The landscape remade, Thiebaud’s Ponds and Streams: learning resources

Najważniejsze kwestie

• Wayne Thiebaud uses unnatural colors, strong contrasts, and an unconventional sense of perspective to paint a landscape that is beautiful, but also distant from the natural world. This modern landscape is man-made and artificial, but also presents us with a type of constructed beauty.
• The Sacramento River valley is the most productive agricultural region in America, despite its naturally arid conditions. The landscape has been significantly altered and controlled in order to provide water to these farms. These interventions have led to episodes of water pollution in a heavily populated area. In recent years, drought has also become an important issue.
• Landscape painting has a long tradition in the United States often characterized by a nostalgia for the landscape before its settlement and development.

Dla zainteresowanych

Do przemyślenia

Bolthouse [an industrial farm in the Central Valley] processes six million pounds of carrots a day. If you took its yield from one week and stacked each carrot from end to end, you could circle the earth. If you took all the carrots the company grows in a year, they would double the weight of the Empire State Building….At Bolthouse’s complex, carrots whirl around on conveyor belts at up to 50 miles an hour en route to their future as juliennes, coins and stubs, or baby carrots, which the company popularized and which aren’t babies.
— Mark Bittman, “Everyone Eats There,” The New York Times (October 10, 2012)