Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Becoming mainstream in American art of the 1840s the pastoral landscape is a well-wrought figment of the country’s cultural imagination as well as a mode of seeing so apparently seam- less in its lush verdure and apparent irrepressibility that it appeared natural rather than artifi- cial and self-contained rather than permeable to society’s desires and perceived needs. Apropos this situation writer and horticulturist Alexander Wilson concluded in 1992 “In the broadest sense of the term landscape [in general] is a way of seeing the world and imagin- ing our relationship to nature” thus viewing it like McGrath as a responsive lens capable of being calibrated to changing ideological views. Since the advent of the automobile pastoral landscape has often been experienced through the windows of moving cars or from highway overlooks intended to perpetuate long out-of-date ideas of the sublime the beautiful and the picturesque. When nature is seen through a car’s lens (ie. its windows and windshield) as in McGrath’s paintings beginning in 2001 aspects of the public’s own attitudes are reflected back to them becoming mirrors of past and present-day needs and aspirations (LL)