Have you ever asked yourself, as an artist, what creates an appealing aesthetic- why one person can love a work of art and the person next to them can think they’re out of their mind for doing so? As artists, we largely rely on our instincts and intuition to determine the visual composition of our work.  All to often however, the value of work can be overlooked because our personal, visual-taste is not shared by our viewers. When aesthetical value outweighs the conceptual critique, narrative, purpose and theoretical value of the work I think is a huge disservice to art and artists alike.  So, I wanted to understand why different populations and classes of people differ in their opinion on what constitutes a desired aesthetic- and how consideration of that can be used within my own work.  Is it a matter of taste, class, social construction, historical ideology: or is it indefinable? I thought perhaps a logical place for initial exploration lied within the value of these works…but again, value shifted from person to person, group to group, class to class.  I wouldn’t waste my lunch money on a Kinkade (sorry), yet- he claims- one out of twenty American households own one of his works.  That seems to be a discrepancy in value as I see it.  So I figured there must be something to these landscape paintings.  I read a recent review in Art Forum by an Artist named Mark Handleman- in the article, (along with an explicit challenge to Kinkade's self-proclaimed title of “the painter of light”); Handleman broke down some of the historical ideologies at play in landscape paintings.   They found their popularity in the 19^th century during the Westward expansion movement. In an effort of colonization, masses of people packed up and moved, in order to conquer and civilize the ‘wild west’.  At a time when nature was seen as an immanent danger to their new found lives, landscape paintings were suppose to convey a sense of mastery over the land.  A taming and a civilizing of the wild- of nature itself.  I thought the ideologies at work in these paintings were something interesting to play with.