Mon
19th
19th
Jul
2010
2010
I grew up in Virginia, in the flat land not near but not far from the ocean. I never remember thinking about the landscape. What I remember was looking out the backseat window at countless, grey columns as we drove alongside another piney woods. We didn’t have vistas where I come from.They put me on the C&O train every summer and sent me to Kentucky to visit. The train was somewhere in the hills near Ashland by daybreak and I stayed awake every year so I could watch Kentucky beginning to stir. Farmers would be coming along the path from the outhouse in first light and I studied the pictures their farmsteads made composed there against the near hill and I would wonder what these silhouettes would be doing after breakfast.
I am marginally interested in the fussed over landscapes of the Central Bluegrass. I do find wilderness areas delicious to smell and aesthetically satisfying, but it is the worked land which supports a single family with varying degrees of difficulty or ease that I find most arresting, that comes mind when I think about ‘landscape’. Fence rows gone to honeysuckle but still working, great breasts and buttocks of dried winter grass folding down to an iridescent green thatch of winter rye tagging last year’s tobacco patch: the beauty takes my breath. But there is more. Any one of these visions carries a subliminal sense of how some human is going to touch that piece of land this year.
— Sarah Tate, reflecting on the three thoughts that come to her mind when considering the Southern landscape, this being the first one: 1. But it is the worked land, as published in an exhibit catalog, A Place Not Forgotten: Landscapes of the South from the Morris Museum of Art. (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Art Museum, 1999), 73. Her other two thoughts are 2. After a while you come to know, on the cyclical rhythm of nature, and 3. Until you are beyond sated, on the extravagance of the Southern landscape.
