(I was) happily contended to ...

(I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. ...rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.
 Marsden Hartley

Quotes from the same author

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.
 Marsden Hartley
I could never be French, I could never become German - I shall always remain American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.
 Marsden Hartley