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Desolation Wilderness, Lake Echo to Eagle Fa
Desolation Wilderness, Lake Echo to Eagle Falls, two days, about 20 miles
"See! Your house is left to you desolate; and assuredly, I say to you, you shall not see Me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!’”
--Luke 13:35
Desolation Sound, British Columbia, calm and sheltered cruising waters. Only 1h scenic floatplane flight from Vancouver
2nd
Taken by Robin.Messer
Was getting a bit desperate so I just nipped out this evening and took this! It's the park near our house in Bathampton. Certainly deserted but maybe not desolate.
Knowledge wasn't on the list of major necessities on this trip. I planned on dropping by Lake Tahoe, waking up and hiking to Lake Aloha one morning. The reality of it was that mid May is not the month to plan a hiking trip in the Desolation Wilderness at Lake Tahoe. Snow is everywhere. I might have made it a mile through the snow and realized there was no trail to follow and I wasn't going to reach any of the lakes I had planned on achieving. The consolation prize was the waterfalls in this wilderness that were created from the heavier snow fall melt off.
I was particularly mesmerized by this waterfall and tryed to capture its beauty as it flowed off of the rocks. By the time I shot it the sun was a bit to intense but I salvaged what I could of the scene and spent some extra time soaking in its beauty with my eyes.
Mangroves sticking up out of the beach at Tanjung Sepat, Malaysia, offer a quiet calm and desolate feeling when rendered in B&W.
You know why that permit is required? Because there is no trail. I mean its basically introduction to rock climbing. With a 35 pound pack on your back its very scary.
Toilers of the Sea
Rockwell Kent (American, 1882 - 1971)
Toilers of the Sea is perhaps the most monumental of the seascapes and landscapes painted by Rockwell Kent while he lived on Monhegan Island between 1905 and 1910. Two and one-half square miles in area, the island is situated in the Atlantic Ocean approximately ten miles off the coast of southern Maine. Settled by colonists in 1622, Monhegan soon developed into a thriving, albeit small, fishing community. In the late nineteenth century the island became a popular summer destination for tourists and artists attracted by its isolation, primitive accommodations, and picturesque setting. Kent arrived on Monhegan in June 1905, drawn there by the enthusiastic recommendation of his teacher, Robert Henri. Unlike most artists who visited Monhegan for a brief summer painting expedition, Kent elected to remain there, supporting himself as a lobsterman, carpenter, and well digger. Painting outdoors whenever possible, he captured the island in all its seasons and moods. Although Kent made frequent trips to the Berkshires, New Hampshire, and New York during this period, the Monhegan experience was the prime shaping force in his life and career. He later called it “my first great adventure in living.”
The results of the first two years of work on Monhegan were presented in April 1907 at the Clausen Galleries in New York . Fourteen paintings were shown, among them “Toilers of the Sea’. The exhibition drew at least one ecstatic review: “Donnerwetter! but [Kent] knocks you off your pins before you can sit down with these broad, realistic, powerful representations of weltering seas, men laboring in boats, rude, rocky headlands and snow-bound landscapes. . . . The paint is laid on by an athlete of the brush. . . . We noted with admiration such canvases as. . . ’Toiling on the Sea’ --- thrilling in color, movement, and mood. . . . Those fishermen in their cockleshell crafts on a sea that is tumbling like tornado clouds, those fellows out there under the lee of that harsh pile of rocks are rendered with a fidelity that tells of a big grip on essentials.” The artist John Sloan visited the exhibition and later noted in his diary: “Splendid big thoughts. Some like big prayers to God. I enjoyed them to the utmost and accept them as great. I’d like to buy some of them.” George Bellows wrote admiringly about the exhibition to a friend and later did Kent the supreme honor of modeling a Monhegan painting of his own after “Toilers of the Sea”.
Although the exhibition brought Kent critical acclaim and acceptance as a major talent, it was not a financial success. As Kent wryly noted in a letter written some four decades later: “No picture was sold. I gave a couple of them to friends, one of these being ‘Winter’ which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. The majority of the pictures were a lot of thirteen for which with their frames (costly gold leaf) William Macbeth gave me $500.00 as an act of great kindness at a time when the illness of my wife and a child put me in great need. Most of these pictures are now in American museums.”
While Kent was active on Monhegan, Winslow Homer was still painting in his secluded studio at Prout’s Neck, Maine. Kent greatly admired Homer’s epic seascapes, painted the previous two decades. His spirit hovers over Kent’s Monhegan paintings and is particularly evident in “Toilers of the Sea”. The images of the fishermen struggling in the waves are strikingly similar to those depicted in Homer’s “Fog Warning”(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and “Herring Net” (Art Institute of Chicago), both of 1885. The connection to Homer was not lost on contemporary critics, one of whom hailed Kent as “a worthy successor to the master of Prout’s Neck, whose rugged, rock-ribbed coast he has depicted with forthright simplicity and directness that has something of the stark actuality and bitter tang of the sea itself.” Despite this affinity, however, the focus and emphasis of “Toilers of the Sea” are entirely Kent’s own. Homer's works underscore human endeavor, with the figures central to the composition. In “Toilers of the Sea”, the towering rock and the sea dominate the composition, dwarfing the boats and men. This intention is supported by the artist’s original title for the painting, “Toiling on the Sea”, which stresses the act of work, not the participants themselves. Kent’s colors are brighter and more specific than Homer’s, creating a more cheerful, less foreboding atmosphere. The ordering of the landscape elements reflects Kent’s architectural training as well as the influence of Kenneth Hayes Miller, one of his early teachers. Kent found Miller’s emphasis on the formal elements of painting an important antidote to the more emotive and ad hoc approach advocated by Henri.
“Toilers of the Sea” represents a brilliant moment in Kent’s career, when youthful fervor balanced a keen command of painterly technique. Although Kent continued to paint significant works during his long career, he never recaptured the sense of romantic ardor and joie de vivre that so vividly animate the sea, sky, and men in this canvas.
Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, and received his earliest artistic training from an aunt who was a successful ceramics decorator. In 1900, at the age of eighteen, Kent enrolled in the summer art program taught by William Merritt Chase at Shinnecock, Long Island. Kent’s talents were quickly recognized by Chase, who offered the young artist a scholarship to the New York School of Art. Reluctantly bowing to family pressure, Kent declined the scholarship and instead enrolled as an architectural student at Columbia University. By 1902, dissatisfied with his studies, Kent accepted the scholarship and enrolled in night classes taught by Robert Henri. Kent’s fellow students included George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Henri’s charismatic personality and inspired teaching galvanized Kent. His artistic horizons were further widened in 1903 by a summer apprenticeship to Abbott H. Thayer in Dublin, New Hampshire. The same year, Kent gave up his architectural studies entirely to become a full-time art student, studying with Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
In 1905, at the suggestion of Henri, the young artist visited Monhegan Island, Maine, where he built a studio that became his home for the next five years. He returned to New York and participated in the famous Exhibition of Independent Artists, organized by Henri in 1910. Unhappy with urban life and eagerly embracing the challenge of cold and desolate places, Kent sojourned in Newfoundland (1914-15), Alaska (1918-19), Tierra del Fuego (1922), France (1925), Ireland (1926-27), and Greenland (1929, 1931-32, and 1934-35). The artist’s wanderlust was recorded in a series of memorable landscapes. In 1928 he purchased a farm in the Adirondack Mountains near Au Sable Forks, New York. Named Asgaard (the Nordic home of the gods), it served as Kent's home base and as the subject of many paintings.
Early in his career, Kent had so successfully established himself as a graphic artist that his reputation as illustrator and printmaker eventually overshadowed his accomplishments as a painter. He wrote, designed, and illustrated a series of books devoted to his travels (Wilderness, 1920; Voyaging, 1924; N by E, 1930; Salamina, 1935; Greenland Journal, 1962) and gained wide recognition for his clean immaculate drawing style in such books as “Candide” (1927) and “Moby Dick” (1930). His masterly wood engravings, inspired by artists as varied as William Blake and Eric Gill, were much imitated during the 1920s and 1930s.
After World War II, Kent subordinated his activities as an artist to his social activism. Ever militant, Kent had been a Socialist in his youth, organized artist groups during the Depression, painted a controversial post-office mural in 1937, and was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union. As a result, his books were banned from American libraries abroad, he was subpoenaed by the McCarthy Committee, and his passport was suspended. In 1958 his passport was returned, and his right to travel abroad was restored. In 1960 the artist donated more than eighty of his paintings to the Soviet Union, which were distributed among various museums.
Despite these travails, Kent continued to paint until his death in 1971. In recent years, renewed interest in Kent’s work is evident in new editions of his books and in comprehensive exhibitions of his paintings and graphic work.
Lure of the Sea: Masterworks of American Coastal Art
Friday, March 21, 2025 — Sunday, July 20, 2025
To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there? -Walt Whitman, Miracles (1856)
For centuries, the American coastline has served as a wellspring of artistic inspiration and a site of personal enterprise that has helped define the national spirit. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as industrialization, expanding railroad networks, and westward migration dramatically reshaped America’s interior landscape, its coastal regions emerged as vital to the development of commerce, industry, and cultural exchange. Access to the sea offered individuals who invested in small craft an entrepreneurial opportunity. Likewise, bustling port cities drove maritime trade, shipbuilding, and fishing industries, while a growing naval presence underscored the sea’s strategic significance. At the same time, artists were drawn to the shore’s dramatic beauty, dynamic harbors, and poetic spaces of leisure and repose.
Lure of the Sea: Masterworks of American Coastal Art traces nearly 200 years of artistic engagement with the maritime world. Featuring more than eighty paintings, works on paper, and sculptures from 1830 to today, the exhibition considers the profound influence of coastal environments on American art and culture. Distinct themes examine the emergence of seascapes and emotionally imbued expressions of nature’s power, beauty, and allure, as well as the tradition of maritime art in depictions of historical vessels, events, and locales. Spanning diverse artistic styles and moments in time, Lure of the Sea explores the coast’s relationship to American industry, leisure, literature, and the emergence of artist colonies that coalesced along the shoreline, inspired by the interplay of land and sea.
This exhibition is drawn from the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art and commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Museum’s landmark gift of coastal and marine art by collectors and longstanding supporters, Charles J. and Irene Hamm. Featuring masterworks from their donation alongside other works in the Museum’s distinguished holdings, Lure of the Sea illuminates the American coast as a realm of boundless artistic and human pursuit.
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For centuries, the coastal landscape has served as a vibrant arena in which American life, industry, and creativity have flourished. Lure of the Sea: Masterworks of American Coastal Art features nearly one hundred paintings, works on paper, and sculptures that explore the profound impact of coastal environments on the nation’s artistic and cultural development, as well as its collective imagination and identity.
Lure of the Sea explores broad themes, including the evolution of American “marine” art, from its traditional depictions of historical maritime vessels, events, and locales, to emotionally imbued expressions of nature’s power, beauty, and allure. The exhibition considers the coast’s relationship to industry, leisure, and the emergence of artist colonies that coalesced along the shoreline, inspired by the interplay of land and sea.
Spanning 150 years of creative output by leading American artists, including William Bradford, Alfred Thompson Bricher, Frederick Judd Waugh, William Partridge Burpee, Childe Hassam, Rockwell Kent, and N.C. Wyeth, Lure of the Sea offers invaluable insights into American life as it has unfolded along the maritime frontier, inviting viewers to engage deeply with the artistic legacy shaped by the sea.
This exhibition is drawn exclusively from the NBMAA’s collection and commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Museum’s landmark gift of coastal and marine art by collectors and longstanding supporters, Charles J. and Irene Hamm.
For over four decades, Charles and Irene Hamm dedicated their time and resources to developing a renowned art collection focused on American coastal art. The Hamms’ labor of love was last displayed at the New Britain Museum of American Art in the 2015 exhibition Over Life’s Waters: The Coastal Collection of Charles and Irene Hamm. Each work in the collection has been handpicked by Charles and Irene Hamm. When forming their coastal art collection, the couple decided they would collect works by American painters, alive or dead, in any medium, of any time, which attracted their eyes and emotions. Unlike most collectors who decide to focus on specific periods or styles, the Hamms have embraced painters working from the early 19th century right through to the present day in an exceptionally wide variety of media and manners.
To state that the Hamms have been passionate about the sea would be both accurate and revelatory. Charles was born in Brooklyn Heights, a stone’s throw from New York’s East River. Irene’s life as a native Floridian was shaped by her proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. Together, the Hamms have sailed along several continents and enjoyed owning a series of both sail and power boats. Their Connecticut residence on the Long Island Sound was designed to display their coastal art collection and maximize their views and feeling of connection to the water.
artdaily.com/news/180280/NBMAA-Presents--Lure-of-the-Sea-...
www.seegreatart.art/masterworks-of-american-coastal-art/
www.newbritainherald.com/news/nbmaa-to-present-masterwork...
Desolation Sound Aug 2008
Desolation Sound Aug 2008
desolation sound aug 2008
desolation sound aug 2008
The Desolation Wilderness is just west of lake Tahoe. It was some of the most beautiful scenery i have ever seen. The terrain is quite uneven through out most of the trail.
rain melting the last snow of spring beside the highway. this shot reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album, partly because it looks like the cover art, but mostly because it evokes the same feeling of desolation. I find it interesting how desolation sometimes makes us realize who we are and what we need.