Seriously awesome paintings. Horace Greeley and the Transcendentalists would be proud.
The Niagara Falls views just blew me away. Also, some of the pictures made me think of Turner. I wonder if Turner might have been an influence on Church.
I think you can get a lot more intimate with the landscape by painting it, instead of, say, just taking a picture of it or be surrounded by it doing other stuff (like the subjects in his paintings). That’s what I get from his paintings, a sense of great intimacy with the landscape.
Hauling all of his painting equipment (easels, etc.) around, though, must have been a pain.
I tend to agree. I do appreciate the great potential of photographic art, but there’s something about a painting rendered through an artist’s eye that affects me in a different way. Maybe I relate to a painting more closely, human through human, instead of human through machine, I don’t know. But Church’s paintings are magnificent, I must say. Also, I expect much of that nature would have been lost to us otherwise.