Preserving the Landscape

Elisabeth Ptak

This excerpt from a new book showcases six artists who participate in the annual Ranches and Rolling Hills art show, which helps protect California's unspoiled western Marin County

ZENAIDA MOTT, TOP OF THE WORLD, BIG ROCK RANCH, OIL, 12 X 16

Few places in the United States provide a pastoral landscape as appealing and memorable as that of western Marin County. Winding roads curve around vast panoramas of land and sea. The passing scene is enhanced by family farms that line the shores and are tucked into unspoiled canyons reaching deep into the heart of the countryside. It’s a landscape shaped by human activity, to be sure, but compared with the way it looked 150 years ago, not much seems to have changed. Parts of the San Francisco Bay Area that once had a similar look—even other parts of Marin County—have been altered dramatically. In fact, in the late 1960s, plans for sparsely populated West Marin included an urban development of 125,000 people living in the San Andreas Fault Zone on the shores of Tomales Bay. Highways, dams, and golf courses were all envisioned.

What has occurred in the intervening years to keep West Marin looking much the way it did a century and a half ago? How, in the face of the same development pressures that have turned the greater San Francisco area into a metropolis of seven million people, has coastal Marin retained its rural and agrarian identity?

“Marshland by marshland, bay by bay, ridge by ridge,” answers Harold Gilliam in his introduction to Martin Griffin’s Saving the Marin-Sonoma Coast, “over a period of forty years of toil, sweat, and tears, environmentalists fought the developers to a standstill … and preserved some of the most idyllic natural sanctuaries—in land and water—in any metropolitan region on this continent.”

Partners in protecting the land then and now are the agricultural landowners of West Marin. For those who belong to one of the farming families who have been stewarding the land for six or seven generations, it’s the landscape of his or her personal history—and well worth protecting. For ranchers a little newer to the business, it’s the landscape of promise and possibility—and equally worth protecting.

Now artists hoping to preserve the land that inspires them have joined the ranks of these ranchers and other conservationists. The men and women participating in the art show called Ranches & Rolling Hills play their part by capturing the spirit of West Marin’s farms, ranches, and open spaces. Each spring, the best of their work is offered for sale, transforming the rural Nicasio’s Druid Hall into a first-rate gallery for one weekend a year. The proceeds of that show are used by Marin Agricultural Land Trust to help preserve Marin County farmland.

Marin County lies due north of San Francisco on land surrounded on three sides by water. Native people first made their homes in the area some 5,000 years ago, and the county takes its name from one of them—Marin, Chief of the Coast Miwok Indians. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Spanish adventurers, followed by Mexican settlers, overtook the Indian lands and laid waste to their cultures. During the California Gold Rush of 1849, the conquerors were themselves displaced as word of the discovery of the valuable ore brought thousands more schemers and dreamers onto the scene. Among them, according to Kevin Starr in his book California, were accomplished painters who first trickled in, then “arrived in significant numbers in the early 1860s, and by the late 1870s had firmly established California as a center of landscape painting.”

Artists were drawn to the western territories by tales of the land’s magnificence. Some were hired by the railroad, “receiving train tickets, meals, and lodging in exchange for a specified number of paintings inspired by the artist’s journey through the West,” according to Sarah Anschutz Hunt in the book, Painters and the American West.

When the artists took to the road, they found inspiration at every turn. They depicted some of America’s greatest landscapes, including the Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Their interpretations have forever affected our own perceptions and memories of those places. Other artists, such as Percy Grey, William Keith, and Gottardo Piazzoni, were drawn to Marin County. Here they found a dramatic convergence of land and sea as well as simple, pastoral settings on the many small dairies and farms established by immigrants from Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Ireland. Mount Tamalpais was a favorite subject, as were the native coast live oak trees that thrived in the Northern California climate.