Some American landscape artists

Georgia O'Keeffe - http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/her-life.aspx
Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, the second of seven children, and grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. As a child she received art lessons at home, and her abilities were quickly recognized and encouraged by teachers throughout her school years. By the time she graduated from high school in 1905, O'Keeffe had determined to make her way as an artist.

O'Keeffe pursued studies at the Art Institute of Chicago (1905–1906) and at the Art Students League, New York (1907–1908), where she was quick to master the principles of the approach to art-making that then formed the basis of the curriculum—imitative realism. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Untitled (Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot). Shortly thereafter, however, O'Keeffe quit making art, saying later that she had known then that she could never achieve distinction working within this tradition.

Her interest in art was rekindled four years later (1912) when she took a summer course for art teachers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she met artist and art educator Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow believed that the goal of art was the expression of the artist's personal ideas and feelings and that such subject matter was best realized through harmonious arrangements of line, color, and notan (the Japanese system of lights and darks). Dow's ideas offered O'Keeffe an alternative to imitative realism, and she experimented with them for two years.

In an attempt to discover a personal language through which she could express her own feelings and ideas, she began a series of abstract charcoal drawings. She mailed some of these drawings to a former classmate, who showed them to the internationally known photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, in 1916.

Stieglitz began corresponding with O'Keeffe, and exhibited 10 of her charcoal abstractions in May at his famous avant-garde gallery, 291. The two were married in 1924, and subsequently lived and worked together in New York (winter and spring) and at the Stieglitz family estate at Lake George, New York (summer and fall) until 1929, when O'Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico.

From 1923 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz worked assiduously and effectively to promote O'Keeffe and her work, organizing annual exhibitions of her art at galleries. As early as the mid-1920s, when O'Keeffe first began painting New York skyscrapers as well as large-scale depictions of flowers as if seen close up, she had become recognized as one of America's most important and successful artists.

Three years after Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe moved from New York to New Mexico, whose stunning vistas and stark landscape configurations had inspired her work since 1929. Her ability to capture the essence of the natural beauty of northern New Mexico desert, its vast skies, richly colored landscape configurations and unusual architectural forms, has identified the area as “O’Keeffe Country.” She painted there from 1929 until 1984, when failing eyesight forced her into retirement.

From Faraway, Nearby, 1937
In 1935 O'Keeffe began to experiment with compositions that combined bones and landscapes, without regard to relative size, scale, or perspective. Despite her realistic painting technique, there is no verisimilitude to this scene. The poetic title—conveying longing and loneliness—suggests that the odd juxtaposition of words and images depicts an emotional state of mind as well as a physical location.

 

Red and Yellow Cliffs, 1940
In 1940, the year this painting was made, O'Keeffe purchased a house on eight acres at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. The views from the property were spectacular. From the front, the Cerro Pedernal (a flat-topped mesa) could be seen in the distance. The backyard faced seven-hundred-foot-high striated cliffs, pictured here in their true colors of red and yellow. Their immensity allows only the smallest sliver of blue sky to show at the top left.

Flower paintings: O'Keeffe's flower paintings often depict the tiny, delicate inner parts of blossoms on an enormous scale, and usually in a very bold and colorful manner.

Poppies, Red Canna
Here's the video we weren't able to watch in class.

Eyvind Earle - http://eyvindearle.com/Bio.aspx
Born in New York in 1916, Eyvind Earle began his prolific career at the age of ten when his father, Ferdinand Earle, gave him a challenging choice: read 50 pages of a book or paint a picture every day. Earle choose both. From the time of his first one-man showing in France when he was 14, Earle’s fame had grown steadily. At the age of 21, Earle bicycled across country from Hollywood to New York, paying his way by painting 42 watercolors. His earliest work was strictly realistic, but after having studied the work of a variety of masters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rockwell, Kent and Georgia O’Keeffe, Earle by the age of 21, came into his own unique style. His oeuvre is characterized by a simplicity, directness and surety of handling.

In 1951 Earle joined Walt Disney studios as an assistant background painter. Earle intrigued Disney in 1953 when he created the look of “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”, an animated short that won an Academy Award and a Cannes Film Festival Award. Disney kept the artist busy for the rest of decade, painting the settings for such stories as “Peter Pan” and “Lady and the Tramp”. Earle was responsible for the styling, background and colors for the highly acclaimed movie “Sleeping Beauty” and gave the movie its magical, medieval look.

After about 15 years creating animated art, Earle returned to painting full time in 1966 and kept working until the end of his life. In addition to his watercolors, oils, sculptures, drawings and scratchboards, in 1974 he began making limited edition serigraphs. Eyvind Earle had a totally original perception of landscape. He successfully synthesizes seemingly incongruent aspects into a singularly distinctive style: a style, which is at once mysterious, primitive, disciplined, moody and nostalgic. He captures the grandeur of simplicity of the American countryside, and represents these glimpses of the American scene with a direct lyric ardor. His landscapes are remarkable for their suggestion of distances, landmasses and weather moods. “For 70 years,” Earle wrote in 1996, “I’ve painted paintings, and I’m constantly and everlastingly overwhelmed at the stupendous infinity of Nature. Wherever I turn and look, there I see creation. Art is creating...Art is the search for truth.”

Eyvind Earle passed away on July 20, 2000 at the age of 84.

“Being a painter, I will tell you just what I try to do when I paint. Beauty is the thing we are all searching for. Exactly what beauty is I have never known anyone to be able to say. As far as I know, truth is beauty, but often the truth is not beautiful. In nature when I look I see trees, some of them are such that they thrill me with their perfection and their sweeping lines and certain mood they seem to have. Windswept plains give me something that can’t be seen. In every tree I feel as though I could see the soul of that tree. It is alive. It is a person. And if beauty be related to the truth, harmony and balance must be there, and there must be movement because in nature all things move. And there are certain laws such as the law of duality. Everything has its opposite. Nothing is without its opposite. If I want a bright light in a painting, I must have a dark shadow. If I want a color to look very warm, I must have also a very cold color, and so on and on forever. But when I paint, I forget the things I know. I just sit there painting away, trying to get the feeling into my painting that I feel inside. Whatever beauty is, I feel it, and as long as I can I shall try to find more and more beauty, and to put it down so that others can see what I have seen.”
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Ansel Adams - http://www.anseladams.com/content/ansel_info/anseladams_biography2.html
(Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984) Ansel Adams, photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California. Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother's maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Early on he found great joy in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate nearly every day.

When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and passionately pursued music. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams's primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

If Adams's love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth gesture" of the Yosemite Sierra. He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as "keeper" of the club's LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club's leaders, who were founders of America's nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children.

The Sierra Club was vital to Adams's early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club's 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club's San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada. As photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club's board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.

1927 was the pivotal year of Adams's life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Soon after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Bender's friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams's life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence to pursue his dreams.

Although Adams's transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. Adams also met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the "pictorial" style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue "straight photography," in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized.

Adams's star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium he consciously emulated. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place.

Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams's life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively.

Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation. However, his greatest influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, they often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not "realistic" documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.

Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. He was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of "humanity" in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that "the world is falling to pieces and all Adams photographs is rocks and trees". Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.

Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not "influenced," but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and others. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his ideals were formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and "muscular" Americanism and the pervading sense of manifest destiny. Adams died in Monterey, California.

Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams's philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of personality.

“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.”

Questions to keep in mind:

Is this photograph/painting more realistic or abstract?
How has the artist stylized the landscape?
- How does the artist use this stylization to emphasize different parts of the landscape?
- What does this stylization show about the artist's feelings toward nature?

What does he/she seem to be interested in showing us?
What is the mood?

How does he/she show distance?