Paul Landacre "Desert Wall" Paul Landacre, Engraving, Desert Wall, 1932

PAUL LANDACRE California artist (1893-1963)

If you live in California, once you see the mountains in Landacre’s wood engravings you are suddenly home, a place that yanks at your heart no matter how much you hate it here. These are the hills you see every day from Griffith Park if you own a dog but there is something different about them in Landacre’s print – you feel patriotic, suddenly at peace, and slightly manipulated like when a movie makes you cry. If a camera had taken this picture you would only feel recognition, and thank God Aunt Betty isn’t standing in the way but this simple etching uses the lens of imagination, and instead of a mechanical click, it’s shutter is emotion. For one thing the buildings are too tiny at the foot of the mountains telling us that at the time they were the first settlers, they are lonely and brave unlike the suburbia that spreads there now threatening to crawl up the mountain like a nervous condition of warts. Here in the beginning there is the dawn of hope because the Mountains are at peace, and most important, eternal. They counter balance the unsettling endless drift of the sky and the terrifying tilt of the all too smooth land. The contrast with which they are drawn tells us their awesome power is quiet for now. In spite of the strength of these mighty giants, they descend to the valley with such gentle grace that the little house is not afraid. Instead it seems protected from a fierce cruelty mother nature who could easily come screaming out of the sky or running across the plains.

It’s funny, usually things are female in our language like a boat is called she but these hills are definitely fatherly because they protect, because they stay century after century, because they are so big and silent and because they connect the land to the sky. In Landacre’s wood engraving they are a way up for us spiritually, emotionally, even physically – they also represent a top we will never reach no matter how many times we climb it because we will always be from the little house at the bottom of these beautiful hills.

We talk of man’s footprint on the planet, well, as you can see these mountains rise like the foot of a great beast and even if the beast only takes one step every billion years, when angered it could crush us in a blink of an eye. So if I were the little mouse in the house, I would walk softly and pick up my trash because God will not save us. God is one of our inventions and when we are gone he will vanish too, but this beautiful beast we call earth, under whose foot we exist, this mountain will remain just the way Mr. Landacre has etched it – forever and ever, Amen.

Artillery Magazine Vol 2 no. 1 September 2007

 

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