Giants in the Landscape

Mt Rose Spring Photo

Mt. Rose Spring
11″ x 14″
Oil

Emerging Face of Mt Rose

The New York Hudson Valley School of painters at the turn of the century referenced to Giants in the Landscape which always intrigued me.  I believe the term meant to be an ideologically  literary reference to the personality of nature, such as wind and weather.  It reminds me of being in my single digit age of life and lying in the grass on a summer’s day watching the clouds float by.  As the clouds drifted by you could see faces, or animals as if the clouds were presenting you with a Rorschach Test.   To me landscapes are like large human figures in various poses.

I travelled along a mountain range in rural northern California a few times in the afternoon. The sunset shadows stretched long across the hills made dramatic shapes and colors.  The a quiet softness of the hills and shadows provoked memories of sleeping puppy dogs.

In Reno a prominent geographic land mark is Mount Rose.  Legend has it that a crusty of Trapper guy named her since it reminded him of a woman lying down looking up from her feet.  The two mounds being breast and for the rest I need not say more.  She’s not quite as pronounced as the Teton range of Wyoming coined by the French explorer.   The view of Mt. Rose from my window is only of her face.  I see Rose’s forehead, eye, nose and chin.  In the winter she is a cameo of a white blanket of snow.  In the spring she lies under the surface of the melting snow, white patches are left appearing to be her summer garb to protect her delicate features from the intense sun of the summer,  an eye patch for sunglasses and a bandana around her neck.  The underlying ground is exposed as her sun tanned skin emerges.  Week by week the snow recedes exposing more and more.   I can hear the snow over her sighing, as did the wicked witch of the North at the time of her demise in the wizard of Oz, “I’m melting, I’m melting”!