THE AESTHETICS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION—LANDSCAPES.
THE AESTHETICS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION—LANDSCAPES. I seized on de Botton’s views on the possibility of admiring gas tankers and of finding pylons beautiful because I agree with them. I have always preferred landscapes that reflect human activity—think of Constable and Brueghel. I was pleased to read Richard Woodward’s comment in the Wall street Journal article that Rackford Downes’s “choice of subjects reveals a preference for inhabited sites over wilderness….” Woodward thinks that Downes is criticizing what Americans have done to the environment, referring to his “fixation on America’s careless treatment of waterfront and desert” and to how his paintings can provide an “undogmatic assessment of what Americans (indeed, people all over the planet) have done to the earth.” I prefer to focus on a quotation from Downes in Richard Woodward’s article: “I’m interested in evanescence, the uncaptureable quality, the quality of the form.” I think of his paintings as showing the beauty that can be found in landscapes that have been shaped by humans.