With your class, locate Maine on a map. Together, identify the latitude and longitude of the state’s boundaries. Compare with those of Texas. How much land area does each state take up? How do students imagine Maine and Texas ecosystems might compare?

 

Guide students to research and explore the ecosystems of Maine, including geography, plants, animals, and climate. Be sure to also discuss the ways that people have changed the environments, for better or for worse. Then, discuss the natural features visible in Beaver Pond. What kind of ecosystem might this scene be taking place in? How can students tell?

 

Students can summarize their findings about Maine’s ecology in brief reports. For an extension to the lesson, they may compare and contrast the ecologies of Maine with that of Texas, or summarize change over time in a particular area.

In the discipline of Social Studies, students need to be able to think conceptually and differentiate between which patterns and ideas are common across societies. Students need to be able to recognize those ideas— whether economic, social, or political—that are not bound by time and place, and how a group’s perspective may affect the historical interpretation of those ideas and principles.

• Take a close look at the foreground and background of this image. What differences do you see?

• The foreground of this landscape is much sharper than the background. What effect do the hard and soft focus have in this work? What attention is given to the rock, the weeds and the mountains respectively?

• From what angle do we view this scene? What effect does this have? Does the artist’s low perspective make the landscape appear larger or smaller?

• Do you think this is a painting, print or photograph? Why?

• This is an oil painting in a hyper realistic style, giving the work the look of a photographic. How would the work be different if the style of painting were less detailed and more gestural?

• How does the artist create depth and three-dimensionality in this landscape? Look in particular at the use of lines and the way that the paint is applied.

• Describe the color palette. What mood does the artist convey through the use of colors?

• The dam in the foreground is a beaver dam. How do we know this, what clues does the image give us?

• The colors are muted shades of gray and green. Does the mood created by these colors correspond with the landscape that is depicted? How?

• The colors and composition of this landscape create a certain stillness. What words would you use to describe the character of this landscape?

• How would this image be different if there were beavers playing in the water? What is the effect of the absence of any human or animal life?

• The artist studied in Philadelphia with a generation of abstract artists, but turned to a more realistic style with depicting landscapes. The artist’s goal has been stated as “making a representational painting as fluid as abstract work, by combining the careful scrutiny of nature associated with traditional landscape painting with a painterly technique that emphasizes brushwork”.  Explain how, on closer look, Beaver Pond can be said to consist of a network of “abstract marks”.Do you agree with this interpretation of the work?

The beaver dam sits in a river or pond in the foreground of this composition.  In the distance, haze floats over the trees and mountains rise, echoing the shape of the beaver dam.  Welliver lives on the Duck Trap River in Lincolnville, Maine, and his work is inspired by the area’s landscape of rivers, lakes, mountains, and ponds.

 

Except for the broad areas of the sky and hills, Welliver uses linear strokes of flat paint to define three-dimensional forms.  In articulating the delicate reeds and the mass of the beaver dam, Welliver’s brushstrokes take on a calligraphic character.  He uses a limited palette of cool colors, evocative of the distilled light of the Maine countryside.  In most cases, his large canvases are painted from smaller studies done out of doors.

 

Welliver’s stated goal is to make a representational painting as fluid as abstract works with their emphatic brushstrokes.  He combines the careful scrutiny of nature associated with traditional landscape painting with a painterly technique that emphasizes brushwork.  On close examination, Beaver Pond is actually composed of a network of “abstract marks,” each with its specific role within the larger context of the picture.

 

Welliver studied at the Philadelphia Museum School, where he was trained in a strict academic watercolor tradition.  He did graduate work at Yale University with abstract artists including Josef Albers and Burgoyne Diller.  Although he studied with abstract artists and was interested in the active brushwork of painters such as Jackson Pollock, in the early 1960s Welliver turned to a more realistic style with landscape as his primary subject.  Beaver Pond and other works by Welliver combine an interest in nature and realism with an exploration of brushwork and planes of colors that characterizes modern abstract painting.