By: TIMOTHY CAHILL Staff writer

Sunday, August 15, 2004

“To walk with nature as a poet,” wrote Thomas Cole, “is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.”

Ralph Albert Blakelock met this condition, and his finest paintings approach a level of expressive excellence one might call perfection. His life was beset with trouble, however, and it is the turmoil of his private nature that was the artist’s most constant companion.

In the history of American art, Blakelock’s place is small but worthy of attention. An exhibit of 32 paintings and a number of drawings and sketches now at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill demonstrate he was a visionary whose best landscapes strike with the force of a depth charge.

The show is a brief introduction to the artist, and a welcome one. I mostly knew his paintings from reproductions, which is not to know them at all. Several of the works here come from the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York City, augmented with seldom-seen paintings from local museums and private collections.

Elizabeth Stevens of Salander-O’Reilly assembled the exhibit, which also includes historic objects including Blakelock’s leather-covered sketchbook, his palette and a dinged metal paint box, crowded with smeared, half-used paint tubes. Some of the items were supplied by Blakelock’s descendants, who still reside in Greene County, and have never been displayed before. Most remarkable is a hand-drawn map of the Western states the artist Blakelock visited; written on the back is a long list of the towns he stopped in.

A fitting location

The Cole home Cedar Grove is a fitting location for the exhibit, since Blakelock’s first inspiration came from the Hudson River School. He was born in 1847, the year before Cole died, and grew up in New York City. Blakelock taught himself how to paint, emulating first the meticulous and reverent styles of Cole, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church. In his 20s, at an age when other artists looked to Europe for training and refinement, Blakelock traveled alone on his first of three trips out West.

In the 1870s, Blakelock found his artistic voice, abandoning the tidiness of the Hudson River painters for an expressive style built on color and energy. An untitled painting from 1870 shows a log cabin in a mountain glade. It isn’t the scene that captures the artist’s attention, but the brilliant clash of crimson and fading orange of the fall foliage.

Blakelock used color the way certain composers use percussion, to set his art in violent motion. His “Indian Encampment,” of a single tepee in a woodland setting, glows a restless ocher. In a nearby untitled landscape, the evening sky resembles a lava flow. And an undated “Sunset” is a raucous solo of russet beneath layers of blue-gray and pale yellow glazes.

Artistic slang

Blakelock was admired by painters Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock for the expressiveness of his paint. He often laid on pigment thick, as if he couldn’t get it out of the tube and onto the canvas fast enough. He was speaking in an artistic slang that time would catch up with eventually. Had Blakelock lived 50 years later, he might well have been a pioneer of abstraction.

The arc of his career moved Blakelock away from representation to realms of memory and emotion. Look at “Indian Ocean,” from 1919, the year the painter died. It’s an almost minimalist composition, with a still, hard-edged horizon. Above, the blue-gray sky looks rubbed on with rags, while the moonlight in the waves is almost pointillist in its juxtaposition of color. You can’t see the moon itself in the painting; it’s somewhere above the frame.

Nocturnes were a common motif for Blakelock. One of the show’s masterpieces is on the stairway leading up to the second-floor gallery, titled simply “Moonlight.” Dated uncertainly between 1880 and 1899, the painting shows a full moon in a blue-green sky. The moon is bright, but, except for the reflection on a small pond, the landscape in it is thrown into an opaque murk. Why isn’t there more light on the scene? Can we read it as a metaphor for that tumultuous time in Blakelock’s life, when money to support his nine children was scare, and he was sometimes forced to paint trinkets in a factory, or mass-produce banal landscapes?

Whatever the reason, the darkness of the earth only accentuates the brilliance of the moon. Blakelock, like Robert Frost, was “one acquainted with the night.” He understood the cold, mesmerizing lunar light. Only van Gogh painted moons with as much melancholy ardor.

The moon is the lantern of eccentrics and the beacon of madmen. In the 1890s, Blakelock began to manifest mental illness that eventually institutionalized him for most of the rest of his life. The end of the show has several paintings made during his confinement at the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital for the Insane in Middletown, Orange County rough, quick oil sketches that seem at once to be a collective wail and refuge. One, a nighttime idyll with two figures, suggests a wistful longing for youth.

Like his more famous contemporary Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock spoke in the indigenous voice of the soul. His paintings have the primal urgency of seekers who never quite find what they’re looking for.

Timothy Cahill can be reached at 454-5084 or tcahill@timesunion.com. FACTS:ART REVIEW “RALPH EDWARD BLAKELOCK” Where: Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring St., Catskill Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday Closes: Oct. 31 Admission: $5 (includes tour of the Cole house)Info: 943-7465; http://www.thomascole.org

All Times Union materials copyright 1996-2005, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.

By: Timothy Cahill

Sunday, September 19, 2004

“Do you know that I have got a new painting-room?” wrote Thomas Cole to fellow painter Asher B. Durand near the end of 1839. “It answers pretty well … and being removed from the noise and bustle of the house, is really charming.”

Cole’s enthusiasm for his new work space came at a time when the artist was perhaps the most highly regarded American painter of his time. The studio, part of a much larger storage barn, is just steps from the main house at Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill.

As the latest phase of a long-term project to preserve the place where American landscape painting was born, the “Storehouse Studio” has undergone a complete restoration and will open to the public from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 3.

Cedar Grove consists of the painter’s 1815 three-story Federal-style house, 3 1/2 acres of grounds and outbuildings. Cole was the leader of the artistic movement called the Hudson River School. To have his work space intact and returned to its original condition marks a significant milestone in American cultural history.

“In many ways, this is the most important building (on the site),” observes Elizabeth Jacks, executive director of Cedar Grove. “If you start from the premise that the most important thing about Thomas Cole is his painting, then it follows that the most important building is the place that he painted. The house tells the story of his life and how he lived, but the studio tells the story of his work, of how he worked and where he worked.”

Among the masterpieces Cole produced in the 20-by-20-foot space is his four-part painting “The Voyage of Life,” perhaps his best-known work.

The $450,000 restoration began in February. Following Cole’s death in 1848, the studio was used as a storage shed, an antiques shop and finally a studio apartment. Re-creating the studio involved removing 20th-century materials and ripping out a makeshift loft to restore a ceiling nearly 12 feet high. Timbers salvaged from old barns were used to repair rotting infrastructure beams, and antique bricks brought in to rebuild interior masonry walls.

The studio is furnished with Cole’s materials, including his easels, a paint box and brushes, plaster casts and reference books. Period materials like those the artist was known to have used, including a camera obscura and magic lantern (an early slide projector), are also included.

“It adds a whole new dimension to understanding the man,” says Jacks of the studio. “You can get a lot of information from what we have. Cole was not a wealthy man — this was a space in a barn.

“The paintings he was working on were often more than 6 feet wide, he had to take his canvases off the stretchers to get them through the door,” Jacks adds. “And you can imagine what it was like in the winter. There’s a fireplace at one end, but Hudson Valley winters get cold. For me, I get a sense of his perseverance.”

All Times Union materials copyright 1996-2005, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.

By: Bonnie Langston, Freeman staff

01/21/2005

The next Sunday salon at the Catskill home of Thomas Cole, founder of the famed 19th-century Hudson River School of painting, will be led by a man who learned of the artist a relatively short time ago and in a rather unusual venue – a New York City subway stop.

The presenter is Manhattan’s David Barnes, and the image he saw a decade ago on a poster in the subway was of Cole’s “The Picnic,” then part of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When Barnes saw the show, its impact changed his life.

“I can’t even tell you how powerful that was, he said in a telephone interview from his office at J.P. Morgan Investments in Brooklyn.

“I said, ‘That’s it. I want to learn everything there is to know about this guy.”

Barnes set out to do that, and as he rattles off dates of paintings, details of exhibits, information about the style and influence of the Hudson River School and all kinds of other minutia, one suspects he has either arrived or at least come very close to his goal. Barnes’ interest in Cole led him to become a member of Cedar Grove’s board of advisors as well as a docent at the New-York Historical Society. He led the first salon of the year at Cole’s home earlier this month, talking about the painter’s series masterpieces “The Course of Empire” – in the collection of the above-mentioned historical society – and “The Voyage of Life,” both created at the height of Cole’s career.

In the next salon, Feb. 13, Barnes will explore Cole’s influence on other artists by way of a slide lecture.

The program has been increased to two sessions, 2 and 3:30 p.m., because of the standing-room-only crowd at this year’s initial event.

“For a winter Sunday, it turned out to be fantastic,” said Barry Hencks, a spokesperson and volunteer at Cedar Grove. Hencks said he counted nearly 45 vehicles in the parking lot, making the recent presentation at the salon – in its second year – the largest off-season event at the historical site.

That is a major change for the 1815 Federal brick home that had been allowed to decay for two decades, leaving it with a crumbling porch, caved-in roof, peeling paint and a flooded basement.

Restoration was far enough along in the spring of 2001 for the home’s first major opening, in celebration of the bicentennial of Cole’s birth.

A year ago, Elizabeth Jacks came on as director, and a search is underway for the site’s first educational director. In addition, Cole’s renovated “Old Studio” opened to the public fewer than four months ago.

Barnes, distraught by the home’s earlier disrepair, joined forces more than four years ago with others to further aid its rebirth. Like second-generation Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey, who visited Cole’s home in 1850, two years after the painter’s death, Barnes has found that Cole’s essence remains.

“Artists talked about this feeling for years after he died,” Barnes said. “His spirit just pervades.”

It certainly touched others in the Hudson River School. Frederic Edwin Church, whose home Olana is a short distance from Hudson, was most influenced by Cole, Barnes said.

“He was Cole’s first and most prominent student. Church was 18 years old, a young kid,” he said. “He really became the rock star of his day. For his ‘Heart of the Andes,’ people lined up around the block to see it (for 25 cents each at Lyrique Hall in New York City).”

At least 12,000 visitors eventually viewed the mammoth work – 66 1/8 by 119 1/4 inches – which they viewed with theater glasses. Visitors to the salon in February will see a slide image of the painting now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like Cole, the younger man portrayed both geological and botanical forms in exacting detail, Barnes said. But unlike his mentor Church tended to represent an entire series in one painting, a “visual feast” known for its profusion of detail and range of atmosphere.

Also unlike Cole, Church lived in an era in which landscapes were gaining more respect. For instance, Barnes said in the early 1840s, a few years before Cole’s death, 1 out of 10 works exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York City were landscapes. A decade later, landscapes dominated, he said.

That does not mean Cole’s work went unappreciated. He made a living from his paintings. And works like “The Voyage of Life” gained much attention.

“Artists loved it. People responded to it,” Barnes said.

But the work was exhibited only a few times. For one thing, there was little opportunity to show art during Cole’s lifetime.

The first permanent art gallery in the United States, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., opened in 1844, four years before Cole’s death. Cole’s “Course of the Empire,” was shown there, and Barnes said today the museum has one of the best collections of Hudson River School paintings.

He said, too, that he is grateful for that fateful day when he glimpsed an image of Cole’s work at a New York City subway station. And he enjoys telling visitors to Cedar Grove all about it.

“I came to love Cole probably the way that he would have wanted – through his art,” he said.

©Daily Freeman 2005 Originally found at http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13781821&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=74969&rfi=8

By SUSAN CATTO

Enjoying the Hudson River School

We want to see some of the sights that theHudson RiverSchoolpainted, if any of those places still exist. Can you suggest an itinerary, book or pamphlet that would guide us?-LeonoreLevit,Wilmette,Ill.

Considered the nation’s first school of painting, theHudson RiverSchoolencompasses more than 70 artists of the early and mid 19th century known for their realistic landscapes of theHudson RiverValley, theCatskill Mountainsand other locations. The time is right to follow in their footsteps: This month, the National Park Service (with several groups) opened Phase 1 of theHudson RiverSchoolArtTrail, a self-guided tour of seven sites featured in paintings.

Anchoring the tour are the former homes of Thomas Cole (1801-48), considered to be the group’s founder, and Frederic Church (1826-1900), one of its best-known artists. Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill, (518) 943-7465, lies at the foot of theCatskill Mountainson the western side of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Across the river, Church’s former home, the Olana State Historic Site, on Route 9G, Hudson, (518) 828-0135, is one of the region’s most popular destinations, featuring dramatic Persian architecture, lush grounds and river and mountain views.

According to Elizabeth Jacks, director of the Cole site, visiting all seven sites takes at least a day. Some are accessible by car and others by walking trails. “The sites that are the most remote will give you the most rewarding views,” Ms. Jacks said.

The new trail brochure includes maps as well as reproductions of the paintings. It is available at sites along the route or by sending a stamped, self-addressed envelope to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Post OfficeBox 426,Catskill,N.Y.12414.

At the New York State Tourism site, www.iloveny.com, you can click on Travel Ideas, then Cultural Tourism, and find a list of 22 sites whereHudson RiverSchoolworks are on view and where the artists lived and painted. Among the best vantage points: Fort Putnam and Trophy Point at the United States Military Academy at West Point, (845) 938-2638; Kaaterskill Falls, Route 23A, Haines Falls; and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, (845) 437-5632, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, which has about 25 paintings from the Hudson River School on display at any time.

For hikers, a new book, “Catskill Mountain House Trail Guide: In the Footsteps of theHudson RiverSchool,” by Robert A.Gildersleeve, (Black Dome Press, $16.95 ), includes period illustrations and maps to painting sites.

Authors: Patricia Harris and David Lyon, GLOBE CORRESPONDENTS

Date: July 26, 2006

Page: E8

Section: Travel

CATSKILL, N.Y. In the typical Hudson River School painting, masses of cumulus clouds rise above an outsize vista of river and mountains. We always figured that those scenes were embellished by artistic license until we visited the painters’ haunts where the northern Catskill Mountains meet the Hudson River Valley.

As we crossed the Hudson on the high bridge at Castleton, the scenery was in our faces. We looked downriver past Rattlesnake and Coxsackie islands, and saw heaps of cumulus congestus percolating over the rippling spine of the distant Catskill ridges. The cult of American landscape began here when Thomas Cole started sketching and painting the wilderness near Catskill village in 1825. “Landscape hadn’t been `done’ yet,” guide Erica Benton explained on a tour of Cole’s home and studio, Cedar Grove. “He created a type of art that Americans could call their own.”

The yellow, Federal-style home features a wraparound veranda with sweeping views of Cole’s beloved Catskills. The tour progresses from the parlor where Cole was married in 1836 (his wife’s uncle owned the house) to the upstairs bedroom where he died in 1848 at 47. When the site opened as a museum in 2001, curators chose not to install artificial light in his studio on the property. “The light you see,” Benton said, gesturing to the large north windows, “was the light he painted by.”

Cedar Grove is the starting point of the Hudson River School Art Trail that ranges from artists’ homes to vistas that became touchstones of the heroic, ultimately patriotic style of landscape painting. The scenes vary in accessibility from roadside views to short walks to modestly challenging hikes. (Cedar Grove hands out a driving tour brochure.)

The logical base for the tour is Catskill village, a 19th-century river trade center on the rebound. Vacant storefronts still mar Main Street, but art galleries, antiques dealers, restaurants, and decor shops host evening wine receptions on the second Saturday of each month (www.mainstreetcatskill.com). The Community Theatre (www.thecommunity theatre.com) runs an independent film festival on Wednesday nights, which can be packaged with dinner at the ambitious Bell’s Cafe a few doors down. On Saturday mornings, the former ice warehouse at The Point, where Catskill Creek reaches the Hudson, becomes a farmers’ and artisans’ market with live entertainment.

Cole may have launched the Hudson River School movement, but his protege, Frederic Edwin Church, carried the celebration of nature to new heights. Literally. Among Church’s first sketches were long views of the river from the formidable eastern bank opposite Cedar Grove. Church built a farmhouse cottage on land adjacent to that bluff, and when he eventually purchased the hilltop, he constructed a fanciful Moorish palace, Olana, to drink in the views. (See related story on Page E7.) He was not above tidying up those views, even creating a lake that, as seen from his porch, seems to nestle in a distant bend in the Hudson. Olana is closed for renovations this year (Church’s paintings normally hung at Olana are on display in Maine at the Portland Museum of Art through Sept. 10), but the interpretive landscape tour touches on the salient points of how Church bent nature to his will.

Nature isn’t always so pliant. Torrential late-June rains washed out the highway (Route 23A) that visitors would normally drive to follow the Hudson art trail. A consultation with State Police revealed that there’s a scenic back route around the closure: Route 23 over the north side of Catskill Mountain, then Route 296 south. (Call State Police for updates at 518-622-8600.) The bypass adds about 20 miles to the drive, but it’s worth the time for dramatic scenery and the opportunity to detour through the resort village of Windham and on to Windham Vineyard & Winery (www.windhamvineyard.com) for a tasting on the deck amid the vines.

Although Route 296 connects to Route 23A west of the washout, we still couldn’t reach one of the most famous subjects of Hudson River School painters the view through Kaaterskill Clove (local parlance for a mountain notch) to 260-foot Kaaterskill Falls. Floods have ravaged both the road and the foot trail through the notch. But we did reach the less picturesque but still dramatic top of the falls by following County Route 18 (North-South Lake Road) to Laurel House Road, where there’s a parking lot at the end. Although the main trail (straight ahead) was closed because of erosion, a creekside trail leads about a half mile to the dizzying head of the highest waterfall in New York.

County Route 18 terminates at the North-South Lake Campground. In 1825, Cole sketched around North and South lakes (now joined). Those sketches evolved into his first breakthrough landscape paintings, including the famous “Lake with Dead Trees.” Although the area was remote when Cole visited, it’s now an active campground and recreation area within the Catskill Forest Preserve. Families toss softballs and horseshoes and children scamper in and out of the muddy water at North Lake Beach. But the deep forest, rocky hills, and overlooks are still there.

Prepared with walking sticks and sturdy shoes, we set out on the blue-blazed Escarpment Trail to see the heights. After scrambling up a clot of boulders about a quarter mile into the woods, we spied a yearling doe grazing along the trail. She looked up, stepped a few feet into the woods, and went back to chewing. We stared a moment, then kept on walking to the high ledges.

When Cole wrote his manifesto on landscape painting in 1835, he observed, “The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.” We walked out onto the vertigo-inducing ledge at Artist’s Rock, where Cole often sketched, and observed a wooded valley spread out in the distance more than 1,000 feet below just like a Hudson River School painting.

All that was missing was a frame.

Contact Patricia Harris and David Lyon, Cambridge-based freelance writers, at harris.lyon@verizon.net.

NORTHERN CATSKILLS (N.Y.) ITINERARY

FRIDAY

2 p.m. Sound sleep

Carl’s Rip Van Winkle Motor Lodge

810 Route 23B, Leeds

518-943-3303

www.ripvanwinklemotorlodge.com

Many families come for the week to the 30 housekeeping cabins, but the 14 fresh and well-kept motel rooms rent by the night. Family-run mini-resort has playground, barbecues, picnic areas, and 160 acres of meadows and woods. $75-$90.

3 p.m. Birth of a movement

Cedar Grove

218 Spring St., Catskill

518-943-7465

www.thomascole.org

Home and studio of Thomas Cole vividly re-creates the spot where the painter saw America anew. Guided tour $7, Friday-Sunday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., through October.

7 p.m. Waterfront grazing

Creekside Restaurant

162 West Main St., Catskill

518-943-6522

Huge burgers, racks of ribs, large steaks, and sandwiches available indoors or on deck overlooking marina on Catskill Creek. $6-$20.

SATURDAY

12:30 p.m. Fuel up

The Catskill Mountain Country Store & Restaurant

5510 Route 23 (Main Street), Windham

518-734-3387

You’ll be hard-pressed not to share your deli sandwich or burger with the friendly cats on the outdoor deck near the farm animal “looking zoo.” $7-$11.

2 p.m. Scale the heights

North-South Lake Campground

County Route 18, Hainesville

518-589-5058

www.dec.state.ny.us

Hiking trails reach aeries favored by Hudson River School painters. Swimming beach and boat rentals. Parking and day use fee $6 per car.

7 p.m. Country fare

Ursula’s Logsider Cafe

800 Route 23B, Leeds

518-943-2581

Hugely popular “country bistro” serves ample portions of diner food, including meatloaf and house specials of smoked chicken and ribs. $9-$13.

SUNDAY

10 a.m. Morning glory

Bell’s Cafe

387 Main St., Catskill

518-943-4070

Keith and Yael McMurrow’s snazzy in-town bistro does popular weekend brunch with Middle Eastern accents such as roast lamb panini with grilled vegetables and harissa. $7-$10.

11 a.m. Last sights

Thompson Street Cemetery, Catskill

Before leaving town, pay final respects to Thomas Cole’s grave in hilltop cemetery at junction of Thompson and Spring streets.