Sep 22

One thought that crossed my mind while reading about landscape is when people have conflicting views on what a particular landscape means. If one society sees a landscape as wealth when another society sees it as a place, there is a fundamental rift between these two societies. The example that comes to mind is the colonizing of America. The Europeans had a different way of viewing and interacting with the landscape which ended up in the decimation of Native American society and culture. As well as having different views about landscape, there is also a lack of empathy that pervades most all colonialism that is highly intertwined with landscape and place.  The Europeans had no interest in seeing what the landscape meant to the natives and how they interacted with it.

However, as in the case of Hudson and other artists who depict landscapes, their unique takes on what a certain landscape means can bring about greater understanding of said landscape. As we talked about in class, Hudson engrosses himself in the landscape and seems to try to understand the landscape as the lobstermen do. However, as an artist, he brings his own experiences and meanings to his paintings. While he cannot truly understand what the landscape means to those lobstermen because he is not one, a mutual appreciation for the landscape would seem to bring a deeper and more sophisticated view of the landscape. Not more sophisticated because he is an artist and artists are perceived as more sophisticated, but because there is a dialogue between the two perspectives which results in deeper connection and perceived understanding.

After reading An Eye for the Coast, I was touched by this man Eric Hudson, who was also in the photograph we discussed last time. He loved Monhegan so much that he spent a long time on the island, drawing, photographing, and observing. Monhegan was a place for him, not only because of his emotional attachment to the island, but also because he understood the community on the island, and was somehow, a part of it. I realized his understanding of the community when I read the analysis of his photo captured a gathering of fishermen and his children at Fish Beach (Hudson.158). The photo not only shows a traditional meeting of the fishermen, but also indicates an unusual “non-structural interaction” between adults and children. I would say, this photo is more concentrate on a landscape instead of people themselves. Landscape can be the harmony of human and nature (Meinig.46). Fishing in the sea is group work, fishermen had to face the dangers and challenges of nature together in a single vessel, and this is how the close relationship among them was constructed. Their long-time work also directed to the fact that their children were brought up together by the whole village, and that’s the reason why the scene of children intermingling with adults appeared on the photo. The environment shaped part of the fishermen’s personalities, and also influenced their small society. This is how nature and human together formed this island, and why I am impressed by Eric Hudson for capturing this fact by his photos and drawings.

In D.W. Meinig’s The Beholding Eye, Meinig says “Any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” From this, I started thinking about the different people we’ve read and talked about in class and the different versions of landscape that they would see.

First, the lobsterman, looking out at a stretch of Mid-Maine coast, would see the landscape in front of him as a combination of system and wealth. If it is his own lobstering territory, then he knows the area well; how the tide swells, the direction of the current, and the influence of the weather. On top of this, he contextualizes the landscape in front of him in terms of wealth. Meinig’s explanation of landscape as wealth is more focused on the monetary values that the views of a place can have, but for the lobster fisherman, the landscape he is looking at contains very physical and very concrete wealth, submerged and crawling around in the waters below.

For an artist, like Eric Hudson, this same landscape means something completely different. He is likely to see it in many ways; nature, habitat, maybe ideology, but most importantly he sees the landscape as aesthetic. If he finds it beautiful and meaningful, he would begin to think about how he could conceptualize and present the scene in front of him onto a canvas or photo. He would think about what the art would tell viewers and the emotions that it would evoke.

Lastly, to someone like William Cronon, talked about in Cresswell’s Genealogy of Place, the landscape in front of him would mainly be seen through the lens ideology and place. He focuses less on the physical aspects of the view in front of him, and more on the underlying factors that have shaped it. His understanding is driven by the complex interactions of people, cultures, and the environment.

After reading “An Eye for the Coast” by Eric Hudson and discussing relational space last class, I couldn’t help but think about Hudson and his relationship to Monhegan Island.  After traveling the world, Hudson first saw Monhegan from a couple of Marshall Johnson sketches. At this point in time Monhegan was just a space for Hudson, he had not emotional attachments to it and only knew it for its landscape.  When he finally visited the island, he claimed “He had never seen a greater beauty than this island” (Hudson, 5).  The combination of the island having a small population and being hard to access made Monhegan a special place to him. The island very quickly became a place for Hudson, building a house on it shortly after his visit (Hudson, 5).  Hudson captured the beauty in things that nobody else would have thought to capture, such as the fishermen and the fishing industry.  These works eventually turned Monhegan into a relational space because of his depictions of the processes that occurred on this island. These depictions caused people to associate Monhegan with the raw beauty that Hudson had captured, even after his death.  He changed the ‘field of flows’ on Monhegan forever – exposing its unique beauty in ways never seen before.  Although Monhegan has changed significantly since Hudson’s death, he still affects the thoughts and ideas that are associated with the island today. It was interesting to me to see the development of Monhegan as a space in Hudson’s life in “An Eye for the Coast” after discussing the different kinds of spaces/places in our last class.

I found the focus on the theme of Man vs Nature in Meinig’s 10 perspectives on landscapes very intriguing.  I had never thought about visualizing a landscape as such a battleground between man and nature before.  I think that each way of looking at landscape had its strengths as well as its weaknesses.  There was no one way that stood out to me as the way that I would always want to look at a landscape, rather each one represented a different lens for observing a landscape that would only be ideal for a specific setting.  This reminded me about the Harvey reading and our discussion on the relational view of spacetime.  In the relational view Harvey claims that it is “impossible to disentangle space and time” because of the “relationalities” that subjectively and subconsciously exist for all of us (Harvey 14).  The relationalities between man and nature in many of Meinig’s perspectives on landscape make visualizing the landscape a relational view.  For example, the landscape as nature view requires the viewer to see man as “miniscule” and all of his creations as “mere scratchings on the skin of Mother Earth” (Meinig 34).  On the other hand, the artifact view takes the perspective that nature only “provides a stage” for man and his creations, so that no pristine nature actually exists and all is tainted by man to varying degrees.  Many of Meinig’s other perspectives on landscape share the man vs nature theme too.  The ability to look at landscapes through different lenses and perspectives I think is a necessary and important process towards artistic expression.  Going forward in the course as we look at different landscapes of coastal Maine through photography, painting and other art forms, determining the lens or perspective used by the artist will become valuable to our understanding of the artists message and purpose for choosing that specific landscape.

During one of our first discussions, we talked about the differences between place, space, and landscape. However, the primary focus of that conversation was the difference between space and place, while landscape was somewhat overlooked. In D.W. Meining’s “The Beholding Eye”, the concept of landscape is reintroduced in many different views. One view that I found particularly captivating was the idea of landscape as aesthetic, and how it relates to Harvey’s idea of relational spacetime (Harvey, 14). Meining describes landscape in this view as “holding meanings which links us as individual souls and psyches to an ineffable and infinite world” (Meining 47). From my interpretation of relational spacetime, the field of flows is a connecting web of things, events, and processes, which acts a structure for understanding spacetime. I see this aesthetic view of landscape as its own type of a field of flows, and the “ineffable and infinite world” as a quasi-parallel for spacetime. If we accept Meining view of landscape as aesthetic, then we accept that landscape is cable of linking individuals to the world. Just like a field of flows is interwoven through spacetime. If every person brings their own ideas, past experiences, dreams, memories, and anticipation when experiencing a situation, then every one will experience a moment, uniquely.  However, collectively their experience from that point will have affect in the future. Two people objectively viewing the same landscape painting will experiences it differently but together their collective experience will affect the painting. Relative to what we are studying in class- every person that visits, lives on, or passes through the islands off the midcoast of Maine brings a bit of themselves to the islands and when and if they leave, they take some of the island with them.