly before cameras, artists were sent out to explore the countryside or the continent and they were expected to return with images of what they had seen, usually engravings, etchings, or lithographs. There was the grandiose wilderness of the nineteenth century Hudson River School, which many credit with inspiring the conservation movement.
I had never been a landscape painter before moving to West Tisbury. My house is surrounded by woods that I look at every day. The first spring I noticed shadbush blooming in delicate white puffs through the still-bare trees, I was enchanted. I had always painted still life compositions set into interior scenes, often with friends modeling for me, but landscapes began to intrigue me.
My friend, Bill Ternes, had been coming for years to lead plein air painting workshops on the Island. It was easy to go out painting with him and his group. I had a lot to learn. Landscape painting, especially outside, is a whole different set of skills.
What makes an artist choose a landscape to paint? What is it that attracts an artist to a particular place? What makes it endlessly interesting? I can only speak for myself and tell my own story, although it is probably similar to what others would say.
For me, it is as simple as looking out my windows, walking my dog, driving around on errands or down dirt roads. It’s the dailyness, the observation again and again, arranging compositions in my mind. I am attracted by colors and big shapes, interwoven patterns of light and shadows.
The Island is endlessly beautiful, an abundance of riches. For me, it is as simple as looking out my windows, walking my dog, driving around on errands or down dirt roads. It’s the dailyness, the observation again and again, arranging compositions in my mind. I am attracted by colors and big shapes, interwoven patterns of light and shadows. Those are ever-changing, endless variations as daylight and the seasons progress. I like this quote from Ursula LeGuin: “Magic can be the fall of light on a place.”
The rhododendron hedge I planted when we moved here has grown into a thicket, the edge between open lawn and our woods. I watch the earliest progression of coloring buds on spring mornings with skies of palest peach, the shapes of the spaces between branches and heavy trunks of oak trees. By the end of an afternoon, much of the woods will have flattened to deepening shade, just the remains of daylight picking out patches of bark and leafy haloes. The sky will disappear for the summer once the leaves come out.
Then the marshes draw my attention. Water rising and falling, changing and redefining their edges. Spring rain fills tidal pools that disappear by summer. Sometimes, darkened, watery depths shoot right up the center of my composition, a contrast to brilliant green grasses, mud flats, lavender and blue-green marshes, all windblown. Other days, those same views rearrange themselves in flattened stripes of land, an odd tree making the only vertical to be seen.
Hayfields, too, with their mounding hedgerows newly greening in the spring, ochre runnels of cut hay that are bound into square or round bales, fields washed orange and purple by summer sunsets, fading to paleness in autumn, turning into twisting, wind-lashed wildlands in a winter storm. For artists who paint animals and farmers and fishermen working, opportunities abound. Our history as a farming community is important to preserve.
Hayfields, too, with their mounding hedgerows newly greening in the spring, ochre runnels of cut hay that are bound into square or round bales, fields washed orange and purple by summer sunsets, fading to paleness in autumn, turning into twisting, wind-lashed wildlands in a winter storm.
Paintings have their stories to tell. The Mill Pond, Parsonage Pond, Lobsterville, Mermaid Farm, Flat Point, Hancock Beach, Lucy Vincent, Quansoo, Red Beach, Polly Hill’s, Sepiessa, Sengekontacket, Moshup Trail, all those fields, all those marshes, all those walks through woods, and along the great ponds with their finger coves. So much to catch an artist’s eye. It always amazes me that a hundred painters could stand on the same spot and paint a hundred different paintings.
I think about the views that earlier generations of painters chose. There wasn’t much in the way of landscape painting here on the Vineyard before the late nineteenth century, when genteel ladies came in the summer to paint Island scenes, some of them quite good. The real influx of summer artists began in the 1920s and 30s, when a more bohemian cohort arrived in Chilmark, attracted by cheap rents, free or cheap food, sparse landscapes and beaches, and evenings filled with music, alcohol, and intellectual discussions. Thomas Hart Benton painted lush paradises or spare farmlands in which his characteristically stylized figures and animals worked in silence. Julius Delbos painted Edgartown and Menemsha harbor scenes on perpetually sunny days. Percy Cowen’s sheep farms with their rolling hills, broken brushwork, and brilliant skies provided an inspiring tutorial for his grandson, farmer and landscape painter Allen Whiting.
One of the first Island painters I met when I arrived here in 1982 was Nancy Furino. Her work was strong and colorful, an interesting combination of recognizable places and energetic, descriptive brushwork that danced and raged across the canvas. The sun felt hot in Furino’s landscapes. The wind blew through them, roughing up waves or hayfields and marsh grasses. Her skies were never merely blue; they were intensely cobalt or violet or viridian. She used broad strokes of many colors laid beside one another, brilliant green, red, purple, ochre, combinations of complementary or analogous colors that gave her paintings an energetic surface. For all the abstract qualities she employed, her landscapes were of the Island.
Rez Williams was another artist who translated what he saw into something more than a representation of what was in front of him. His paintings broke apart the vision of a traditional landscape into stylized shapes and patterns of his imagination, rendered in colors the painting called for, rather than the expected local color. Rez had a curiosity and sense of humor that he explored. Once he wondered how to paint a vibrant pink landscape. He made it work and it’s one of my favorites of his paintings. He was devoted to the preservation and conservation of the Island. Among his last paintings was a series he did for Sheriff’s Meadow.
There is a wonderful story about Wolf Kahn, who occasionally painted on the Vineyard, and Fairfield Porter, two of my favorite painters. Kahn was visiting Porter at his summer home on Great Spruce Head Island off the coast of Maine. Porter was struggling with a boat tied to a pier, trying to integrate the boat into his composition. Kahn said to him, “Just leave it out.” To which Porter heatedly replied, “You don’t understand what I do.”
There are many opinions about whether a landscape painter should work on site or from drawings or photographs or memories in the studio. Ask a plein air painter and he or she will say, “An artist must be in nature to truly understand it.” A studio painter will offer a different perspective: “An artist must reflect on the experience and refine it in the studio. It is not the relentless slavery to what is there that makes art; it is the artist’s interpretation, what is left in and taken out to render the most perfect distillation of what is seen.” Most landscape painters have done both and made their choices. Artists were unable to easily paint outside until the mid nineteenth century, when paint pre-mixed and put into tubes became available. The French Impressionists were the first.
Leslie Baker often said to me, ‘Painting a landscape is recording a moment in time.' I think of that a lot, looking at the changes on the Island over the years.
Leslie Baker often said to me, “Painting a landscape is recording a moment in time.” I think of that a lot, looking at the changes on the Island over the years. Leslie and I had painted along the south shore looking into Chilmark Pond just before Hurricane Sandy; when we went back after the storm, it had all been washed away. Liz Taft painted the iconic clay headland at Lucy Vincent before it collapsed and washed away. Parsonage Pond has become a flowery marsh, but it remains a pond for all time in Allen Whiting’s paintings and in my own.
A good landscape painting can transcend the simple reproduction of a scene, often inspiring viewers to look afresh, and want to preserve what makes the Island a visual and ecological treasure. An unobstructed view. A stormy day or a placid one. Wind rushing through a hot, summer field. An opening beyond a woodland that draws a viewer to wonder where that pathway goes.
Conservation, preservation, the care and stewardship of our Island views and values, our traditions, our community, our history. That is what most of us care about. Art maintains these values. All contributions matter, and all contributors. Our goals are the same.
The writer has been an artist on Martha’s Vineyard since 1982.
