Childhood Memories of Canada, the Discovery of Painting, the Conflict between Content and Design, and Finding a World Already Composed

This is something I painted when I was 11 years old.  Even then, I didn't
 always go for the most dramatic thing I could find.

I was lucky to have a dad that bought me oil paints for Christmas when I was 10.  Although, I didn’t know how to use them, I proceeded as if I did.  I painted this as an 11 year old.  At that age, art meant nothing.  I wasn’t looking to capture some kind of drama.  The concept of a composition was an idea that did not exist.  When I looked at something, I was interested in a feeling.  Here, there is a road of trees, mountains, sky, and shadows.  The day is like many other days.  Looking back on those early paintings, it seems to me that I must have been interested in the moment.

Although I was in love with mountains and clouds by the time I started painting, there was a time when I had no such preferences.  That is probably true of all children.  At first, all is wonder.  Then when we learn that weeds are weeds, wonderment becomes judgment.  Because I am primarily a visual person, memory takes me back to a time that could precede speech.  I remember the sputter of a neon sign in the night when I was 2.  To the surprise of my mother, I could describe our apartment over the drugstore years later.  I remember my baby sister Kim coming home from the hospital when I was not quite 3.  I remember snowflakes caught in a pot, and the pleasure of digging up dirt and discovering that halves become whole when practicing the magical math of cut up earthworms.  The sound of frogs filled the woods.  A ship stood at the end of a street.  Church consisted of a world that existed outside its windows.  Chain link fencing secured backyard grass.  The house stucco was rough to touch.  Music played on reel to reel tape.  A highway drive, gloomy skies and an A & W Root Beer sign occupy memories of early childhood.  There was the panic of almost losing my best friend by leaving her behind on a bus, a doll I called Suzie.  There is the memory of a great lake long before I knew the name Lake Ontario.  I remember grandparents, the scent of tobacco, and the sound of small boats on the water.  Even now, the faint sound of a lawnmower recalls a Canadian infancy.

So much of who we are can become lost by the time we leave early childhood.  Painting became a conscious thought when I was 5.  I may have seen paintings before, but that is when I realized that the visual world was something that could be described.  I was with my dad.  We stopped to see a yard sale of paintings.  They were landscapes.  I realized I could describe what saw, but because I saw a small sampling of what a landscape could be, without knowing it, my vision had been narrowed.  I didn’t understand that I could also paint something like activity around a school bus until I saw a painting of a school bus stopped at a crosswalk.  That is the problem with art.  It is difficult to conceptualize painting without first seeing a canvas covered in paint.  But once you know what painting looks like, that information has a habit of closing down the thought process.  Knowledge can lead to freedom, but it can also be a trap.  Once a narrative is set, it can be extremely difficult to imagine any other alternative.

 I took a design class in college that emphasized the importance of composition.  Although I was aware of the concept, the idea suddenly troubled me.  Though I never considered painting everything, once much of what I saw was taken off the table due to the implications of design, I grew to hate the idea that the depiction of life was subservient to the demands of art.  Had I had a B plan, my life as an artist would have been over.  I instinctively felt the idea was wrong, but I saw no way to debate it.  For the next few years, I lived a life of compromise.

I thoroughly enjoyed the highway, and walking was always a joyful occupation.  I did these two things to see my surroundings.  I felt alive inhabiting the spaces around me.  I began to realize that the idea of placement only applied if you were living in the 2 dimensional space of paper or cannas, that the randomness of gravel had a kind of intelligence that exceeded that of the observer, that there was no need to worry or fuss because the world was already composed.  It dawned on me that I no longer needed to be the captain of my surroundings.  I could simply be.  I could be clouds billowing in the arrival of spring.  I could be rust, or the rustle of brittle leaves.  I could be shimmering heat waves on the horizon, a mercury colored dance of desolation.  I could be a hillside dotted with grazing cattle.  I could be industrial steam, indignation belching out disbelief in a Texas sky.  I could be the moment of encounter.  I could see the world as it really was.  I could leave the restrictive thoughts of rectangular lines behind and begin to paint my surroundings.  That had always been the point anyway.  As a child, I would have never thought that design was indeed needed to justify a depiction of life.

Hazen Market, Hazen, Nevada, Alternate US Highway 50
acrylic on 4 shaped ragboard panels

I’ve never argued that you cannot compose, or that great things cannot be accomplished by doing so.  I am just saying that it may not be necessary, that my work really has nothing to do with that thought process.  I know it is hard not to think, but the paintings look composed.  Perhaps, it may be instructive to think about that thought for a moment.  You have been given no other way to consider the things you see, so that is the only response that you could possibly have.  Again, it is hard to escape the notion that the camera simply did not point itself in this or that direction.  I agree.  But in thinking of continuum, any part of the whole is going matter, and that section, whatever section that might be, is definitely going to be worth seeing.  The point is that whatever happens to be selected is vitally important to the idea of time and place.  I don’t allow for the composed to manhandle the moment away.  To eliminate this or that thing for the greater good of a painting is to end up painting a place that never was.  That might be fine, it might be great, it might make for a fantastic painting, but that is not my reason for being a painter.  I never think I can improve upon a view of a reclining highway, let along do it justice.  The fact that it is completely out of my reach is what makes a little success so beguiling.  In all fairness, I am probably not the best person to discuss the merits of design.  When I look at a painting, I never see composition.  I can never find the focal point because I tend to see the entire canvas.  I don’t happen to care where the horizon is, or which way a woman may be facing.  If what I see intrigues me, I will remain a while.  If not, no amount of design can keep me from pacing down the hallway looking for something else to catch my attention.

Old Neighborhood Garage, Richardson, Texas
mixed media diorama

I guess a question worth asking is where did the principles of design come from?  We behave as if they were never invented.  While I can see why the church would want to make sure that Christ was the focal point of a painting, I wonder why the same kind of care should be given to a pear.  Given the wisdom of indifference that is inherent to nature, does it make any sense to select an element from earth or sky and treat it as if you were trying to please an egotistical king?

End of the Day at the North End of the Richardson Heights Shopping Center...
Left panel of 2 panels
mixed media diorama

While living in the suburbs, I often painted the suburbs.  People frequently thought I had a bag of tricks to shake things up with.  They had the idea that I did something to transform the everyday into something new and compelling.  The truth was that I didn’t do anything to the scenes around me other than include them in my life in much the same way that I embraced the sights of early childhood.

US Highway 50 and a Drawing of Ottawa, Kansas

Street Corner, Ottawa, Kansas, US Highway 50
burnt matchstick and charcoal
9 11/16 x 17 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches

 

 

Ottawa, Kansas is the first image to come from a recent trip across the country on US Highway 50. The drawing was made using the tips of burnt matchsticks and charcoal. The carbon closest to the unburnt section of the matchstick is a wonderfully unstable color of brown.

 

I never drew much as child because I was painting.  I thought drawing was an incomplete process and saw no reason to pursue it. When I discovered charcoal in college, I realized that the medium was more painterly than paint could ever hope to be.  A broad wash was as simple as pushing dust with a sponge across paper, and the rub of an eraser made an impact that a single brush stroke seldom achieved.  I worked almost exclusively in charcoal for a while in college and repeated that process for a couple years after graduation.  Because painting had been my background, I treated charcoal as paint. Charcoal consumed the vacancy of paper.  It filled the page.  It was no place for a vignette.  I never saw drawing as an exercise, or a study for something else.  Although I see the value of exercise, I’ve never been able to do it.  I am either fully engaged, or I don’t want to have anything to do with the process and would rather go walking.  

The Diorama and a Move to a New Curved Surface

acrylic on a shaped ragboard panel

 

I recently started painting on a curved surface that leans forward. That physically places the sky in front of the foreground. Although the positioning is the opposite of the dioramas I made for many years, the sense of space it creates is about the same.

 

The diorama changed the way I saw painting. Once the element of space was included, I realized composition no longer mattered. There was no reason to worry about how things related to the edge of canvas or paper, because conceptually, I eliminated the picture plane. I was painting space. I was painting the world around me, and the world already happened to be composed. This related to that simply by the fact that it was there.

 

mixed media diorama

 

 

Although I loved what the diorama did, the problem of shadow and glass always bothered me. In 2002 I stopped making the diorama. There was a lot of looking over my shoulder at the past that initially got in the way of painting. I lacked the confidence I had. Even though painting had always been my strong point, it was now something I feared. The diorama had become my calling card and I did not know how to function without it. The problem with specialization is that you become a craftsman, a person that no longer has anything new to say, and art thrives in a life of the unknown.

 

The curved surface I am painting on is not something I consciously struggled to discover. I simply woke in the middle of the night with the idea. Although it looks like a straight line from the diorama to the curved surface, the fact is I never would have thought of it as long as I was making the diorama. If what you have is seen as a solution, the only thing you will ever be able to do is refine the problem. It is difficult to think outside the box without actually leaving it.

US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway, (Second Installment of a Highway Journey)

This is a continuation of the previous post that touched on the discovery of a mysterious highway when I was 10.  Although what I saw may have been affected by weather, it was the strange geology of the place that captured my imagination. The endless succession of mountains and valleys was nothing but hypnotic.  



A dry lake along US Highway 50. Since I left the details unidentified in the writing, I did the same thing here.

There may be a need to explain the voice of the piece being written.  There could be a thought that says this does not sound like a ten year old.  Although, I intend to write what comes to mind of the drive I experienced, the way I encounter things remains the same.  When I was two, I stepped outside a drugstore and felt the weight of neon sputtering light into cast iron darkness.  Of course, language was limited then.  At the age of six, seven, or eight, I wondered whether I was a physical presence, or just an idea with the impression that it had a reality.   My mind isn’t anything but average.  It just happens to cling to things like the sights and sounds of a playground.  It is not sharp enough to find banality loitering around a parking lot.  All it sees is the light that illuminates crumbling pavement.  Story telling can be tricky, and although I intend to give it to you straight, all truth winds up being fiction.  I will try to work from a place of honest deception.  When a narrator is needed, I will rely on a travel guide.

 

Getting back to the sand dunes, the range to the south is closer than it was, there is another beyond that, and it stretches out for as far as the eye can see.  A single butte in silhouette, rides the horizon.  From any position, the valley is like a sea with this island sailing away in hues of blue and gray.  Here a shift in blue has everything to do with how far away you are from your destination.  I have never thought about this that way before, but blue is separation.  In a strange way, if the separation is severe enough, earth and sky merge into a swell of uncertainty.  As a phrase, “the cutting edge” is an odd way to describe the pursuit of the unknown.  An edge is a boundary, and boundaries define.  It might be better to portray a lot of what goes on as “cutting corners.”  My way of thinking about the edge, may be unfair.  The phrase probably refers to the extension of something beyond where it was before, like from city to suburbs, but right now, I am in a place where art cannot not compete.  It never has.  It never will.  We are not dealing with empty walls that could use the break that paintings often provide.  Our vaulted ceiling is sky.  The butte seems to move as we roll along.  A river is crossed, a town creeps up on a slowing car, and one highway turns into another simply by taking a right at the stop sign.  Now, that didn’t take long.  Skim through a few pages, and the highway arrives.  This is it.  This is our point of entry.  In the presence of a ten year old, there is no distinction between highways.  All I know is that this is supposed to be the scenic way home, and as far as I can tell, it is.  As far as I am concerned, the highway has no number.  It is my favorite though, and I can feel it.

 

The fields around town display gray combinations of sandy soil and plants compressed by the bitter weight of winter.  Windbreaks give way to sage.  The mileage markers are lean and the desert is spare.  Stunted brush grows close to the ground in clumps no larger than clenched fists.  The land is mean.  The desolate environment endorses a trickle down reality.  Annual stockpiles of rain, sleet, frost and snow may measure less than 4 inches.  Mountains to the west capture the promise of rain by taxing the clouds rolling over their summits.  The earth grows prosperous.  If the right’s enterprise creates wealth for the nation as a whole, they should have chosen a better image to prove their point.  Nature does not produce abundance on scant rainfall.  Conditions like these generate desert.  Try a little trickle down economic philosophy on your garden and see what comes up.  Who in their right mind, would want to be trickled on anyway?

 

A dry lake shimmers.  Blue mountains break the shoreline.  Surrounded by hills and mountains, it reminds me of the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In fact, I wonder if it is connected.  I look to see if I can tell.  I can ask dad.  He will know.  I don’t.  I ride in silence.  It is interesting to see bleached mud flats.  The lakebed is substantial.  The sky is overcast.  There is nothing ominous about the weather overhead.  Gray can be kind to shades of green.  However, there is none along the highway that now looks down into an empty lake.  I begin to wonder how much longer the desert will last.  Even I tire of the subtleties that subterfuge separation.  Simple sentences can stun, but I seem to be shying away from them.  I should stop the shameful game I am playing, but so sleepy now, shall my mind succumb to something as severe as reason?  Should I save this sad search for satisfaction found in the sound of the letter S as the highway steels away from the lake, or shall I leave it lying on the shallows of shoreline silence?  Now that sentence is hard to surpassed, at least by someone like me.  I have been out here too long and I am tired of trying.  Is this pure nonsense?   I mean, can it be clean?   Or, do unraveling thoughts prevail?

 

sky shatters

over a dry lakebed

 it could have been

a thunder clap command

conducted by a bolt of lightening

  the laceration,

the blast

military flight

divides sky

asunder

                                                                               

In an effort to skirt a mountain, the highway climbs a fan only to fall away.  A valley is waiting just over the rise.  Below, the scenery has shifted.  Openness closes down into a narrow basin.  The facing ridge is a row of rough and tumbling outcrops that disfigure falling shadows.  This spectacle takes place out in the open and in the light of day.  Who knows what goes down when the sun slips behind the horizon.  Actually, the temperature does, and night can be brutal.  If the temperature was 90 degrees during the day, you may be facing a low of 45 under a canopy of stars.  I hope you planned for this and not some soft yielding Texas evening filled with the sound of cicadas.  Summer is a season that climbs into the sky each morning.  Autumn rules the night.  I’ve even seen ice hiding in a garden hose strung out across the lawn in July.  Rise and shine to the bite of a frosty morning.  The thrill of a new day is chilling, and in the arid atmosphere, steam quickly withers away.  A freeze can take place at anytime of the year, and it is rare for it not to cool off when darkness settles in.  This is not Las Vegas, and contrary to common perception, the state is not excessively hot.  Even though Utah snows are more abundant, they melt away more quickly when summer arrives.

US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway (First Leg of the Journey)

This is the first segment of something I wrote a few years ago while
I was preparing for an art show based on US Highway 50 (The Loneliest Road in America) as it crosses Nevada.

 

 

Since I left the details of the trip as a recollection of a child, I've chosen not to identify this mining town.

 

 

I was ten when I discovered the lonely highway.  My parents were still married then, and lived in Reno, Nevada.  Spring break, took us to my grandmother’s place for a visit.  At the time, (this would have been the late sixties) Orem was a small town just north of Provo, Utah.  In many ways, it really was not much of a town.  Off State Street, the layout was a farming community of blocks so long that the cross streets seemed to complete the horizon.  Agriculture still had a lock on the community.  Residential housing, the idea of neighborhoods had not yet replaced the furrows of open fields.  The white stucco house sported a red tile roof.  Two junipers framed an entrance that was nothing more than a concrete step, a landing place to scrape the mud off shoes onto a welcome mat, and two blue ceramic pots.  In the pleasant weather of spring and summer, they contained flowers.  From the living room, the view was lawn, a line of spruce trees, a mailbox, the street, fruit trees and mountains.  In yards of historical houses, these trees seem to be enormous.  They are as old as many of the settlements of Utah.  An irrigation cannel raced on the other side of the road with water that had not yet learned how to meander.  Cold as snowmelt, it was a cooling brew to thirsty orchards.  Fruit trees framed the mountains around the valley.  Looking to the east, the Wasatch Range rises.  Almost no urban area in the United States of America, sits in such a dramatic location.  The flight over Mount Timpanogous is breathtaking.  The shores of Utah Lake embrace the west.  Although in the same valley as the lake, Orem is much higher.  It sits on one of the ancient shorelines that register as steps as they bump up along the mountainside.  Lake Bonneville covered most of the western Utah and spilled over into eastern Nevada.  This and the Great Salt Lake are all that remain. 

 

The spring was wet and cold.  Clouds rolled in and out, breaking up for perhaps part of the day.  Each morning rose in a fresh coat of snow that failed bury the green blades of grass.  Orem never really knows the meaning of buried in snowed.  However, the same does not apply to other towns around the valley.  An inch of the white stuff in Orem may measure a foot or more of glorious powder in the towns of Mapleton or Salem.  This inclement weather may have influenced some of what I saw as we made our way home along the new highway.  Although, I have no way of knowing.  I’ve never crossed the state at the same time of year again.  Heading south, the interstate follows the Wasatch Range in a westerly swing that terminates with Mt. Nebo.  At 11, 877 feet above sea level, it rules as the range’s highest peak.  The freeway swings around it, skirting its fan down into Juab Valley.  Highway 50 can be reached by leaving Interstate 15 at Santaquin.  I did not know any of this information at the time of our trip.  What I describe now, is a journey across a land beautiful and mysterious.  This is an exercise in recall.

 

Leaving the freeway, a two-lane road crosses a small valley.  Out the side window, Utah Lake is off in the distance.  The mountains ahead are like many I have seen before.  They are average, but here average is mean.  The car pulls under the weight of a climb up into juniper and pinion pine.  I want to say it is overcast, that is what I see, but I can’t be sure of that.  It is such a long time ago, and impressions of sunshine fall in dry and open places.  Whether this is accurate or not, I have no way of knowing.  There is a sense though that these broad flats and valleys are less omminous, that they escape drizzle if there is any.  Many of the places I have in mind have names, but I have decided to leave them out, for that is how I encountered the terrain of a long and lonely highway.  And in thinking about it, that may not be a bad way to approach this description of land I have never seen before.  Like the settlers and the explorers before them, it is unknown to me.  That is how many travel anyway.  They have their maps.  They know what towns and highways to look for.  However, they have no concern for landmarks.  A low ridge on the horizon goes by.  It is lost to talk, or to the tuning of the car radio.  There just has to be a station out here somewhere. This is the kind of place for a pillow and a book, and with food in the cooler, it will be fine.  Never mind the travel.  Are we making time?

  

 and distance

is a swell

and a long haul

stammer

 

 

I must confess that these are never my attitudes while riding in a car.  Every attribute the land has to offer, features a narrative that runs through my mind.  Sometimes I am an early explorer, but more often than not, I am a travel guide sharing beauty with those that follow. 

We come to a town at the top of the hill.  Its prime is past.  The mines played out long ago.  The one thing mining never fails to do, is to place a town in a dramatic location.  Here streets are cradled in ruggedness.  Winding down through the canyon, a valley lays claim to more mountains.  All this can be seen from living room windows, or at the very least, from mailboxes posted by crumbling steps and struggling roses on the verge of going wild.  If I lived here, I would be checking the mail all the time.  As far as I am concerned, the wealth of these towns was never the ore, and the ones that find a way to stay are well aware of this.

 

Coming to a tee in the valley below, the pavement extends in two directions.  A left turn happens to be the right choice.  A weathered highway rolls down a valley of juniper and pinion pine and the mountains diminish with ease.  A range rises to the south, the west opens on a horizon of sand, and the land broadens.  I am not sure I remember all these details.  They may come from events more recent.  Still, it is hard to imagine that I would have missed sand dunes.  They are romanticized in movies of the West, and of course, there was Lawrence of Arabia.  That was my favorite film as a child.  Sand is singular in the way it rides the wind.  Unlike dust, it never gets lost in a storm or settles down in mud flats.  It is much too particular for that.  Although at ease in large congregations, it has no interest in bonds and is always ready to move to the persuasive sound of wind, even if it just happens to be a whisper.  It is also as rare as radio, out where towns have no real significance.  I keep coming back to the idea of a land without radio.  Welcome to radio free Nevada.  The interior of the state has a ban on the airwaves.  Static is the sound of love songs and commercial spots in a land locked between mountain ranges.  This is this country’s Tibet.  Much of it is high, open and remote.

One Way Off Mckinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas

This painting can be seen at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, ragboard, canvas, charcoal graphite and wood
52 9/16 x 17 3/8 x 2 1/2 inches

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas is abstraction in just about as many ways as can be imagine. It started with the middle piece and for a while it was nothing but that painting. The bottom piece was also completed the same evening; it just so happened that the paintings fit existing frames. Abstraction embraces a game of chance. It was a lucky break. The frames fit the new paintings.  Even though I did not know it, chance had already played a role in the structure of the painting.

 My focus remained on the center painting. Although I thought I was finished, I continued to make subtle changes. As I evaluated what I saw, my mind would say yes, then it would say no, and no always required further action. Abstraction is always at risk from the very beginning. A wash or simple gesture is almost always beautiful. Yet the question of whether it is enough is always lurking. Any advance could mean destruction. Ease no matter how exquisite, is not that satisfying. Painting was never meant to be routine and ease can be just another form of boredom.

This was the original orientation of the painting. The bottom part of
this pairing is where it all began. In the beginning it was simpler and developed over time. 

As I looked at the two paintings, I considered putting them together. Because I saw them as a vertical expression, there was no way to see them standing on one another. They needed to be physically connected. Doing that was risky because it would be hard to undo. I liked what I saw. The horizontal abstraction occupied the top spot. When I began to think of introducing a street scene into the mix, I decided to flip the whole thing around and the top became the bottom. That change in orientation meant that I needed to do more painting. The problem was resolved one night listening to the Beatles’ album Revolver.

When I flipped the painting around, I thought of adding imagery
to the top of the frame. Here we see some imagery of the wet street between the
two abstract paintings.

To make a place for what would be a new painting, I extended the frame. I had no way of knowing if a street scene on top of a couple abstractions was something that would work. I pressed ahead. As snowmelt began to coalesce, I imagined a section of the wet pavement and cobblestone painted on the top angle of the bottom frame. I liked the idea of imagery fanning out from underneath the middle frame and bumping up to the beaded lip of the frame below. I placed a blank piece of paper in that position to get a feel for what it would do to the overall structure. Again, I liked what I saw. Because the information on the angle of the frame was limited, it would remain abstract no matter how accurately it was rendered. I liked the idea of a vague reference and painted it that way.

Here the frame was extended to accommodated the new painting of McKinney Avenue

Part of my experience with abstraction has been collage, and this ended up being collage as I never imagined it. The entire process including the frame was based on being open and alert. When you paint that way, there is no telling what will happen. There has been a trend in the art world to limit the range of imagination. You were supposed to paint bottles, or cats, or abstractions that were light and airy, or abstractions that were stockpiles of paint. The other was to be ruled out in favor of a singular position that stood for commitment, sincerity and vision. I immediately responded to the work of Gerhard Richter because it blew all that nonsense away, demonstrating that it was okay to be involved in many things. Knowledge should not be shut out just to become a specialist. We look up to and admire those that can speak more than one language. If painting were language, a multilingual understanding of paint would be a celebrated thing. By bringing the abstractions and cityscape together, I demonstrate a grasp of some of those language skills and show that in many ways, they really are the same. If you can do one, you should be able to the other. The artists that gave us modernism could do many things. What happened? 

Full view of the finished painting.

 

 

 

US Highway 50, Utah, Nevada and the Border Inn

Border Inn Motel, Slots, Café
oil on canvas
16 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches

This painting can be seen at William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

The Border Inn lies on the Utah-Nevada between Delta and Ely, Nevada. It is a welcomed sight for those not noticing the sign that read NEXT SERVICES 83 MILES back in Hinckley, Utah. That is a long haul without any habitation. The course of the highway and the signs that remind you to watch for deer, cattle and falling rock lie in brush and stubble. Because of the beautiful nature of desolation, bullet holed trashcan pullovers pass by in silence.

If the border tied into traffic from Salt Lake City, it would be like Wendover and Mesquite crawling with Mormons on gentile retreats for the weekend. The alpine peaks of Great Basin National Park are not much of a draw. Before the park, nobody knew what was there. As it is, most of the time, you can have much of the park to yourself.

On many Nevada highway borders, there are places like the inn proudly displaying gambling signs. This is too small for anything more than a few slot machines. Still it is small town Nevada away from the industrialized gambling of Reno and Las Vegas. The West survives in these towns along the highway due to isolating wind, heat, cold and snow. Because of the lack of water, farming was never really an option. When the ore played out, many towns vanished in the sage. Part of what kept these hanging on was vacant highway. You’ll probably have to stop at two or three of these for a hamburger and gasoline. Nevada takes openness for granted. NEXT SERVICES 83 MIILES was a courtesy of Utah. Nevada goes on the assumption that you are not going to gamble on the accuracy of a fuel gauge as you leave Ely for Eureka or Lages Station.

Handmade booklet for painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada

The following is from a handmade book for one of the paintings in The Loneliest Road in America exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas 2010.  In describing the Great Basin, my thoughts turned to wildfires.

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

Although it had been green across most of the state, many low-lying areas remain barren even in years of abundance.  All of us have seen or heard how deserts bloom after rain showers.  That happens here as well, but not as often as it does in Texas or New Mexico.  It is not only a matter of it being dryer; it is also due to the timing of the rainy season.  The monsoons of the desert Southwest arrive in summer.  In much of the Great Basin, precipitation falls as snow when plants are dormant.  Because most of Nevada has no drainage, snowmelt stands in low-lying areas awaiting evaporation, saturating soils with mineral salts that never make the sea.  The soils are toxic to an awful lot of plants, including many weeds.

 

I wonder how so many of the world’s plants came to be weeds.  Until recently, anything native qualified, and juniper are still thought to be in need of clearing.   Nevada is said to have had vast grasslands when the cattle arrived; the sea of sage is explained as overgrazing.  At Great Basin National Park, displays say the landscape is new due to fire prevention.  From driving around, I agree that northern Nevada was mostly grassland, but the pinion and juniper that drape mountainsides along US Highway 50 have been there for a very long time.  That can be a problem with scholarship.  Historical documents talk about vast grasslands and some assume that applies to the entire state.  Early travelers followed the Humboldt River where mountains and hills are simply sage.  It is a mistake to extend that description to other ranges of the region.  If the Snake Range was not thick with juniper and pinion pine 100 years ago, where did the evergreen abundance come from?  It takes hundreds of years to grow trees of any size in the dry climate.  Count the tree rings; fires were not routinely roaring through the forests.

 

There are some parts of the country, where burning the undergrowth is the same thing as burning up trees.  Nevada is not a land of towering pines like Florida or northern California.  The brush cannot be burned without torching the oak, juniper and pinion pine.  The many fires have more to do with climate change than unwise fire suppression.  When you go from three dry years in ten, to seven, fire becomes reality.

 

 

Suppressing fire with fire promotes grass, as any rancher knows.   A few years ago, a ridge burned not far from my parents’ house.  Before the fire, the flat was open, and most of the oak and juniper grew along the hillsides.  It was lichen-covered rock, dwarf sage, wildflowers and very little grass.  The quick burning fuel that drives wildfires was in short supply.  Afterwards, golden waves of grass tumbled into the woods waiting to be thunderstruck.  Instead of quelling the threat, it is raring to explode.  That might be why ranges that burn keep catching fire.    

 

 

 

  

Handmade Book
4 1/2 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches
2010

US Highway 50: A 500-Mile Stretch of Utah, Nevada Aridity Marginalizes Farming to the Edges of Great Basin

Intersection of North Harmony and Stillwater
oil on canvas
11 9/16 x 10 5/8 inches
2010
The agricultural area of Fallon, Nevada is on
the western side of the Great Basin.

On the 500 mile drive across the Great Basin, there is farming in the shadow of the surrounding ranges.  The one end of the highway mirrors the other.  However, everything in between is far too dry to support anything more than grazing.  If it were not for the many mountain ranges that rise and fall away on sliding horizons, there wouldn’t even be the short lived streams that occasionally fill dusty playas.  What I wrote below is based on a memory of impressions.  Having lived some of my life in rural Utah, I know farming is more than fields of green and quiet highways.

 



I photographed the fields of Fallon, Nevada so long ago that I wasn’t sure which way I was facing.  The light seemed to signify the east, and that was confirmed by the enlarging profile of Fairmont Peak as I zoomed in on a horizon of shaded debris, the hallmark of farming.  Even in June, the days are never long enough to complete all the chores.  Tire swings and irises divide houses from dusty ruts, outbuildings and alfalfa.  Lawns function as mud reducing turf for car chasing dogs bent on the senseless joy of barking.  Deep-rooted vehicles and discarded parts are indispensable links to laboring children home from school and the many families dependent upon backyard tractor cannibalization.  Farming can be like navigating a dead cow up a canal with a sunflower stock of a stick; the flies are a reminder of bloat in the reeds.

 

The image was cropped from three horizontal frames.  Although it was a shame to leave all that information out, it is nice to work vertically.  That is something I seldom do; I really like being able to describe the lay of the land.  However, the arbitrary nature of the composition still comes down to content.  The details equal design.  There is no need to rely of on fabricated relationships or kiss up to the picture plane.  The only things that matter are the things that do, and they are not the similarity of summarized shapes, patterns of textured gestures, the rhythms of obstinate stumbling blocks, the chime of untimely riming, focal points, undeniable plots, or graveyard junipers pruned to view Saint Patrick’s Cathedral more precisely.

 

The beauty of the question is asphalt and intractable weeds injecting seasonal green into sorted stones shouldering the pullover of lost and lonely motorists.  Not all are stranded.  Some come for the quiet splendor of the countryside, the home of those clinging to the land of ancestors, even if it was just Uncle Jim and his son Rob trying their hand at ranching.  Wealth resides on a porch of screened in evenings.  Crickets rise and fall in pale twilight.  Constellations are bound to rule the night.  Dogs yap, howl and bark at elusive horizons.  Moths bombard blinding isolation; a jackrabbit is hit by rolling headlights in the glare of hesitation.  The evening conceals the fatality of grinding traction in a swell of sweet smelling alfalfa. 

US Highway 50, Hinckley, Utah
The agricultural area of Delta, Utah is on the eastern side of the Great Basin

 

 

           

US Highway 50: Great Basin National Park, Bob Scott Summit and other Stops along The Loneliest Road in America, and a Painting of Playa



Wheeler Peak, Great Basin National Park, Nevada

 

In 2005, my brother Steve and I hit US Highway 50 to pursue a book devoted to The Loneliest Road in America.  The idea came from a conversation that happened while camping in Great Basin National Park.  Painting the highway had been on my mind for many years, and Steve being a writer suggested turning it into a book.  Having parents in Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada, we grew up with a 500 mile commute between families.  I mentioned that in a statement written for an exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas.  There was sometimes an assumption that the title was a reflection on a lonely childhood when it was actually a description of place.  That is the official name of the highway.  Childhood was how I knew of the Great Basin.  I was never lonely in a car.  There was too much to see for me to be anything but engage.  The sky sailed high above pinion and sage as travel profiled range after range on a blue horizon.  Life got in the way.  The book never happened.  Individual passages written for specific paintings is as close as we got to that compilation. When I wrote the following, my audience initially seems to be Steve.

 

Playa

 

Playa
oil on canvas
17 3/8 x 7 15/16 inches
2009

 

It has been more than four years since we stopped in the little valley cradled between the outskirts of Fernley and the bend in the road known as Hazen, Nevada.  I don’t know where you were or what you were doing while I shot photographs of the hills and playa that framed the northern view of a land that lead to Lovelock and beyond, but it was so far away that it was out of view even in the clean crisp air of an unusually cool June morning.  Perhaps you were taking notes that could describe in concrete detail the memory of a land I just tried to communicate to you.

 

I was on the road a couple of months ago and passed this way.  The previous day took me as far as Bob Scott Summit.  Having no desire to travel the night, I crawled off into a sleeping bag in the back of the Sonata.  A starry sky filled the windows of my modest accommodation.  What a luxury that was.  The city intensifies darkness, burning out nearly all the shades between black and white, leaving night as subtle as compressed charcoal.  However out here in the pinion, the stars shine bright, and night is lighter than I ever imagined it to be, even in the absence of moonlight.

 

Morning view of Austin, Nevada

 

I left in early morning starlight and headed for Austin Summit to capture the rise of dawn.  I got out of the car.  I was glad to be wearing gloves.  October had frozen the shoulder of the road I walked along taking pictures of the pass.  Aspen slopes glowed green, yellow and gold, and the sage was weather-beaten.  In Austin, the first service station hadn’t open yet.  The next station was the only other station in town.  Its signage read pay before you pump, so I stayed on the highway.  Just outside of town, I reconsidered that decision.  Fallon was 111 miles away and there was no warning sign.  When you leave Green River, Utah, a sign emphatically states that the next services are 109 miles away.  I guess Nevada figures if you’ve made it this far, you already know there won’t be anything out there.

 

It was early afternoon by the time I passed by the playa; I had taken many pictures along the way making my travel time even longer.  It was not the same.  Two or three drilling rigs now inhabit the small valley.  The reason I am not sure of the number is I had no desire to document what I saw.  I realized that this end of the highway was filling in.  Americans are always looking for a home on the range.  However, because they want space to be convenient, the city grows out to where the wind blew not so long ago, unrestrained, kicking and chasing tumble weeds just to disturb the dust, never ever caring that the dust just wanted to settle down somewhere out on the playa.

Handmade book for Playa
4 1/2 x 3 x 3/8 inches

The Loneliest Road in America: US Highway 50, Nevada and the Great Basin; Peavine Peak, a Painting from an Exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

The next several posts come an exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas that I did in 2010.  The paintings where a survey of U.S Highway 50 crossing Nevada.  The following is written information from the invitation and the handmade book that went with the painting of Peavine Peak.

 

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

The Loneliest Road in America

 

Although it may not be America’s loneliest road, a portion of US Highway 50 has that designation for a reason.  On its way from Maryland to California, it crosses Nevada, the driest state in the union.

 

For personal reasons, I extend the theme to include some of Utah.  As a child, I traveled back and forth between parents on this highway.  The 500-mile drive from Fillmore, Utah to Reno, Nevada was devoid of farming for 410 miles.  The rivers that rise on either side of the Great Basin never find their way to the sea and wind up wasting away in large evaporation ponds like the Great Salt Lake.

 

The region informs the way I think about light, and although I was not aware of it, the long vistas taught me to see instability.  It is a feature of any horizon and key to a sense of depth in painting.  It is nice to return to mending miles of silence strung along by power lines and waves of sage known as The Loneliest Road in America.

 

 

 

Peavine Peak
oil on canvas
5 7/8 x 17 1/2 inches
2009

 

Peavine Peak

 

As remote as it looks, Reno is on the other side of the mountain.  This in fact, is not far from Horizon Hills, a subdivision just down the hillside.  We lived on Pawnee Court, a dead end street, in a maze of streets claiming tribal ancestry.  In a way, that may have been fitting.  The development looked like a reservation.  The houses had an air of being manufactured and the lots were mostly barren.

  

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture.  As neighborhoods go, this was nicer than most.  However, architecture in the state, if there is any, looks haphazard.  If you want more than gaming and houses of prostitution, stick with the sage.  Wind-rustling brush shapes the face of the horizon, and from our place, it was either high or low.

 

By suppertime, the wind was roaring and tin canned processions of tumbleweeds and milk cartons assaulted backyard gardens.  Although there were dogs in the neighborhood, there was no need for them. The wind had a canine sense of design.  Had there been any trees, thrashing branches would have whipped leaves into the sound of many waters.  No one had air conditioning, and the afternoon heat was chased away through open windows that later closed to keep out the night.  Then, in the chill of morning light, the wind was silent.

 

 



Handmade book for Peavine Peak
4 1/4 x 3 x 3/8 inches