Workshop Leader: Deborah Sattler, Deborah.Sattler@ColoState.EDU
Enrollment Limit: 25
The purpose of this workshop is to focus on the visual image in ways that open up and explore fresh ways of seeing and reading the land. The visual image is one of the most direct and distinctive elements of the language of art which can stimulate thinking about how natural and cultural landscapes, as well as wilderness, are perceived and known. We are the heirs of the nineteenth century and the romantic views of landscape. Through Bierstadt, Moran, and Whittredge, painters of the American West, we have come to realize the origins of a sensibility that longs to see the land as spectacular, sublime, and thrilling scenery. It is a sensibility that makes us resonate with pristine views of waterfalls up the Big South, or Crater Lakes in the Rawah Wilderness. We recreate the wilderness for aesthetic, emotional, and environmental reasons. Undoubtedly, the visual image is a powerful way in which we experience the richness and emotional complexity of our western landscape. But it is more than that. The visual image conjures up a sensory representation that can change how we see the land we walk, the land we fish, the land we live on. When we look at wilderness and other natural landscapes, creating a visual image or pattern of images, we see beyond the natural features to a symbolic language that can express specific moments and meanings. By exploring and exposing ourselves and our writing to a variety of ways of seeing landscapes, we can begin to see ourselves and the land in new and meaningful ways.
Visual images are used by writers to describe and explain, but they can also tell whole stories. In addition to presenting a visual overview of the history of the visual image of our landscape, we will take stock of the vocabulary and names of flora, fauna and places that surround us. We will recall and/or invent sensory experiences. From these basic elements, we will craft and create a portfolio of language images, impressions and expressions that can be used to write journals, stories, histories and poems.