Getting Critical About Art

The Rocky Mountains Lander’s Peak by Albert Bierstadt appears to be a very original and vintage painting of how Native Americans used to live in this country before the Europeans took over their land and called it their own. It seems as if the Native Americans had their own tribes, or communities, and this tribe did not consist of more than 30 people. Each of the tribe members were very close and cared for one another and were more family members than friends. The jobs for the tribe members were probably the men would hunt and gather for food, while the women would stay in the teepee waiting for the men to come home to cook the food and the children would run around and play. They did not have to worry about half of the things modern day citizens worry about today. Such as their appearances, like their weight or the texture of their skin, or their hair because there was not a television for them to watch and tell them that how they looked was not good enough and needed to be changed. It seems as if living there was a paradise and everything was care free. These people were not worried about playing taxes by the end of the month for electricity or worried about playing their house bill on time because they were living a very simple lifestyle.
The subject matter of this painting is about nature. Everything in this painting seems very healthy and clean. It looks like a paradise with the blue skies and no pollution in the air so the Native Americans could breathe only pure oxygen. The snowcapped mountains would start to melt and the water would travel all the way down the mountain into the pool of water right next to the shore so the people would have fresh drinking water that is not contaminated with chemicals. The green grass and trees show that this place was untouched and no one tried cutting these trees down to build homes or buildings.
There are many questions that this painting asks, but the main question that it is asking, in my opinion is what happened to this simple, care-free lifestyle that has died very quickly within a century? How come we used to live a very simple and slow paced lifestyle with a lot of leisure time to a very fast paced lifestyle with no time to relax anymore? The message that this painting communicates to me is we need to take time and think that maybe the lifestyle we are living is not really the best way to live our lives. Before all this technology came about, family members would always be close together every day because they did not have a car or an airplane to drive or fly across the country, but these days we do and I believe that it is separating us from our family which is not healthy. Our family is the most important thing we have. Then the technology allows us to build tractors to cut down all those trees and build factories over this magnificent landscape and build factories that creates so much pollution and contaminates the air and the water so nothing is pure anymore. Nothing is the same as it used to be and it will never be like this again. So let us remember what we used to have before all this technology came about.