California Memories 1994

Eyvind Earle's painting "California Memories" presents a stylized view of the Californian landscape. Earle’s memory is not a literal transcription of a place, but a vision that conforms to a particular aesthetic, and this tells us something about how California itself was being imagined in the mid-20th century. Earle developed his highly stylized landscapes as backgrounds for Disney films in the 1950s. The work draws on the traditions of landscape painting that were designed to promote an idea of California as a new Eden. However, Earle gives us a vision of total artifice. The natural world is transformed into a series of repeating decorative motifs. The intense stylization suggests a culture more concerned with idealized fantasy than social realities. The historian looks at the context in which such images were created. We can ask how the landscape becomes a signifier for a particular Californian dream, and whose interests that dream serves.