The Problem of the Picturesque
With summer’s start, Islanders are no doubt itching to get off The Rock, maybe to some place a little grander in scale than the Island, with its mostly quiet beauty. Everybody wants to travel at least somewhere, but what if a change in perspective would do the same for Islanders as a change in scene?
Warning: Cultural history ahead!
There’s been a movement recently to create backyards where we’d want to spend quality time. One proponent has dubbed this the “Homegrown National Park” movement. To this way of thinking, with a little work our backyards can become sites filled with plants, birds, insects, and even mammals, rather than sterile lawns punctuated by a few bushes, as is typical in America. This strategy of creating wildness at home benefits the ecology of where you live. You’re making habitat for your natural community and quality of life for your human one.
But these spaces could also satisfy our need to be somewhere wild and beautiful without having to travel anywhere in a car or plane. We could spare ourselves the pain of airports or jammed campsites, while shrinking our carbon footprint too.
The problem for many people is the small scale of these would-be backyard wonderlands. No majestic mountains or grand rivers. No vast forests or desert canyons. Who could be content with such minor beauty and such a small landscape?
But why should we need big beauty on a big scale to satisfy our need for nature? Such a specific need probably isn’t hard-wired into our DNA, which means that it may be something imposed on us by our culture. If that’s the case, the cultural source may be what historians call the picturesque.
The picturesque is the quality of something in real life that leads a viewer to think it resembles something seen in a piece of art, such as a painting, movie, art photograph, etc.
There are two things to note here. First, many things in nature are often less artistically satisfying to view, less obviously beautiful, than manipulated images of nature. Second, many artistic renderings of American nature not only juice up the beauty of the original; they also present nature on a grand scale. In fact, the grandness in scale seems part of what we Americans find beautiful in these renderings.
We’re bombarded by images of nature thus manipulated, and, if not understood as artistic expressions, they can lead us to expect nature to look like them. Whenever nature doesn’t look picturesque, we may feel disappointed or uninterested.
This may explain why a backyard with subtly beautiful native plants organized to celebrate its small scale might seem boring to us. Our eyes have been trained to overlook these quiet scenes, as they search for something more dramatic and much grander. What do we lose, though, by always craving more?
