Female Artists Who Worked in the American West

Female Artists Who Worked in the American West

The subject of female artists working in the American West has often been overlooked due to pervasive Western male stereotypes. These stereotypical images include popular media overlays of cowboys, male hero icons and male activities. Yet, the environment of the American West has been the inspiration for many American female artists. One of these is the landscape photographer, Laura Gilpin. Gilpin's relation to the West and the connection of that particular landscape to her work is obvious from the following quotation:

What I consider really fine landscapes are very few and far between," Laura Gilpin wrote to a friend in 1956. "I consider this field one of the greatest challenges and it is the principal reason I live in the West. I am willing to drive many miles, expose a lot of film, wait untold hours, camp out to be somewhere at sunrise, make many return trips to get what I am after." (Women Artists of the American West)

Laura Gilpin's work was deeply concerned with and intimately related to the landscape and atmosphere of the South West. "No other woman in the history of American photography so devoted herself to chronicling the landscape. Others photographed the land, but none can be regarded as a landscape photographer with a sustained body of work documenting the physical terrain. (ibid)

In an assessment of her work it is important to mention that her approach to landscape photography differs in relevant ways from the approach of male photographers who documented the same subject. Essentially, the quality of her work brings sensitivity to the landscape, not just as an isolated object but in the way that the landscape related to and shaped the human activity of that environment. Her concern with the interaction between the landscape and human life was one of the aspects that distinguished her art from other photographers of the West, including Henry Jackson or Timothy O'Sullivan.

Gilpin's work provides us with a "peopled landscape with a rich history and tradition of its own, an environment that shaped and molded the lives of its inhabitants." (ibid) She was also a highly individualistic artist and had few influences except the landscape and the natural environment. As an extension of the ethos of her landscape images another important aspect to her work were her photographs depicting the indigenous inhabitants of the West. Her portraits showed an acute sensitivity to the individual nature of her subjects. To a large extent it could be argued that Gilpin's work counters the stereotypical view of the native inhabitants of the region. Her work, in particular her portraits, run counter to the stereotypical notion of the 'fierce savage'.

The work of Gilpin and others reflected an interest in the domestic, the daily, the "real" American Indian behind the stereotype. Although tinged with placid romanticism and perhaps even tranquil pictorialism, such portrayals did preserve aspects of native cultures. Moreover, these representations of American Indians presented the public with the image of Indians as "deserving" of conservation, rather than the stereotype of fierce, threatening Indians who, in many people's minds, seemed to warrant extinction.

(Riley 163)

Gilpin is also cited as being one of the influences on modernist trends in photography. This refers especially to her individualistic feminist stance with regard to the environment and the importance of the relationship between people and the environment. "Laura Gilpin, whose Western landscapes are as essential to the formation of the modernist sensibility as those of Ansel Adams or Weston www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000387706" (Brayer 16)

Agnes Pelton

Agnes Pelton is a more contemporary artist working in a different medium and style to Laura Gilpin and with different artistic objectives. However, the two artists are similar in their use of the unique qualities and artistic attributes of the landscape and natural qualities of the West as a source of inspiration. Pelton initially painted in the conventional representational style but later developed a unique abstract style of her own, which included landscapes. These landscapes differ from the work of Gilpin in that they explore the interior and Spiritual qualities that are manifested through her paintings.

Agnes Pelton was a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), which was formally organized in Taos on June 10, 1938. Her work concentrated on the abstraction of the Spiritual element from the world around her. Her work displays a fascination with painting as the embodiment of spiritual impulses, although her brushwork and tonality are far removed from his in their delicacy -- a manifestation of the fact that her interest was not in materializing the spiritual but in spiritualizing the material world: "artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality."

(Rudnick 87)

Much of the essence and direction of her work can be found in the TPG manifesto, which states that their purpose was "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual." (Women Artists of the American West) The manifesto included the statement that "the work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems and the essential aim of art should be to "widen the horizon of art." (ibid)

The concept of the sublime is very important in Pelton's work. The sublime refers to the search for spiritual and intellectual qualities that go beyond or 'transcend' representational images. In other words, her work is an expression of the search for the ideal within the real. As the landscape photographs of Gilpin explore the surface and realistic textures so the world, so Pelton's images attempt to convey the inner and Spiritual dimensions and meaning of the world and environment of the West