Transcript - Chasing The Light
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Sam Evans-Brown: Just picture, if you can, a painting.
[mux, sound effects]
Sam Evans-Brown: We’re sitting on a little hill, overlooking a road. It’s a nice day. Standing to our left is the lower half of a twisted dead tree, smooth where the bark has been stripped or fallen off… some vines twirling up around it.
They sky has a peachy late afternoon quality… The road, winding to our right down the hill, has a great ankle deep puddle across it, a person wearing blue shorts and carrying a sack of something or other is guiding some cows across the puddle towards a quaint dutch city in the distance. There’s a dog by his side.
You’ve got to wonder - what does it all mean?
Alan Chong : This is from the 17th century, this is from Jacob von Ruisdale...
Sam Evans-Brown: Alan Chong is director of the Currier Museum, in Manchester, New Hampshire, where this painting, View of Egmond by the Sea, lives. And what he’ll tell you is that there are all sorts of theories about why Von Ruisdale painted this scene… but we don’t really know.
Alan Chong : Landscape is a kind of art for which there is very little to say. One has to project a lot of extra meaning into it, and it’s very open-ended.
Sam Evans-Brown: And maybe for that reason, this kind of art hasn’t always commanded a lot of respect. For example, a group of renaissance-era italian critics once said...
Alan Chong: And this sort of politically incorrect, but they said it - oh, landscapes are for simple minds. They’re for people who really don’t understand the complexities of classical allegory, and historical scenes, so you can just look at a painting and be happy… and what’s wrong with that.
Taylor Quimby: Mm. Yeah, there’s a lot there.
Sam Evans-Brown: That last skeptical comment comes to us from producer Taylor Quimby, who for the past couple of months, has been convinced that there is an episode of Outside/In buried somewhere inside paintings like this one…
Taylor Quimby: Am I right in saying that there’s something encoded in this?
Alan Chong: Maybe.
Sam Evans-Brown: Like he’s going to uncover the environmental version of The Da Vinci Code or something…
Taylor Quimby: Let’s hit some of the weird ones you were mentioning...
What’s funny about his quest though, is that he doesn’t the first thing about art.
Taylor Quimby: What do you think of Bob Ross?
Lian Duan: Who?
Sam Evans-Brown: Or you know... very, very little.
Taylor Quimby: Guy with a big afro who had a TV show?
Lian Duan: I’m not familiar with that. Sorry about it.
Sam Evans-Brown: But I must say, he’s stuck with it… and while he isn’t exactly Dan Brown, he has come up with something worth hearing.
Even if he had to ask a lot of smart people some very basic questions along the way.
Taylor: Based off the crash course I’m getting now, what do you think I should know.
Lian Duan: There is a series of books quite good for this… uh… art history for dunce. I believe. Yeah, it’s a good book! Yeah. Sounds silly, but it is good. It IS good!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>
Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In, I’m Sam Evans-Brown and today producer Taylor Quimby is bringing us Landscape art for the rest of us.
Taylor Quimby: The dunces. The dummies. Join me!
Sam Evans-Brown: You’re none of those things. It’s a tour de force… a survey of how humans have interpreted our landscapes using art throughout history, and how that might be changing… as society changes...
Taylor Quimby: That’s very kind of you to say but really I was just fumbling my way through this world, and so that’s what I’m bringing to you.
Sam Evans Brown: AND, today we have an ENHANCED podcast experience for this Outside/In Art Exhibit, for those who are so inclined. We’ve got pictures of all the works of art mentioned in the story posted to our website and our instagram. We’ll give you a heads up whenever there’s a new one to look at.
Taylor Quimby: The slide show starts with that first one from Von Roisdale we talked about.
Sam: Shall we do it?
Taylor Quimby: [hesitantly] Yeah...
[Outside/In theme swells and fades]
Taylor Quimby [At the Currier]: Let’s move on, let’s see what we’ve got.
Taylor Quimby: The Currier Museum is closed on Tuesdays. So my tour with Alan Chong felt very intimate… the hum of the air conditioning, the echo of our footsteps... It was like being in an empty church.
Taylor Quimby [At the Currier]: This is really cool, being in a museum when it’s closed.
Taylor Quimby: But along with that sense of majesty I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of embarrassment. A wobbly feeling that I don’t speak the language… Now, If you have ever felt this way - in a museum, or looking at a piece of art - Alan is here to put you at ease.
Taylor Quimby: I’m interested in art history but it can be overwhelming there’s so many time period and ‘isms’, you know there’s romanticism and classicism..
Alan Chong: Forget about all that. It doesn’t matter. Knowing that 17th century Holland might have been called the baroque or the golden age, we can’t use those terms, they are historically inaccurate and they don’t really tell you much about a work of art….. and do they really help us? Sometimes. … But you can avoid all that stuff. It’s more important to look at a single work art and what it may be saying, what it may be doing. And more importantly, what kind of emotional or intellectual triggers it has for you as a viewer.
Taylor Quimby: So art lovers and students of history, apologies in advance - in our museum, we’re throwing away conventions in favor of a more approachable, if less accurate history...
And we’ll begin our tour of the Outside/In exhibition in a room dedicated to what I’m calling, the Animals are Awesome Age.
Werner Herzog: These images are memories of long forgotten dreams.
Taylor Quimby: This is Werner Herzog, from his documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Werner Herzog: Is this their heartbeat or ours?
Taylor Quimby: And here, if you’re following along online or on instagram, is our second artwork.
Werner: Madame Parfit takes us down to the farthest chamber of the cave… the mysterious chamber of the lions.
Taylor Quimby: Cave paintings made from a mixture of charcoal and animal fat…
This is a place called - I’m just going to have sam do this because he makes fun of my french all the time...ahem, Sam?
Sam Evans-Brown: The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave.
Taylor Quimby: Thank you.
Sam Evans-Brown: You’re welcome.
Taylor Quimby: More than a dozen species of animals are depicted here - deer, lions, rhinos, hyenas… Paintings date back some 32,000 years.
This cave is in Southern France… The air is literally toxic with radon and C02… I’ve read more modern folks have climbed Mount Everest than have seen these paintings in person.
In this documentary, Werner asks...
Werner Herzog: Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time.
Taylor Quimby: If a may, Werner, I’ll speculatively answer with a no -
But animals are the subjects of nearly every early cave painting discovered, and I think - 32,000 years later - the basic explanation is pretty straightforward.
Animals were our predators, and our prey… Our companions, and our competitors… And perhaps, even then, early humans thought they were beautiful - elegant. Perhaps these caves were used to tell stories, or do drugs, I dunno… but certainly, people from this time were focused on the creatures of this world as something worth capturing, in spirit, and eventually, in real life too.
Okay, enough of this room, let’s fast forward some 32 thousand years to…
[With Echo SFX] The Age of Painting Stuff You Own!
The guest curator of this gallery will be...
Nils Büttner: OK, let's introduce myself. I'm Nils Büttner. I'm a professor of art history in Stuttgart, Germany,
Taylor Quimby: And in this room, we’ll be lumping together oh just a couple thousand years of art… Because from the ancient greeks all the way until and through medieval Europe, a lot of artwork was commissioned specifically by the wealthy. The what was a common theme? A thing that wealthy folks from multiple cultures and centuries like to see?
Nils Büttner: If you are an owner of a piece of land, you show the country that is your country…
Taylor Quimby: Property. Ownership. Land that is my land. And I don’t mean in the our land sense of my land, I mean like MY LAND. Aspects of the modern art world - the lack of diversity, pieces purchased by investors for millions of dollars - they can feel really exclusionary. And the truth is, that type of exclusion is built into the foundations of art history.
There have been all sorts of landscaped painted over the years… heavenly landscapes, hellish landscapes, historical landscapes… but in the one genre of painting specifically designed to focus on the beauty of the outdoors… The quote unquote “European Landscape painting…” there is surprising lack of variety.
Taylor [In stairwell with echo effect] : Fields… villages…Peasants at work… Gardens... harvest crops... Peasants at work…
Taylor Quimby: This is not in the museum, by the way, it is a creative dramatization of my reaction.... I recorded this in the stairwell outside my office.
Taylor: [In stairwell with echo effect]… windmill… Peasants working…
Nils Büttner: People thought that all what is good for men is beautiful. So if you have vineyards and you see the grapes and you and they promise a good vine, this is beautiful because it's good for the people. But if you go to a dark forest with wild animals. They are dangerous. And so a dark forest is not beautiful.
[mux and forest sound swell]
Taylor Quimby: As opposed to the cave painters… who chose to paint both predator and prey…The history of European landscape art is focused on the aspects of the natural world that have been, and can be dominated, owned and harnessed…
Beverly Naidus: Landscape is when you’re standing outside of things.
Taylor Quimby: This is Beverly Naidus, an artist focused on ecological issues and professor at University of Washington Tacoma.
Beverly Naidus: It’s very much a representation of dominant culture, christian hegenemy, manifest destiny, white supremacy, all those different systems of oppression create this sense of ownership over the land.
Taylor Quimby: There’s a famous British painting by a guy named Thomas Gainsborough, it was made in 1750 - and it’s a portrait of a newly married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews.
This is the third piece, for those following online… Let’s take a look.
[mux]
Mrs. Andrews is sitting on a pretty little bench, in front of a wide scene of the English countryside. A rifle is casually balanced in the crook of Mr. Andrews arm, who is standing beside her.
These two members of the landed gentry - aristocrats who made a living just from owning property. In a BBC film called Ways of Seeing, critic John Berger puts it this way…
John Berger: They have become not a couple in nature, as Rousseau imagined nature… there’s is private land. If a man stole a potato at that time, he risked a public whipping. The sentence for poaching was deportation.
Without a doubt the principle pleasure this painting gave them was in seeing themselves as the owners of their own land.
Taylor Quimby: Again and again, you see the same geographies in European landscape art...
Ironically, what you don’t see, are a lot of the celebrated landscapes that we find interesting today… Wilderness...Jungles, tundras, and high mountain peaks.
[Climb Ev’ry Mountain from Sound of Music plays briefly]
These vistas were still seen as dangerous
Nils Büttner: The Alps were crossed, but It was seen as a very dangerous thing to go over the Alps here in Europe. And so nobody would have gone to climb up a mountain, to go to the snow zone, because this is only dangerous.
Taylor Quimby: People didn’t climb them, people didn’t paint them…
Nils Büttner: And they found this kind of landscape really, really ugly.
Taylor Quimby: Ugly. Ugly! Can you believe it?
[mux]
But let’s leave for a moment the European history… and skip over to another gallery in the Outside/In museum, one where you’ll find almost the exact opposite - lots and lots of mountains… and not much else.
Lian Duan: When you look at a chinese landscape paintings you saw the same thing again and again in different dynasties… always with the same subject matter. Mountains. Rivers. And that’s why Chinese landscape paintings is called “Mountain Water painting”.
Taylor Quimby: What’s the Chinese word for that.
Lian Duan: Shānshuǐhuà.
Taylor Quimby: Shānshuǐhuà
Taylor Quimby: This wing of the museum is dedicated to what I’m calling the Mountains as Metaphor Movement.
And our curator here...
Lian Duan: Yes. Yeah, my name is Lian Duan. I’m from Concordia University in Montreal Canada.
Taylor Quimby: Paintings in this wing start way back - at least 1500 years back - when Chinese artists, poets and scholars, were painting mountains and rivers on silken fabrics with black India ink.
These mountains and rivers are doing something that the commissioned landscapes of Europe do not.
Lian Duan: They encode philosophy, the philosophical idea we call the tao. That’s the commonality to all Chinese Landscape art.
Taylor Quimby: The Tao - sometimes translated into English as “the way”, is a part of chinese philosophy, religion, even politics. And it’s represented here through visual artistic traditions… Which you can see for yourself if you’re following online - artwork number four is an example of a mountain water painting. The artists are neither concerned with realism, or ownership… here, the flow of water or the trail winding up the mountains are a sort of philosophy in themselves.
Lian Duan: Road in English is also way, and way is a translation of chinese ‘tao’… therefore you also see a small zigzag mountain road leading you up and also like the water, going beyond the mountain tops, beyond the peaks. In the west, we use another term. We say ‘transcendental.’ That’s how you go beyond this world to another world. The philosophical world. To reach the tao.
[river sound SFX]
Taylor Quimby: I don’t want to fetishize or appropriate ideas that I don’t really understand, and the tao is definitely that. But there is something familiar here… a tradition, an urge even, to see ourselves in the world around us. To project our own feelings onto landscapes, and ecosystems…
Lian Duan: Chinese artists preferred to express their internal idea, their internal failings, their sentiments, in their landscape paintings, in other words for the later artists landscape is not really a representation of the literal order, but an expression of their internal order, or we say their internal world. The English translation for the tao is the way.. The way things… the world goes.
Taylor Quimby: The Europeans eventually got here too by the way.
Lian Duan: There is a concept we call the sublime. That’s the idea, sublime could be comparable to the chinese tao.
Taylor Quimby: Here again, our European curator Nils Büttner:
Nils Büttner: Looking at high mountains or stormy landscapes can give you a good feeling to know that you're not in a storm, but in your warm home. And look at a painting.
Taylor Quimby: This part of the museum - the part where the outdoors are used as a way of representing something internal…. is maybe where we see the most important work from the perspective of how art has evolved to where it is today…. A place where things here get more and more abstract… more and more conceptual...
Taylor Quimby [at the Currier]: What is the minimum requirement to count as a landscape?
Chong: that’s a very good question. Is this a landscape? … this is… kind of kinky, you know.
Taylor Quimby: But frankly, we’re going to cruise on by this section, because - crucial as it may be to art, this isn’t the most important stuff in the Outside/In museum. And before we jump again in time, I want to focus on one more gallery from the 19th century….
[With echo SFX] The Age of the Travel Brochure.
Here again, at the Currier, is Alan Chong.
Alan Chong: This artist, Cropsey, painted this in England for a European consumer so he’s creating this landscape to represent America to Europe.
Taylor Quimby: We’re standing now in front of painting number five, if you’re following online… it’s a massive view of Mount Washington… Well, some place in the White Mountains anyway… There are beautiful fall colors, a crisp white mountain peak in the sky… Which, I can tell you from personal experience… well, the artist hasn’t gotten it quite right. .
Alan Chong : Does this look like Mount Washington? It’s pretty close right.
Taylor Quimby: A little bit craggier.
Alan: And a little bit higher than reality.
Alan: The artist is trying to tell a story. It’s a narrative. And like selective storytelling there’s a bit of exaggeration. You downplay certain things. Well it’s like a movie.
Taylor Quimby: Cropsey was one of a number of artists from what is called The Hudson River School - a group that famously painted a number of iconic American landscapes at a time when the idea of America was still being shaped.
But what they were trying to do - and how their work was used… are not necessarily the same thing. Again here’s Beverly Naidus.
Beverly Naidus: The hudson River School was trying to talk about the sacred in the land. What they experienced at divine… but the work was then bought by wealthy people who saw it as a kind of advertisement for the west.
Taylor Quimby: And for this reason, you might also choose to put it in that previous gallery - the Age of Painting Stuff You Own.
Beverly Naidus: It was like oh look at all this land that we can go and own, no one is on it, the spaces appear to be empty. Or if there were people or animals on them they were not significant, and so it became propaganda...Who bought the work? It was the robber barons. And they were the ones logging and mining. Pushing people off the land.
[mux]
Sam Evans-Brown: In all this western art history… what you don’t yet find, is an age in which artists are depicting the natural world as something vulnerable… As something that needs our protection…
Well, not in the official text books anyway… All of that art has historically wound up in different places… In museums of natural history.
Beverly Naidus: Indigious views of nature, one is part of it…. And that didn’t get represented until activist movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements… began to question the dominant culture.
Sam Evans-Brown: Environmental art meets environmental activism… when Outside/In continues.
…...Break…..
Sam Evans-Brown: Welcome back, I’m Sam Evans-Brown - and today, producer Taylor Quimby has been walking us through the Outside/In Art Exhibition - art that tells us something about the natural world and how we use it. Up until this point, we’ve often had to look back at art and extract meaning from it, from a sort of anthropological point of view. But today, there is more awareness around environmental issues that are pushing some artists to be much more explicit about what they’re doing…
I mean, you know what I’m talking about right?
[Montage of news clips from reports/speaking talking about Climate change]
Here’s Taylor.
Taylor Quimby: In the last sixty years or so, a series of art movements have sprung up in and around environmental activism…
But to get into the next part of this history - the part where artists start thinking about art more deliberately, we’ll have to leave the climate controlled environment of the gallery… and step outside. Which is what artists started doing in the mid-19th century.
Nils: If you have a paint tube, it's easy to paint outside.
Taylor Quimby: This again, is Nils Buttner - talking about a tradition called… ahem, Sam?
Sam Evans-Brown : Plein Air.
Taylor Quimby: Painting in the outdoors, with an easel, oils, and a wide open view. It was a tradition that sprang from technology… Paint in lightweight tubes, for starters. Second...
Nils Buttner: The invention of the steam train.
Taylor Quimby: And last of all, industrialization at large. For aesthetic reasons, and for personal reasons, painters wanted to get away from the city.
Nils Buttner: In most parts of the cities.They had like yeah. They they had shit all over and it was a big town was really a stinky thing. To go outside to the forest and have fresh air was really good for the painters and made nature more attractive.
Taylor Quimby: And this - getting out into the world to create your art - is a tradition that is still with us today.
Taylor Quimby [Outside]: That wind is picking up.
Alicia: That’s why I’m tucked away under here. That way you only get it from two sides.
Betty: It’s a subculture, and part of the subculture is like okay we’re going to hike in four miles, you know, let’s pack in as light as we can...
Marlene: It is, it’s very challenging, I mean you have to deal with the cold, the rain, the wind, the bugs… It’s like she said on the way up, it’s almost like you have to be prepared for camping, all the time.
This is Alicia, Betty, and Marlene - they and two other members of a Plein air group from New Hampshire have gathered on a forty degree morning in November, in the dirt parking lot of JT Farnam’s Famous clams in Essex Massachusetts. They’re all painting a picture perfect salt marsh estuary just off the side of the road.
Toni: Browns, tans, and oranges…
Alicia: Golden!!
Taylor Quimby: Must be challenging for a morning painting - those colors last --
Alicia: Seconds. They last seconds when the sun is coming up.
[mux swell and fade]
Taylor Quimby: There is a wonderful humility to the plein air tradition - it’s a sort of speed challenge for artists looking to achieve some sort of meditative flow… a tradition that celebrates a certain hominess, and quaint brand of nostalgia… And despite the fact that it’s origin are at least indirectly related to industrial pollution, it is a tradition that has largely been seen as separate from political concerns.
That’s not the case for all of the art that’s moved outdoors. Here again is artist Beverly Naidus.
Beverly Naidus : It started in the 60’s and artists began to question everything.
Taylor Quimby: In the 1960s, an influential book called Silent Spring…
News clip: This is one of the nation’s best sellers...
and other works helped give rise to the modern environmental movement.
News clips: In her groundbreaking work, Silent Spring…
Rachel Carson: We have to remember the children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth...
Artwork inspired and was inspired by this activism - in a sort of circular, chicken or the egg sort of way.
Beverly Naidus: I remember reading Silent Spring in junior high and being like oh my god.
Rachel Carson: The balance of nature is built on interrelationships...
Taylor Quimby: Around this time, you start to see a new branches of art - one in particular that rejected the commercial art world, in favor or work that wasn’t just made outdoors - but was exhibited there as well. This branch was called Earthworks, or Land art. And though it’s environmental…sort of... it was not exactly eco-friendly.
Beverly Naidus: You’ll see artists, particularly white male artists who were still making an impression on the earth, showing their power on the Earth.
Taylor Quimby: Let’s take for example, a piece by a man named Robert Smithson.
Aviva Rahmani: Arguably the most famous work he did was called The Spiral Jetty.
Taylor Quimby: This is eco-artist Aviva Rahmani, who is also helping us curate the last gallery of our exhibit: I’m Calling it the Age of Change.
The piece she’s talking about - number six in our online gallery - is a massive sculpture. It doesn’t depict a landscape, it IS a landscape.
Aviva Rahmani: He organized a number of rocks on a shoreline to create a pattern.
Taylor Quimby: It is, as the title describes, a huge fiddle-head shaped spiral...on the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. It was made in 1970 using bulldozers and dump trucks.
Aviva Rahmani: What’s interesting about his work, two things, one is that...He wrote about his environmental concerns, but the works themselves were not environmentally sensitive.
Taylor Quimby: Despite being made by a person who was concerned about the environment - the process of actually creating Spiral Jetty was in itself inherently damaging to the ecosystem in which it was created… And today, 50 years later, as the jetty has slowly eroded away, the question of how to deal with this artistic paradox continues.
Aviva Rahmani: People are now concerned about or confused about whether they should preserve that work. So when people think about restoring it, it would have to be at the expense of the local environment, which might be organic and might be essential.
Taylor Quimby: Out of the Earthworks movement has come - and of course I’m jumping ahead here - artwork that isn’t just environmental in its shape, or message, but artwork that aims to literally preserve, or rehabilitate natural spaces. The reaction to works like Spiral Jetty, which raised environmental awareness without examining it’s own impact…. And reaction to the more recent phenomenon of political climate change denialism has made some artists much more forthright about their practice: This is not opinion. This is not subjective. This is a crisis.
Aviva Rahmani: Many artists are at that point. And so are many people. We’re listening to the scientists tell us that environmental collapse, even the collapse of civilization is imminent. So in that sense artists are no different than anyone else.
Taylor Quimby: I should say that scientists do not agree what a collapse of civilization might look like, or what it even is, or that we’re heading there in the first place... but humans are altering the world at an alarming rate… and the anxiety surrounding even the possibility of collapse is almost palpable…
Aviva Rahmani: The whole culture has been turning… I’ve been doing turning, because I was simply living in the present.
Taylor Quimby: And what’s interesting about this turn, is that in some places, it’s thinned the line between two art and action.
Aviva Rahmani: Where the art between activism and artmaking. That’s an interesting question and it has an legal implication as well.
Taylor Quimby: I don’t want to get into all the details… but some art is legally entitled to protection… preservation… And Aviva has used this very concept to create an experimental work - a sort of visual/musical opera - that theoretically could have delayed or prevented a proposed natural gas pipeline from being built north of New York City.
The work is called the Blued Trees Symphony… you can see some photos in our online gallery - it’s piece number 7 - and we’re listening to a bit of it right now.
[cue mux]
Aviva Rahmani: Sounds a little complicated but it’s not. It’s a series of ⅓ mile measures where pipelines were proposed on people’s private property
Taylor Quimby: On those properties, using aerial imagery, Aviva mapped out notes in a symphony… And where each note fell, she and others painted a blue S-shape...
Aviva Rahmani: a vertical sine wave, s-i-n-e.
Taylor Quimby: … on a tree that, if the pipeline goes through, would be designated for clearing.The sine waves were only painted on deciduous trees - because paint could hurt the bark of conifers.
Aviva Rahmani: But the paint that was used was not-only non-toxic but it was casein. Which means that the medium to carry the pigment was milk based in this case it was buttermilk.
And buttermilk is an ancient Japanese tool to grow moss on rock.
Taylor Quimby: As soon as the trees were painted, the markings become a habitat for moss… which eventually, will grow and cover the signs themselves and transform into an organic, living symbol.
Aviva Rahmani: So one could argue that the mark itself, which was only one part of the project was as permanent as the tree.
Taylor Quimby: The idea here is to make art that is, in itself, a sort of permanent natural installation… one that might be protected through legal processes, - ultimately forcing the developers to either halt or reroute the pipeline.
It hasn’t worked out that way, exactly.
That first pipeline - or an extension of an existing one, rather - was built. The blue trees were destroyed. Since then, the symphony has grown - new trees at other locations have been painted. Some have survived and others have not. h
The project has yet to establish the legal protections Aviva had hoped for - and I’m not sure she will - but the music, and the artwork survives.
There are other artists in this gallery, who are working much more firmly in the traditions of the past, in order to change people’s thinking on environmental issues… other branches, that aren’t going as far folks like Aviva… but still have a role to play.
Brian Ritchard: I’m painting places where nature and culture sort of butt up against each other. And the wind farms are a perfect example of that.
Taylor Quimby: This is Brian Ritchard - an artist based in Chicago.
Brian Ritchard: I think for example like Van goyan or rembrant who painted landscapes and often included windmills. You can sort of see this in your mind’s eye, everybody has seen an old dutch windmill painting. What I’m doing is very similar to that. Dutch painters were very proud of these structures and saw them as being highly symbolic of man’s cooperation with nature, and therefore man’s cooperation with God. So they imbued a lot of spiritual qualities with these windmills and I’ve sought to do the same.
Taylor Quimby: This is a pretty simple subversion here… but nevertheless, feels radical to me, given the degree to which some people see wind farms as a blight on natural landscapes. You can see some examples of his work by the way - number 8 in our online gallery.
Brian Ritchard: You may feel that it ruins your view, but you may need to change your point of view to look at if you want clean air.
Taylor Quimby: But I do have to wonder, as I walk through this gallery - which is bigger than you can possibly imagine - can you measure the impact of any of these works? As art and activism blur together, will critics measure it by the ability to move the needle on environmental issues? I asked Beverly a question along those lines.
Taylor Quimby: There’s a part of me that wants to ask like, who is a person who prevented say a pipeline from being built… But I suppose that’s not the right approach.
Beverly Naidus: It’s totally the wrong approach. Because it’s not about an individual anymore, it’s about the seeds that have been scattered by multiple generations of people and multiple groups. And suddenly, we see something shift. But it’s been going on forever. People in indiginous nations have been working in resistance for 100s of years, and that some of the seeds they scattered are finally becoming visible to those of us alive today, is remarkable and wonderful.
Taylor Quimby: I want to go back… to finish off our tour to to speak, back in Essex. Out in the blustery wind, and pale warm sun.
Because even though this tradition - plein air - is perhaps one of the most apolitical art traditions still being practiced today… Everywhere I looked there were little signs. Signs that Beverly is right, that little seeds planted long ago are sprouting up in unexpected places.
At lunch, inside the clam shack - this group of artists was chatting about their various trials and tribulations… one of which, caught my ear. A sort of rebellion… against notions of ownership.
Alicia: Property owner came up to me and said “leave. You’re not going to make money off of my view.” So there’s all kinds.
Betty: I just had my iphone, wanted to take photos of this barn scene. I get out, and I parked in a legal spot that’s off the road but it’s not his property, and then I’m walking around and I take my photos, and on my way back to the car I hear a gunshot three times. Yeah so…
Marlene: The challenges of plein air painting.
And even though they were all painting the same nostalgic New England view - a salt marsh, and pretty little colonial house - there was still room to make a statement.
Betty’s painting, especially, stood out for one particular choice.
Betty: It’s actually, I’m doing a series about the environment. So all the skies are orange or red, to relate to the red sky in morning, sailors take warning. So I hope to make this a realistic inviting landscape but then the viewer puzzled as to why did I leave the sky orange or red, so it’s a bit of a political statement.
Even the works that aren’t trying to veer into political territory … That have nothing to do with climate… Each one is a still life still life of something that is changing…
This salt marsh for example - it’s a landscape that in fifty years might be totally unrecognizable. The little colonial house? Under water.
Bob: It’s the light...This is the perfect time to catch it. The sun coming in from behind me and picking up these beautiful blues right in here.
Taylor Quimby: A woman named Alicia told me that one of the challenges Plein Air painters face, is the urge to keep adapting your painting as the light progresses - as the sun changes its position.
Alicia: When I was here the last time, it was like my brushes and palette knife was just flying across the canvas.. We try not to chase the light, that’s what it’s called, chasing the light.
Taylor Quimby: But this landscape is changing in ways we can’t see in a painting… And each of these artists is chasing a whole lot more than light.
Bob: I’m trying to capture these beautiful blue streak right through here…
Taylor Quimby: Even though the moment’s changed already?
Bob: Everything changes… but like the blue streak.
[mux swell]
Outside/In was produced this week by Taylor Quimby, with help from me, Sam Evans-Brown, Jimmy Gutierrez, Justine Paradis, and Sarah Ernst.
Erika Janik is our Executive Producer.
Maureen McMurray is Director of flying across the canvas.
Special Thanks to Sharon Allen and the Plein Air Painters of New Hampshire, and to Hannah Rothstein
Again, if you weren’t able to follow along but want to see some of the artworks we talked about in this episode, go to our website Outsideinradio.org… or check out our Instagram.
And listen…if really would like to help out the show, but you absolutely for some reason cannot support us financially – rate us on iTunes and leave us a happy comment. They make us feel good about what we’re doing, and we love reading them. Or show one technologically hesitant person how to subscribe to the podcast.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.