This week I delved deeper into the ideas of space as a continuum and place as a process at a moment in time. I did this in two ways.
The first was to research the idea of eating outside in the form of a picnic. The word picnic is defined as a meal take outdoors. Before 1830 in America, paintings that described themselves as picnics were rare. Most of the American landscape paintings were romantic responses to industrialization. This is best demonstrated by the paintings of Thomas Cole. In 1836, he painted "The Oxbow," which depicts nature without human presence. In 1846, he painted, A Pic-Nic Party where nature becomes a backdrop for a picnic. Angela L. Miller describes the painting , "In short, the human conforms to the natural, the natural to the human…”
These paintings are significant and related to my thesis because they are demonstrative of the beginnings of the separation and construction of the idea of wilderness. Angela Miller describes this:
The preference for wilderness subjects that helped to define America's peculiar cultural identity gave way in landscape practice during the 1850s to a pronounced taste for a middle landscape that tamed nature's feral energies, pastoralized rugged wilderness contours, bridged threatening chasms, and banished indistinct voids by substituting in their place fluid tial transitions…. The picnic theme offered an imaginary flight into an idyllic realm removed from the economic instability and social fluidity that had become an overpowering feature of urban middle-class experience by the 1840s. Treatments of the picnic theme range from the somewhat matter-of-fact to the dreamlike and wistful, the latter recalling the older fete galante.
Nature's Transformations: The Meaning of the Picnic Theme in Nineteenth-Century American Art”, Angela L
The "middle landscape" is where the picnic scenes took place. The idea of a middle landscape, gets at the idea of spaces on a spectrum because it rejects the dichotomy of landscape and city. It begins to get at the idea of space on a spectrum. What is also notable is that a picnic is described as a break from the constant.
The second way I delved deeper into the ideas of space as a continuum and place was to look at the continuum of the site through the temporal framework of history. The site has had a number of lives. At a moment in time a three family homes, a concert hall, a dance hall, a place for watching movies, a school, a garage, an abandoned building, and now the site of a water resource.
