Fasinating, my gut reaction is quite different. I get a feeling of energy and life. Anyway enough with that picture. She seems to be doing just fine without us having sold out a number of solo exibits in Toronto, not to mention having her work featured on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa.
Be careful when you equate exhibitions and sales to being able to make strong art. Not to take anything away from her commercial success as an artist, but oftentimes the reasons why an artist gets exhibitions and makes sales has nothing to do with their talent.
Enough talk about that painting. Here is a group of images I keep coming back to again and again. These are
Chromolithographs made by Thomas Moran. Moran, as some may know, was the artist that went on the Ferdinand Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. Moran was the complete package. He was an outdoorsman, an excellent horseman and the reason he was asked to accompany Hayden on the expedition is because of his skill as an artist and painter. Hayden saw in Moran a person who could not only document visually the world they would be exploring, but also saw that he was good around other men, could hold his own and more around a campsite and was good in a knife-fight. Moran, and the photographer William Henry Jackson (of Civil War fame...), often went out together for days at a time alone to photograph and sketch.
Quite often Moran would paint and sketch from the back of his horse, filling in colors with numbers to be painted in at a later time. Moran would rely on the compositional accuracy of Jackson's photographs for his later large-scale paintings. Jackson's photographs are invaluable for proving that these worlds existed to a very doubting public, but Moran's paintings would become the definitive record of the area. Moran also completed during forty days an amazing body of work for which he would draw from for the rest of his life. Moran's paintings would also become some of the last mass-produced color reproductions for public consumption in a portfolio of Chromolithographs published in Boston by the finest publisher of Chromos at the time, Louis Prang.
Moran had it all. The outdoor savvy to not only get around, but be incredibly productive while in the field...and most importantly he had the ability to see with tremendous clarity and not too much over-editorializing the scene placed in front of him. He did say: "I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization....Topography in art is valueless." That being said, by looking at the record left by Jackson and comparing them to the paintings that are based on those images, you can see that he does not take too much creative license with the views. His treatment of light and color and space puts him at the top of the list of people I look at that have documented the west. Moran went on several different surveys visiting the hottest spots in the west. The places he visited and painted would put us all into the 'well traveled' category for those who have been smitten with wanderlust.
I don't go out visiting places to make the same compositions Moran does, but through my reading of his text and visual studying of his paintings and drawings I go out to those wide-open spaces with a heightened awareness of what worked for him, and what can potentially work for me. I don't go out to recreate his images, but I do go out to try to capture the same feeling he did in my own work.
There is a lot of information about Moran on-line, but I'll give you a link to a small page that not only features one of his finest Chromos, but just so happens to be of
Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Oh yeah, if you are an artist and happen to have a mountain named after you, you're someone that ought to be paid attention to.
Late summer/fall soft low slung light slipping through the clouds after a storm is what I most closely relate it to.