Honored to speak at Union College’s Kelly Adirondack Center as part of the college’s Adirondack Week. We showcased Lake George artworks one semester.
Mom used to drag me to museums.
I’m grateful she did. It rubbed off. Today, I visit museums wherever I travel, often with my wife and our kids. I’ll never forget a hot summer Saturday years ago at New York City’s Met. I turned a corner into the New American Wing. There, large as life, was the enormous John Frederick Kensett oil painting of Lake George. This famed oil painting astonished me. Here was a lake I knew well from summers spent sailing and swimming, and where I wished to be that sultry day. In a glance, Kensett transported me.
I’ve been fascinated ever since with this genre. The study of great landscape painting has been handed down through generations from Claude Lorrain through J.M.W. Turner and John Constable to Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School artists who began a new American tradition of painting. These early American landscapes were the Instagram of their times, depicting to a new nation of immigrants the beautiful natural treasures of their new, unexplored continent.
Enjoy!