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Landscape painter Karol Mack has had a life-long artistic involvement with the spectacular scenery of Rocky Mountain National Park. She first painted these scenes as a child, when her aunt, a gifted teacher, recognized the little girl's artistic talent and encouraged it by taking Karol to the Park on painting trips. Many of the scenes Karol paints today she also painted as a child under her aunt's guidance. Look at one of Karol's mountain landscapes and you immediately recognize something special. It is that the towering peaks of the Rockies in her paintings display not only their great beauty, but also a more elusive aesthetic meaning called the sublime. The sublime aspect of nature is found in those places that fill us with wonder by their immense size, such as high mountain peaks and ranges, endless prairies and deserts, or the infinite depth of the night sky. While nature's beauty evokes feelings of joyful exuberance, sublime places evoke a mood of quiet meditation, inviting the viewer to reflect on nature's mysterious aspect, and on our place in it. So the Rocky Mountain scenes Karol has frequented and painted all her life have been ideal for developing her mature artistic sensitivity to the sublime. Karol says that capturing the sublimity of mountain scenes in a painting requires a different approach from those aimed at expressing their beauty. For a sublime painting she typically chooses a larger format (View from Loch Vale and Long's Peak From Trail Ridge, for example, are both 42.5" square). The larger format helps evoke the heart-stopping immensity and timeless endurance of the mountain masses shown in them, prompting reflection on how our own relatively small lives relate to such a scene. She also uses darker and closer values. This helps express the mysteriousness of the sublime, because a lower keys suggests a mystical or spiritual dimension behind the surface appearance It also allows for shapes in the shadow areas that are suggested rather then defined, further enhancing the sense of mystery. This works to good effect in the shadow areas of Bear Lake, Dream Lake and Moraine Park, Early Fall. Softer edge work also helps, contributing to an atmospheric effect hat also enhances mystery. The sublime in nature may be discussed as often in today's art work as the beautiful. But Karol points out that it has distinguished history in painting. She cites the landscape of the German Romantic Casper David Friedrich (1744-1840), the stormy seascapes of Joseph Turner (1775-1851) and the mountain scenes of American painters Thomas Moran (1836-1926), and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) as examples. The sublime is celebrated in the writings of recent naturalists and environmentalists, and is alive and well among painting of the West today. Here Karol points to James Reynolds's recent landscape paintings, Clyde Aspevig's 1997 Priz de West painting Prairie Sublime, and Wilson Hurley's dramatic cloudscapes as just a few cases in point. Though dedicated to capturing the sublime dimension of mountains, Karol is also devoted to expressing their great beauty. A painting like Bear Lake Reflections, for example, is pure beauty. So the question inevitably arises: can a landscape painting express both the beautiful and the sublime? "Why not?" Karol asks, if the what the artist wants from a particular image. The painting Horseshoe Park, for example, conveys the beauty of trees and streamside grasses along Fall River in the foreground, and in the background the sublimity of Mount Chapin. This sets up a dynamic contrast between these two important aesthetic values within the same image, a dynamic tension that is true to the way we actually experience many such mountain scenes. Some might worry that including both beautiful and sublime aspects in the same painting will leave it without a a classically paced center of interest. But Karol believed that in a painting of this kind, the whole image can be the center of interest, a point she remembers picking up from long-time friend and mentor, fellow painter Albert Handel. The sublime is a deeply moving
aesthetic value. It can be found in many different forms of landscape,
but seldom as alive and moving as the vast, towering peaks of Karol
Mack's paintings. |
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Horseshoe Park, |
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Mountain Landscapes U.S.A./
Colorado
/ California
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Field Studies /
Southwest U.S.A. |
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All material and images copyright Karol Mack 1998- 2008. All Rights Reserved. |
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