Lost & Found in Fog, Part 4
In this blog series, I trace how a lost wedding ring, an innkeeper’s tale, and the story of Thomas Cole’s Oxbow helped me find my way through a creative fog—revealing that inspiration, though often hidden, still waits along the timeline from lost to found.
Part 4
A Band of Gold, A Bend in the River
Turns out timelines are not so well bookended from starting point to ending point, from lost to found. I started writing this essay soon after that visit to Cape Cod. Over two years later, it remained unfinished. My timeline yielded once again to a fog, not of loss per se, nor even a purposeful shelving of creative impulses with respect to writing. A high-profile public-sector job and the vagaries of life encumbered engagement with those impulses but did not extinguish them. Image making remained, but was more and more on the periphery, more and more victim of obligation, if not outright duty—the haze between myself and inspiration. I turned to printing my work until my second hand, gifted Epson R2880 gave way to its own timeline. Printing was a creative engagement that fit the limited freedom that remained to me as a busy public servant, father and husband. When printing was no longer an option, I lamented the distance between myself and the space and time needed to engage creatively with the landscape, the world and myself. My lamentations were particularly acute during my hour-long commute from my home in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts to my office in Hartford, Connecticut. It was during one such commute where the fog enshrouding my creative engagement parted enough for me see that a timeline back to ‘found’ was right in front of me.
That morning, driving through the Oxbow of the Connecticut River—Interstate Route 91 now bisecting it—a literal fog lifted all around me, shot through with golden sun. Thomas Cole’s View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) sprung to mind. That morning, from my car I watched the dance of mist and light as the sun rose over the Holyoke Range and lamented the obligations that had taken from me the opportunity to make any images from the sheer beauty imbuing the landscape all around me at that very moment. An indescribable epiphany washed over me viewing that lifting fog with The Oxbow in the back of my mind, as that masterpiece often is when I pass through the area. The epiphany stirred long absent emotions, and a long absent confidence and calm that I would, no doubt, find—had, indeed, found in that passing moment, that epiphany—"my freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences” through creative engagement, image making and through writing. Reminiscent of peering that sliver of gold, the slimmest crescent of my wedding band glinting in that sandy rut, I had found, once again, creative inspiration. A fog lifted all around me—literally and figuratively—as I drove, now blissfully, to work. Coincidentally, I later found out that, for Cole, the making of The Oxbow had lifted him from a fog of sorts that had set in on his creative timeline, his artistic inspiration.
In his essay “The Oxbow by Thomas Cole: Iconography of an American Landscape Painting,” Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, at the time a Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described Cole’s “happy accident” in coming to make the painting. His patron, Luman Reed, had commissioned Cole to create his now well-known series of paintings depicting the arc of human culture from the “savage state” through stages of “civilization” to destruction and desolation. Cole described The Course of Empire, consisting of five canvases, all somewhat large, as “higher style of landscape.” As the Exploring Thomas Cole website puts it, “one suffused with historical associations, moralistic narrative, and what the artist felt were universal truths about mankind and his abiding relationship with the natural world.” Cole also viewed the commission as “a prized opportunity to fulfill longstanding aspirations” by undertaking a work, he wrote, “on which I may hope to establish a lasting reputation” as an artist. However, according to Roque Rodriguez, “[w]ork progressed slowly and not to [Cole’s] satisfaction. He encountered great difficulties in painting the figures. He felt lonely and depressed.” He had lost his inspiration along his creative timeline. Sensing Cole’s difficulties, Reed made a fortuitous suggestion to help Cole find creative inspiration again and move from lost to found on that timeline.
Reed suggested that Cole set aside the commission for a time and “paint something in his ‘accustomed manner’” for an upcoming exhibition. Demurring, Cole recommended releasing one canvas of the commissioned series. Reed balked, proposing, rather that Cole paint “an arcadian scene” challenging Cole to create a painting along the lines of the second canvas of the commissioned work, The Pastoral Scene, which Reed lauded, proclaiming, “no man ever produced a more pleasing landscape in a more pleasing season.” Cole relented and, in a March 2, 1836, letter to Reed, told his patron that he “should take advantage of your kind advice and paint a picture expressly for the exhibit and for sale” rather than forge ahead with the commission. Cole, it seems, had seen the opportunity as a way for himself to move along the timeline on which the daunting commission had placed him, that is from the loss of creative inspiration to finding himself inspired once again through undertaking The Oxbow. That Cole recognized this dynamic, this ebb and flow of inspiration on the timeline of creative enterprise is evident from these events that led him to The Oxbow. Interestingly, Cole, later in life also ascribed a timeline to his chosen subject—the American landscape—and his philosophical approach to that subject. It is a timeline that resonates with my goals and philosophy in image making and writing.
In responding to a widespread European view that the American landscape was bereft of true beauty for, in part, its lack of the physical remnants of epochal history, the scars of civilization, so to speak, Cole, in his Essay on American Scenery, “venture[d] a few remarks on what has been considered a grand defect in American scenery—the want of associations, such as arise amid the scenes of the old world.” “The Want of Associations,” as in historical associations, in the American landscape, seemed to inspire Cole to offer a counterpoint to the predominant aesthetic in landscape art. Cole, in one concession, however, noted that one “who stands on Mont Albano and looks down on ancient Rome, has [their] mind peopled with the gigantic associations of the storied past; but that [one] who stands on the mounds of the West, the most venerable remains of American antiquity, may experience the emotion of the sublime, but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds of man.”
Cole, however, pushed back on the accusation that a lack of historical associations within the American landscape was a deficiency, arguing that “American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.” In so doing, he set down a philosophy I now carry like a torch to light my way should inspiration be lost to a fog, enshrouded and unattainable. Cole went on, directing the reader, when,
[s]eated on a pleasant knoll, [to] look down into the bosom of that secluded valley, begin with wooded hills—through those enameled meadows and wide waving fields of grain, a silver stream winds lingeringly along—here, seeking the green shade of trees—there, glancing in the sunshine: on its banks are rural dwellings shaded by elms and garlanded by flowers—from yonder dark mass of foliage the village spire beams like a star. You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage—no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation; but freedom's offspring—peace, security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the scene. On the margin of that gentle river the village girls may ramble unmolested—and the glad school-boy, with hook and line, pass his bright holiday—those neat dwellings, unpretending to magnificence, are the abodes of plenty, virtue, and refinement. And in looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind's eye may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the soil.
Cole espoused that “Poetry and Painting,” and I would add landscape photography, “sublime and purify thought, by grasping the past, the present, and the future—they give the mind a foretaste of its immortality, and thus prepare it for performing an exalted part amid the realities of life.” And in so doing, he concluded, “they carry with them the power to mend our hearts.” The same mending, I felt when I grasped my wedding ring from the past of being lost to the present of being found and the future of possessing, once again, longevity in a band of gold. The same mending, I feel now, as I once again am embraced by the inspiration to create, write and make images—my timeline weaving out of the fog of loss—an opportunity to once again grasp the past the present and the future.
While all that is lost is not to be found, we all march, knowingly or otherwise, at points in our lives, along timelines of lost to found. From the fog of the unknown—unfathomable—to the clarity of absolute certainty. From grief to elation. From insecurity and doubt to composure and confidence. From motivation and creative inspiration to a timeline, a landscape, bereft of any incentive for imagination, creation. Some things that are lost are tangible, though no more precious that those bits of ourselves we lose along the way, like the inspiration that fled from my life when I chose career over creativity, stability to be free to stability from want, need. Or when, mired in that career, my desire to create bound by the strictures of obligation, life turned from solace to torment until the burdensome fog lifted in the bright glow of the illumination of epiphany. That innkeeper gave me a hope I felt was unwarranted as I made my way back to my powerlines and the thick, spongy undergrowth in which my wedding band was snugged, an artifact—an “Association”—in the making. That crescent in the sand was always there from the moment I dropped it, just waiting for me to realize that fact, to gain the confidence to believe that that which is lost is sometimes found. My embracing the wonders of photography leading me back to writing was a crescent in the sand I only saw in retrospect, years later. And, the sun shot fog, golden and lifting over the Oxbow, immediately instilled in me again the same inspiration and confidence Cole bared in his Oxbow. I now, once again, strive to “sanctify the soil” with the art of my image making. Cole leaving me of one last lesson in his masterpiece, a reminder of the need of a buoyant self-assurance in the making of art. Thomas Cole placed himself in his painting, not only perched on Mt. Holyoke, but turned, full faced, his back to the scene, eyes squarely on the viewer. He reminded me that my images required a bit of me in each and every one for them to have any chance at succeeding as intended, any chance of even touching the power to mend our hearts. Each had to have a bit of the path I have travelled, a bit of the anguish of loss and, of course, that slim, golden crescent I came upon in that anonymous sandy rut.