Contemplating Sermons in the Stones

The type of landscape painting that Darthea Cross does has a history behind it which might be subtitled “from allegory to entropy.”

image courtesy of author

By Daniel Gauss

And this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in the stones and good in everything. — From Shakespeare’s As You Like It

The type of landscape painting that Darthea Cross does has a history behind it which might be subtitled “from allegory to entropy.” As with all the best contemporary landscape painting, one becomes aware of the expectations concerning the experience and contemplation of nature we bring to it, and the limits of what we tend to derive from a direct experience and contemplation of nature. Given what the great landscape artists of the past expected from nature, based on the agendas they brought to nature, Cross’ work asks, “Do we have to leave our visits to nature feeling disappointed?” In response, her work is infused with an optimism for her genre, based on the understanding that we need not approach nature for spiritual, scientific or even environmentalist lessons and that being shorn of these encumbrances, in its liberation from our willful approach to it, nature possesses a stark reality of engagement that can provide a…