Acoma 1904

Thomas Moran painted Acoma, an oil on canvas, sometime in the late nineteenth century. It's a landscape, but it's really all about light, or rather, the effect of light. The ochres, browns, and tans are almost bleached out by the sun. Moran's brushwork feels pretty conventional, but the colour is used in a way that makes the forms almost dissolve. There are moments, like the outcropping on the right, where the brushstrokes become more visible, like he's laying down slabs of colour. It feels a bit like he's trying to capture the way the light itself has eroded the stone. The American West was also painted by Georgia O'Keeffe, who captured a similar sense of light and space but with cleaner lines and a bolder palette. But this painting reminds me more of the Hudson River School. These artists saw painting as a form of visual poetry, a means of capturing not just what a landscape looks like, but what it feels like to be in it.