Coastal narratives and Baltic ecotones: Painting beaches and boulders at the water’s edge

Abstract

This paper evaluates Nils Kreuger’s and Teodors Ūders’ engagement with the sea on two sides of the Baltic coast, noting the diffusion of landscape, seascape, and coastline in paintings of Öland and Halland in Sweden, and the Dunte seaside in Latvia. Extending a discussion of artist encounters with coastal seaside communities reveals the ecological and cultural complexities characteristic of this environment. Kreuger’s paintings, while experimenting with tone, light, and form are rooted in the distinctive island landscape of Öland and the weather-beaten coastline of Halland. While for Ūders, the Dunte seaside presented a return to a ‘primeval’ nature, associating symbolism, impressionism, and realism with coastal life. In borrowing ideas from the natural sciences to describe visual culture, I contend with historic methods of ecological and agricultural cultivation, and contemporary ecocritical readings of art history, with regards to the Baltic coastal ecotone. The interaction with the sea and coast, on two sides of the Baltic, grapples with the regional identity, cultural specificity, and ecological variables of the shore; from woodland clearing and seaweed cultivation to the distinctiveness of the grasses, beaches, boulders, and water. This critical evaluation is not simply concerned with images of ecosystem damage and decline; rather these paintings are aware of the respective topographies, ecologies, and landscapes of the Swedish and Latvian Baltic coastline. As such, I consider these paintings not only within the social, historical, and visual narrative of Nordic and Baltic coastal art history, but as records of cultural and ecological memory.