Art is the path of the creator to his work.

     With a quote like “Art is the path of the creator to his work” from Emerson, of course a painting of nature seemed only fitting to be tagged to it.  This poster captures the spirit of Emerson through a few ideas.  One is that looking is important; nature is about looking.  In this picture, the viewer has many things to see, and it takes a while for the viewer to see it all.  At first they see the trees and the path, green and orange.  In the distance there’s a house, and then a lake and mountains behind that. The pops of color amidst the green of the foreground really come to life when the viewer looks at the painting.  Looking closely at the pathway, you can see that it is jagged and rough; it would be easy to trip on.  There are layers to how we see things, especially with nature, and this is evident in this painting.  The longer you look at it, the more you see.  The reason I chose this painting to accompany this quote was because of the literal idea behind it; the painter’s art was the path to his work, and he painted a pathway in his art.  However, this quote loses some of the complexity of its context when it is taken out of the rest of the paragraph.  It goes on to talk about how these paths are “ideal and eternal,” and yet most men don’t see them, including the artist himself.  Artists create work that they believe is the end result; they don’t realize that their art is just part of their pathway to their end destination.  This idea is lost with this poster.