Oh Beautiful

175 years ago a group of artists found themselves at a crossroads.

The country that they knew and loved was trying to tear itself apart from within. At the same time, the looming threat of the expansion of cities was destroying the nature they held dear.

So, they turned away. They started painting the landscapes as a form of escapism, setting their mind free from the anxieties of the time. They couldn't escape it, though, and the tension itself shone through in their contrast, their colors, and the way they orchestrated their works.

The Hudson River School was a diverse group of artists, including immigrants from all backgrounds, black artists decades before abolition, and female artists half a century before the suffrage movement. Simply put, before anything else: they were human.

Some of the earliest practitioners of luminism, they used light and shadow to both display the beauty of American nature and contrast the rising civil war tensions that they couldn't separate from it. It was an unabashedly patriotic practice, but not without recognition of its failures.

Today, many American artists find themselves in that same pull. Conflicted. Unabashedly proud of the country they grew up in, but ashamed of the immoral actions of the government that controls it. Ashamed of the state sponsored kidnappings and murders of their neighbors across the street or across the globe.

This project is a snapshot of that. It celebrates the Hudson River School artists while also intentionally polluting their art through the means of image generation networks (Progressive GANs) and other compression technology.

The result is American. Not the America that you can go visit, but the America that is stuck in our heads. Ideological, utopian, and utterly broken at its core. It's something to be proud of, but that pride comes with anxiety too.