Constable's Haywain:

English Romantic Landscape painter, John Constable, born in England in 1776, grew up on a farm and learned to appreciate the beauty of Southern England's natural landscape through his upbringing. After formal training at the Royal Academy, Constable still found landscape painting of his own hometown to be the most beautiful portrayal of landscape to be shown. As shown here in his painting, Haywain, 1819, Constable means to represent the countryside that he grew up in as it was at the time that he remembered: pure, unpaved, uninterrupted by the modern means of farming and industrialization. This was as Constable remembered it, nature co-existing with mankind to make a beautiful and cohesive unit.

Unfortunately, Constable's pieces could not be considered realism because they were presented to the public too late. While England industrialized and brought machines to land, ease of country living is what Constable strove to sell. It was past realistic and almost historic, although, not a virtuous enough story to tell as history painting. Therefore, Constable's piece came to be more of what the viewer wanted to see, a story of how it used to be, as opposed to how things currently are.

In America today, society strives to produce, sell, consume, produce and sell more and encourage all to consume that which we have produced. Government and business portray America as global leaders because we are so progressive. Really, though, are we? We are consuming resources that come from all over the world and cannot be replenished. Oil, metals and fresh water, to name a few, are being used up at alarming rates, and America is the consumer of most of the world's precious resources.

Government, media and big business would have us all believe we are still living in harmony with our planet and the world. It is quite simply not true!!! The fact of the matter is that the world is in the midst of a tribulation ... financial, industrial, political, environmental...nobody fully understands the depth at which we are truly in crisis!

All that being said, I personally wish for a government that will represent America as a true global leader. I wish it would represent truly what the world has become so that we can progress into people who embrace the land (Nature!) that we live on and conserve it for future generations to come.