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| End of the Day at the North End of the Richardson Heights Shopping Center... Left panel detail mixed media diorama 11 7/8 x 63 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches 1987 |
One of the joys of not having to rely on composition is that
the entire world is open to you. The world
abounds in the local. The exhilaration
of travel can be had by riding a bike or strolling down an alleyway. A walk across a parking lot can fill with a
sense wonder. The peeling paint of a rusted dumpster may be a bit of a kick, a heart
rising skip, the arrested freshness that comes with every new encounter. With this state of mind, every day, every time
of day, every atmospheric condition is splendid. Life is even bright in stormy weather when
design no longer denies a child eye view of everything as treasure. A vacant lot becomes a place of nature. Even blacktop and shiny metal cars beam
radiantly. Stepping towards the theatre,
life happens in the wind. Trees and
shrubs throw off pollen dust to the flutter and buss of flying insects. Car doors open and close in moments of lowly grandeur.
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| End of the Day... full two panel view |
I once spent an entire day observing the habits of
Richardson Heights Shopping Center. I
arrived before dawn, and left just after dusk. It was Sunday. There wasn’t much going on. The Texas Blue Laws were still enforced. Given the current political conditions of the
state, the past could easily seem like a golden age of liberalism. Anyway, the idea was to do an entire
exhibition based on a single day in a parking lot. I know that’s taking the idea of local to the
extreme, but I was confident there was more than enough to see to make for a
very exciting show. Although I didn’t go
that route, I easily could have, and some very nice dioramas came from the
all-day excursion around the grounds of the shopping center.
The tools of the trade didn’t include pencils, sketch pads,
canvas or paint. The engagement with any
particular place is too enjoyable to be distracted by the practice of painting. I came to see and feel the life of a specific
place in my neighborhood. To help with
that endeavor, I had a camera and a notebook.
I brought a folding chair to sit in and a tape recorder to capture
sound. Most of the noise was
traffic. The ebb and flow was the
aggravated ease of a lazy summer Sunday.
The recorder also captured a chirping scurry of birds as dawn gave way
to shape and shadow. Early in the
morning, a Corvette pulled into the north end of the shopping center. The car door opened and a policeman stepped
out. Within no time at all, I understood
what was happening. The shopping center
filled in with cars. He was a crossing
guard for those going to church. There
is no way to explain this if you have not lived in Dallas. Although most people don’t seem that pious
during the week, when Sunday comes around church overtakes state, and traffic
patterns are managed to meet the needs of church going people. When church was over, the parking lot quickly emptied
out. I wandered around taking pictures. I noted business names, inspected litter and
paid some attention to the activity of ants. When you have all day, you have all kinds of time
for long drawn out yawns and internal bouts of fascination. Both modes of being seem to be completely compatible. I noticed meandering cracks. I stumbled on bits of scattered gravel no
longer the embedded compression of blacktop conglomerate. Faded paint, an exquisitely eroded layer of cap
rock divided gray from gray. The
powerful glare of an ever present sun was everywhere. In pale gray heat, little puffy clouds
followed a shadowy path of quiet annihilation.
Around noon, cars crowded in around Wyatt’s cafeteria. Dining out on Sundays also seemed to be an
eventful part of going to church. Dallas
was the churchiest place I’d ever seen, and I grew up in Utah. Perhaps, when religion is practiced that
casually, there isn’t any cost to looking handsome or pretty. You simply change clothes and persona. Anyway, the one thing parking lots seem to
have in common is an inability to encourage walking. I once worked a couple of doors down from a
fitness center. Women drove around and around
looking for the perfect spot. God forbid
if hips should have to walk. I wonder if
any of them stopped to consider how ridiculous it was to labor that hard to
avoid exercise while trying to exercise. Steps don’t seem to count for much unless they
include dues, mirrors, and a cold interior of fitness machines.
Over the years, I’ve heard people say that people are the hardest
things to paint. Naturally as a
landscape painter, I don’t much care for the idea. The statement insinuates that trees are not
as hard to paint as faces, and further proclaims that an apple, napkin and hat,
and a cold beer stand in lower tiers of difficulty. I am certain that is not in fact a fact. Almost any mountain slope is far more varied
than any variation in the human face.
The noted difficulty comes from a consciousness that places the human
race as the crown of creation. We spend
all our time thinking of ourselves. Even
in societies where a reverence for nature was more prevalent, that reverence was
still centered on the inhabitants of man.
With that mindset, nothing else has ever received equal time or
consideration. The standard for
mountains has never even matched that of kitchen utensils. Anyone can paint a mountain. It’s not hard to see why we would have environmental
problems. We only see ourselves. As a result, landscape painting has never
received true scrutiny. It is perfectly
fine for a mountain to be nothing more than a few gray lines on a horizon. Very few deeply care about nature. You can tell that just by the way they
drive. A highway is nothing more than a
forgettable stretch between destinations.
Since a person is not a tree, a
cloud, or a sage covered bluff, there is no need to heed the particularity of
how cloud movements continuously reconfigure cloud formations. Many painters simply make the stuff up and
never really seem notice that the grey underbelly of a cloud isn’t really any
darker than the blue sky that surrounds it.
The same kind of laxness won’t fly when considering the profile and tone of a human face. Try making one up. You won’t get away with it. That’s why I have a bit of a problem with the
outdoor crowd. They just paint to feel artistically
free. Painting outside has nothing to do
with understanding the subtlety of light.
I think it’s time to put the people thing in perspective. John Singer Sargent would never have had the success
he had if he had plein aired the privileged faces of the Gilded Age.
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| End of the Day... left panel view |
As evening began to settle in, my day of observation came to
a close. Although short lived, the
pastel atmosphere began to relinquish heat.
After initial cooling, the air seemed to warm up again. I know that’s probably not the case. The sensation was most likely tied to
increased humidity. The sun had set. It was safe for trees to begin to release some
of the moisture that had been stored during the heat of the day. The sound of crickets could not yet compete
with cicadas, the noisy creatures of heat that pass the day away in marked
intervals of intensity. Deciduous trees leaned
more and more toward evergreen. Lavender
meandered twilight across the sky. Street
lamps intensified the weight of darkness.
Starlight was nothing more than a glimmer of major constellations and
possibly a passing satellite. I snapped a few finals shots as evening
settled in. I loaded my stuff into the
truck glad to call it a day, and drove home to my apartment on the other side of Central Expressway.
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| End of the Day... right panel view |
Great post--you were the young Henry David Thoreau of suburban Texas. The same level of observation, which you capture perfectly here.
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