Thrashing Birds and a Notion of Ownership

The west face of Notch Peak, House Range, Millard County, Utah

The question of ownership was illustrated to me one Thanksgiving Day.  There had been too much food, television and talk.  I needed fresh air.  Realize this is hard to obtain, when a development is surrounded by feedlots.  Outside, there’s an occasional house.  Open fields are turned up and over.  To the west, the direction of my walk, the House Range rises.  Somewhere between here and there are the remains of Topaz, a Japanese Internment Camp, a subject never taught while I was attending school in Utah.  As I travel, my awareness is asphalt.  The course gray lane heads for the horizon.  A mound of manure, cattle and flies await at the end of an extremely long block.  To the right, there is an irrigation canal; the fields are much lower.  A wood frame house sits in the bottom of one of these fields.  Scattered trees are bare.  Clouds are thin and the sky is high.  Whether this is the way it was, I can’t really say.  Even the strongest memories are more poetry than prose.  However, I am fairly certain about the thrashing of birds, a heated squabble over land, and that’s not just because they were in flight.  The trespasser was gliding in with ease.  The other, was a fluster of homeland panic.  Horses roam fields filling in with wind.   Deeds mean nothing to the mice, rabbits, cats and dogs that wander around staking out territory.  An array of overlapping inhabitants claim to own the place.  Every layer seeking control while coyote calls rule the night.  And who or what has claim enough to stop all this clamor?  The wind will be the wind you know.  And the wind picking up a little dust is carried away.

My sister's home in rural Utah

The fields are lower on the north  side of the lane.

One end of the feedlot.

House in the bottom of one of the fields.



Topaz Japanese Internment Camp, one of ten concentration
camps that imprisoned 120,000 citizens and immigrants
for 3 1/2 years beginning in 1942.

Topaz Japanese Internment Camp hospital foundation.

A Ragtag Rendition of Topography, Something from the Early 1980's

A Ragtag Rendition of Topography
mixed media
12 x 15 3/4 inches

Sometimes half the fun is finding a name for a painting.  I am not sure it ever had a title.  Yesterday, while walking in the woods it came to me.  I already knew I wanted to use topography.  Looking at snow hidden within the thicket of sticks and branches, I heard the word ragtag.  It seemed to fit in a literal kind of way.  The painting was in part old paint rags.  The random arrangement was left mostly untouched.  I liked the unsaturated nature of the paint.  The fabric was still free to breath.

Spring, Something from the Early 1980's

Spring
acrylic
6 5/8 x 10 inches

To me this seems reminiscent of the East.  The curious thing is at the time, I didn’t have any interest in the East.  In a world of the preconceived, this could never happen.  I simply had no interest in Chinese painting.  That’s the beauty of abstraction. 

Crazy Water, Something from the Early 1980's

Crazy Water
mixed media
9 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches

It’s so long ago; I don’t remember how the cut up squares came to be.  Collage a part of my practice often included removal.  The paper remains of something missing can be so beautiful.  The pairing of a grid with free flowing pigment and the random weight of charcoal marks is not how a painting begins.  Freed by the thought that there is nothing left to lose, acts of desperation sometimes lead to beautiful solutions.  Instead of being inspired from on high, creativity is an awareness of what just happened and a willingness to listen. 

William Vaughn Howard and a New Framework for Painting

William Vaughn Howard
Title Unknown
acrylic, pastel and graphite
3 5/8 x 22 1/2 inches

The painting above was given to me by my painting professor William Vaughn Howard.  I studied with him as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno in the early 80’s.  He spent the summers in Greece on the Island of Paros; I bet that is where this was painted.  Although small, it has the structure I want to discuss.   

Detail of the left end

In 1986 I flew back to Reno from Dallas to see what turned out to be Bill’s last show.  What I saw was a group of paintings, the likes of which I had never seen before.  As I recall, 18 inches of verticality rolled out across the walls for another 12 feet.  The 1 to 8 ratio was hard to fathom.  The minor extremity of a 1 to 2 ratio troubled me.  I never knew how to handle the extra space.  The structures were shifting peripheries.  The sweeps eliminated the ability to focus on any particular part of a painting.  Moving through shifting views seemed to be the point of the exercise.  Eyesight could not help but move and vision became a kind of travel.  The absence of a focal point was not a loss.  Instead of leaving, I found myself wanting to resume the sweep of freedom that had carried me away.

Detail of the middle

Although fascinated by the arcs, I couldn’t understand how they came to be.  A rectangle encourages rectangular thinking especially when working abstractly.  When there are no observable curves that you are trying to fit within a space, the action of brushstrokes and splatters happens with an awareness of the outside edge of the stretcher.  It is hard to work a space that is not a conventional rectangle.  When the picture plane is extended, it is visually difficult to stay away from the middle.  This is not a matter of mathematics, but rather one of perception.  Almost any division seems to dangerously align with the middling core of the middle.  The wider the span, the more significant the middle becomes.  Within elongated space, the practicality of a two thirds rule applied to the horizon is exceedingly useless.  How do you compose in any meaningful way covering all that space without becoming lost?

Detail of the right end

When I visited Bill’s studio, he showed me photographs taken in panoramic fashion.  The photographs represented continuous views of coastline running into sea.  I failed to see the significance.  I wondered why align so many photographs together.  I found it a bit confusing.   He died not long after I was back in Dallas.  Within a few months of that visit, I was photographing in the same manner.  Nothing had ever been so exciting.  My neighborhood came alive.  And as I overlapped photographs on the apartment floor, I began to understand the origins of those wonderful waves and how they signaled a need for extremely long paintings.  The arcs are natural to panoramas.  They are the photographic records of a camera turning to embrace the surroundings.  Although, Bill is no longer here to confirm the nature of his compositional structures, it seems plausible that he saw a continuum in photographic prints that were then abstracted onto expansive canvases.

The new views quickly expanded the latitude and capacity of my dioramas.  Once the lay of the land extends beyond the parameters of a single snapshot, landmarks are no longer limited to highway milestones, but include the faded veneers of mom and pop shops along pock ravaged access roads.  There is a realization that composition is comprised of two or more frames of the view finder.  Or put another way, there is no composition to find because the composed is all around.  Point the camera here, there, or anywhere and the added space embraces continuum.  The confines of a standard viewfinder is alien to the everyday navigation of moving around.  Composition is about placement.  Although often thought of as the arrangement of outside objects, there is no need to define or compose when information positions you within your surroundings.  I quickly found this to be true.  When I composed prominent sites, frequently people didn’t know where they were because traditional compositions sever everyday relationships.  When I started painting the insignificant bits of habitation, I wound up painting locations that people instinctively knew much to their surprise.

I believe those last paintings tackled a new kind of vision.  Although the terrain of landscape had been a staple of abstraction, it never contained the breadth of time seen along a highway.  The new was housed within traditional strictures.  Canvasses had the proportions of portrait painting.  Ratios appropriate for the interior life of habitation may not be fitting for the great outdoors.  There was no vista, or distance sprawling out in sunshine, a gleaming rise of stubble gray, pasture, baled developments replacing hay, the magnetic skip of high tensioned power lines, the blue cast slant of earthen furrows, the widespread lisp of horizon outside Deming, New Mexico, the spotted dots of juniper and mesquite tabled between lowly mesas, tin, a windmill that no longer spins, freight on rails, churning smoke, and the elm sheltered trash that marks significant bits of history along an open highway.  The makings of a time horizon that I’ve grown to know as place came into play with the paintings of William Vaughn Howard. 

Information for the images below

City of Richardson from Central Expressway and

Spring Valley Rd. on the Morning of July 4th, 1987

mixed media diorama

8 3/8 x 124 x 3 7/8 inches

 

Artifacts Reclamation Project Number 227

Artifacts Reclamation Project Number 227
mixed media construction
21 1/4 x 12 x 9 1/2 inches

For many years, I’ve been a foot-traveler.  The habit had nothing to do with trying to be physically fit.  It was all about seeing, and seeing was so much more than just pedestrian pleasure.  Although often aimless, every footstep maintained a connection to ever changing place.  There was so much to see.  Congregating clouds often housed pools of the deepest of blue.  Breaching the reach of leafless trees, pools of azure shattered into shards, lashing branches whipped a high pitched whistle of the wind.  Transition was a place where texture began to fade away.  I loved the horizon.  When I say horizon, I am not referring to a dividing line, a pictorial joint, a flatland abutment, or a right angled sky welded to the edge of circumference.  When speaking of horizon, it is the fringe of distance I’m talking about.  Recall identifies frail rectangular shapes as motels, hamburger stands and traffic.  Cattle graze within a band of ethereal trees.  Power lines ripple threaded direction to an enclave of indiscriminant buildings on a rise beyond visible highway.  The land of the pedestrian was not only a distillation of blue, but the treading of terrain was a stout round of reality.  It was hard not to see cracked concrete, or a flattened battery corrode in a rainbow puddle of scum.  Civilization comes with hard surfaces.  Sophistication is littered with chunks of consumption that can never be consumed; cigarette butts are fibrous lumps among them.

When I paint, I pay special attention to the close up stuff.  Without that stuff, all you wind up with is a scene, an abstraction, the veracity of décor that hangs over a sofa.  Though never a smoker, I’m fascinated by discarded cigarette butts.  Of course, my attention extends beyond their ashen remains.  Broken glass shimmers in flash and shadow.  Empty cans canter a rolling effervescent sound of aluminum castaway.  Scattered bits of gravel blaze a trail of tread and exhaust across chipped and faded paint.  Grass reclaims habitat crack by crack.  Leaves decay on oil stained pavement.  A puddle implies recent rain, front yard drainage, or the cleansing power of a grimy car wash.  Elements coalesce.  The array contains a history of weather and habitation.  Light warms the foreground.  The vista feels ceaselessly fleeting.  Without scrapes of relatedness there is no grounding.  The sky insufficiently blue fills in with petrochemical slogans, a choir of young crystalline unicorns sweetly beam never ending rays of sunlight.   

MATERIAL LIST OF INGREDIENTS: A COLLECTION OF DRIED  CIGARETTE BUTTS, ONE COMMUTER CRUSHED STARBUCKS’S BOTTLE TOP, A PILE OF TORN NAME BRAND CIGARETTE PACKS, AN OIL PAINT MIX OF WAX, ANTI REFECTIVE GLASS, SHELLAC, BASSWOOD PICTURE FRAME MOLDING, RAG BOARD MATS AND SPACERS, SCREWS, A WOODEN DOWEL, SOME HOUSE PAINT SELECTED FROM A COLLECTION OF CANS ON A SHELF, A STACK OF CARDBOARD CUTOUTS WITH THE EXTERIOR SURFACES PEELED AWAY, ELMER’S GLUE, WEBSTER’S NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY FOUND IN A VACANT HOUSE BY A HOT SPRING ON THE WAY TO TOPAZ MOUNTAIN, A TITLE PAGE PRINTOUT, A SANDWICH BAG, GRAPHITE, A MICA POWDER MIX OF WAX, A NEWSPAPER PAGE BACKDROP, AND THE POST-CONSUMER PACKAGING OF WHAT WAS PROBABLY A CRACKER BOX, ALTHOUGH, AT THIS POINT IT IS VERY HARD TO TELL.

There was an evening when I got very excited about doing something with cigarette butts.  The artifacts of soft cotton littered the outdoors, the playground of childhood.  I saw consumptive beauty early on.  Here I am not referring to the human cost of smoking.  We all have bad habits.  I’m reflecting on the graphic side of nature.  Nature is not only unspoiled places.  It abounds within the sound of urban living.

When I woke, a rare snow coated the streets of Dallas.  Walking to work, I questioned the spectacle of collecting cigarette butts.  I wondered and worried about what others might think of me.  As an artist, I like to think I am free of such preoccupations.  Although, I have never freed myself from the weight of social expectation; I went ahead and tried to ignore the judgment of others.

I didn’t have much luck finding the wet and muddy discards along the streets until I wandered through a drugstore parking lot.  There they were more plentiful especially around some hedges that separated the parking lot from some shops behind a bus stop.  In collecting more and more cigarette butts, I began to feel more at ease in my endeavor.  Then a woman called out to me.  Turning around, I found her standing there handing me a ten dollar bill to buy some smokes of my own.  I explained that I didn’t need her money.  I told her that I was an artist working on a crazy project and thanked her for her generosity.  In watching me, the only thing she could assume was that I was homeless.  Rather than turning away, she offered to help.  Though I was not in need, the gesture filled my soul with joy.  How difficult can it be for us to temporarily alleviate suffering?  Consider what a kind gesture can mean the next time you see someone down and out.  It was nice not to be written off because of my appearance.  I don’t wear a suit and tie.  By simply looking for cigarette butts, I am sure I looked the part.  This kind woman didn’t care how I came to such a desperate situation.  Instead, she chose compassion as a way to begin a day cloaked in the cold of winter.