Deep Waters

Thomas Cole’s Cedar Grove and Frederic Church’s Olana are across the Hudson River from each other, the former an 1815 Federal-style farmhouse and the later a lavish Middle Eastern inspired pile built in the early 1870s.

- John O’Hern

The two artists immersed themselves in the landscape of mountains, lakes and the majestic Hudson.

From coast to coast, despite the intrusions of highways, bridges, railroad tracks and cities, a surprising amount of the landscape that inspired generations of artists is intact and continues to inspire.

Eileen Murphy has spent her life along the Hudson in Columbia County, home of Olana. She observes, “The American landscape has shaped us as a nation while reflecting us back onto ourselves. This is a phenomenon that I try to capture in my paintings. I make extremely detailed landscapes, devoid of people, that have the uneasy feeling of something important having happened, or something about to happen. The viewer naturally projects his or her own associations and experiences onto the scene.”

We look at contemporary Hudson River scenes and are reminded of the sense of the landscape expressed by Cole, “It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.”

Murphy’s latest landscapes are finely painted atmospheric evocations of the near timelessness of the region. The intrusion of mowed fields and a fence move them from the primordial to the present. Elegy V (The Lost Carpet of The Great Beyond), 2018, is a celebration of the natural beauty and the minimal intrusion of the hand of man. Yet, its title, Elegy, from the Greek word for “song of morning,” suggests an ominous future—“something about to happen.”