I think of the landscape of western America as varied, beautiful, wild and damaged, bountiful and poisoned as any on earth. As an inhabitant of western America, I view its landscape—mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, streams, forests, rock walls, glaciers, canyons, meadows, ocean and bays—as a priceless gift of indescribable beauty and significance to the lives of all its inhabitants.
Wolf, bear, cougar, coyote, marmot, eagle, hawk, rabbit, snake, lizard, tortoise, frog, fish, beetle, elk, fox, human, moose, bison, deer, owl, mouse antelope and ptarmigan are of and formed by and conscious of the landscape in which they live and die.
As are you.
As am I.
Of and formed by and conscious of the landscape in which we live and die.
What we do to the landscape we do to ourselves.
What we make of the landscape we make of ourselves.
Think of that.
We are what we eat, as the old teaching has it. More, we are also what we do in order to eat as well as what we do to the landscape in order to eat. And we are what we see and do not see in the landscape around us.
The landscape is our oldest, best, most reliable teacher. Look around: the longer, closer and more carefully you contemplate the landscape the more it will tell you—about its current state and about yourself.
I grew up with the Sierra Nevada and the great open desert to the east as my boyhood playground, but I don’t remember contemplating any of it as anything other than a backdrop and field for my personal endeavors until I was in college. That seems strange in some ways, but, like many people of that age and time, I was immature beyond my years and barely conscious if that of many things that constituted and formed my life. It was a great time and I enjoyed it, but consciousness of the world (the landscape) and personal pleasure and endeavor are quite different matters. The reader may know others who could be so described. It need not be a terminal state.
Though, like all learning, it was multi-faceted and more complex than a single teacher and class, a freshman art appreciation class at the University of Nevada helped me learn to appreciate more than art. At that time I was not at all interested in art and took electives according to the time of day they were offered so that I could ski in the afternoons. It was my good fortune that Craig Sheppard’s art appreciation class fit my ski time aspirations. Sheppard, a fine, well-known western artist, was the kind of person and teacher that inspired attention. I liked him in part because it was clear he knew things about his subject and about life that other teachers did not, or at least were not able to communicate to me. Sheppard showed me (us?) that art could be a door of perception, a tool of understanding and a connection to the world as perceived and expressed by the artist.
Art Appreciation 101 covered the history of art, but Sheppard himself painted landscapes of Nevada, among other things. His work touched and moved me more than, say, reproductions of Botticelli, Rubens or even DaVinci, and I never viewed the landscape of Nevada quite the same after my initial exposure to Craig Sheppard. I was of that landscape, as was Sheppard the artist, and I responded to the way he expressed and honored that connection. It would be years before I could put words to that response and connection. A few years later I spent several days walking around the countryside near Arles in southern France and realized that I would not have seen the landscape the way I did without knowing the work of Van Gogh. I would not have been interested in landscape or Van Gogh had I not taken a basic art appreciation class from Sheppard and been introduced to his own work.
These days I favor the lovely lithographs and oils of Russell Chatham. I never tire of them and I often see Chathams in many places in the western landscape in which I live and through which I move.
Sheppard died in 1978. Since then the western landscape has shrunk. It has suffered abundant destruction and indignities, too obvious and numerous to need mentioning. I wonder what Sheppard would think and how he would paint today’s western landscape that we are all of and formed by and at least at some primordial level conscious of?