Road Trip Recollections of Offerle, Kansas, and the Limitations of Language and Paint

Large Puddle, Offerle, Kansas; US Highway 50
acrylic on ragboard panel
10 15/16 x 40 1/4 x 2 7/8 inches

I’ve been through Offerle, Kansas before. On this trip, I started documenting US Highway 50 in Ocean City, Maryland.  From there, I headed west photographing every town along the way. Even though it rained for several days, it is hard not be drawn to water. I stopped the car and stood as close as I could to the large puddle. I say puddle because it didn’t greet me as I rolled through town on a previous trip. However, the grasses that grow in the heart of the depression, indicate that it can often be a captivating place for moving water.

I’ve heard that a picture can paint a thousand words. I must say, that has seldom been my experience. It has never left me feeling chatty. I always seemed to be completely blank when it came time to explain the why of what I painted during college critiques. As I looked at this most recent painting, I found I had nothing to say, and wound up looking at Wikipedia for inspiration. About all it offered was the name of Lawrence Offerle as one of the settlers that founded the town in 1876. The last census placed the population at 199. Over time, that figure has not varied much. It appears to have always been a small town surround by sky.

If painting can paint a word or two, that language is going to be limited to visual symbols. That means painting is just a mouth full of nouns that can never form a sentence. Without the ability to form a sentence, painting can never be narrative. The idea that there is a kind of painting that can tell a story is fiction. Although painting can be very good at describing things we can see, it can’t carry on a conversation. If a painting is of a woman handing an apple to a man, it can say “woman handing apple to man.” It cannot say “Genesis, God, Eden, or the fall of man.” The painting is just a painting. The story comes with us. That is why the meaning behind an archaeological site can be so hard to decipher. If we were not the Egyptians, all we’re going to see are rows of people, birds and cats standing in strange positions. A painting of little moving people is likely to be described as narrative. But, how does that differ from a painting of cattle grazing a rolling hillside? The one thing narrative paintings seem to have in common is the ingredient of people. I guess that differentiation does tell us something. We only think people are important enough to inform us. The rest of nature doesn’t really seem to matter. If we insist that one kind of painting can tell stories, then we must extend speech to all painting, because little moving people can’t say any more than a painting of a rotting apple in a basket. If a painting is of little moving people, all it can say is “little moving people.” The idea that an angry chicken shrunk them comes from us.

I thought I might try to describe another scene of Offerle in writing. Although it could take a month or more to paint that scene, it would in fact be an easier thing to do. Nothing captures the moment better than a picture. But, human thought is not a painting or a snapshot. To tackle the thought process requires language. The painting of the puddle could never reveal any daydreams, or say that it was just one of many stops along the highway as I made my way across the nation.

Around a slight bend, a stone marker reads WELCOME TO OFFERLE. The supporting posts for the horizontal sign are also stone. On the left one, EDWARDS is vertically written. The stone post to the right chimes in with the word COUNTY placing the town on the western flank of Kansas. Gray grass is littered with a green touch of spring. A surviving snowbank remains cradled in a depression by the shoulder of the road. Behind the sign, a display of farm equipment covers a large patch of grass. It is not hard to tell that the machines are from the past, exposure has left the paint extremely weathered. An elongated building of corrugated steel resembles an arena. Three out buildings are painted white. A two story house with a porch faces the highway.  It too is white with a roof of green singles. The sky is light. The trees are bare. Three utility poles string a strand of wire out to the highway. Out in front of the house, two rows of junipers, browned by the bite of winter, separate the yard from the sporadic flow of traffic. Although radiant at the edge, a distant water tower is hollowed out by shadow. A small portion of the road momentarily rolls out of view. A knitted thicket of trees and utility poles hides behind the massive colonnade of a grain elevator. On that side of the highway, there’s predominance of metal buildings in colors of steel gray, pale ochre and cream. Yellow canisters shine bright in a field where nearly all the other propane tanks are painted white. There’s also a building of brick with a low pitched roof that could be a school or church. A radio tower would pierce the sky if it were closer, but at this distance, it is a faint line rising out of an industrial horizon. The highway is a polished gray. The white line that separates the shoulder from the rest of the road occupies two thirds of the pavement. The yellow line that divides the highway, merges into a ridge of weeds and a rail line of steel.

What I tried to describe, reads right to left because the welcome sign was the reason for my stop. If I painted what I tried to describe, it would probably read in the opposite direction, with the pale pavement sailing towards a distant water tower. However the remains of a bright white snowbank may have countered the pull. I have never really cared to address the question of balance. My only concern has been to give voice to the entirety of a location. The importance of angles and focal points can be settled by those interested in composition. The idea of time and place is easier to see without the overlay of artificial restrictions. Although a little long, what was written didn’t begin to capture what could be grasped in an instant with a painting or snapshot. I found I could not describe what I saw with any accuracy. Most of the detail had to be deleted to remain readable. Any image that fills your head cannot be what I saw as I stopped the car to take a picture. In this sense, a picture can paint a thousand words, but seeing does not begin to be a thing called language. Although I may be able to paint the brightness of spring, the wind can never whisper or reveal the origins of a town named after Lawrence Offerle.

  

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 [LB1]

US Highway 50, Granada, Colorado and the Amache Internment Camp

Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50
acrylic
8 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches

In 2005, I began photographing US Highway 50.  My focus was a section of highway known as the Loneliest Road in America that traverses Nevada.  Raised in Utah and Nevada, I grew up crossing the Great Basin.  An area of interior drainage, the rivers never make it to the sea.  Instead, they vanish in shallows of stagnation.  The Great Salt Lake is a good example of this.  My parents lived at opposite ends of the 500 mile divide of mountains and valleys.  Highway 50 was the connection between Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada.  In 2012 I extended the highway theme to include Colorado.  This past fall, I covered the rest of the highway on a road trip that took me all the way to Maryland.  This is not a project to be completed in a single season.  It will likely involve the rest of my life, but I really like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway.

I wanted to capture all the towns along the way.  As I traveled, I realized that kind of exactness would never actually happen.  Maps never entirely capture the idea of habitation.  What constitutes a town or community is not always straightforward.  With all the clusters that happen along the way, the abstraction of a map was necessary.  I missed some towns because I didn't know I missed them.  Sometimes I turned around to fix the mistake, and sometimes I didn't.  Then there was the problem of cities and the surrounding suburbs.  I confined cities to skylines and downtown intersections.  I didn't hit museums or spend much time dining out.  This wasn't about tourism, although it often touched forgotten places, the kind of places only known to those coming home to houses shadowed by freight trains on tracks that preceded miles of automotive travel.

Heading west out of Kansas, the sun had just come up.  In Granada, Colorado, grain elevators bathed in morning sunlight.  I pulled over just in time to catch a passing Amtrak.  I didn't realize or imagine that Granada had been the site of an internment camp.  That knowledge came to me later at a rest area.  However, I recently caught it on my way home from Maryland.  There wasn't much. There never is.  The only standing structure was not from the past, but rather the reconstruction of a guard tower.  Signs at the entrance provided a brief history.  The Granada Relocation Center also known as Amache held 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry from August 1942 to October 1945.  This was one of ten camps that held 110,000 prisoners.  Two thirds of the prisoners were American citizens.  The interesting part about the figure is that another internment camp has the number at 120,000.  I noticed the discrepancy because there happens to be a camp not far from where I live.  Out in the desert of west Millard County, Utah are the remains of the Central Utah Relocation Center also known as the Topaz Internment Camp.  Whatever the number, wartime seemed to inflame racism, a racism that many are never willing to acknowledge. 

The reconstruction of a guard tower at the Granada Relocation Center,
 also known as the Amanche Internment Camp.

The Central Utah Relocation Center, also known as the Topaz Interment Camp.

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, charcoal, paper, canvas and wood
12 1/8 x 90 11/16 x 1 1/2 inches

 

The photographs for this painting were taken as I was preparing to leave Dallas.  What got this started was not a photograph, but rather an abstract painting completed a couple years later in Utah.  Although the photographs were taken on Super Bowl Saturday 2011, I had no idea that there was anything special about the day until I started walking past all the banners on McKinney Avenue.  Snow is rarely an issue in Dallas, but I lived there long enough to have seen many snowstorms.

 

Though not part of the plan, it is appropriate that the painting grew out of abstraction.  In doing so, it captures the Dallas years from the very beginning.  When I arrived in the city, I was an abstract painter.  I never planned on doing anything else.  It just became a very uncomfortable way of being.  I believed that abstract painting was about chasing the unknown.  It seemed like the sustainability of a style didn’t really fit that position.  I didn’t see any way to continue that kind of openness and have any kind of a career.  Gallery representation implied style, something I could not do and remain open to the lifeblood of discovery.  And of course, there was the problem that a life devoted to total abstraction was also a rejection of nature.  There was no way to engage nature without imitating it.  The joy of abstraction may have been fine for a while, but it didn’t resolve the conflict I had with an art philosophy that expected the depiction of life to be designed.  Though I absolutely hated the idea, retreating to abstraction as though it were some kind of monastery had only taken me away from the nature that had been the reason for taking up painting in the first place.

 

Art history left an impression that art is ever changing and that great artists redefine the expected. Naturally, I wanted to be a great artist.  Who aspires to grasp the average?  Although I graduated from college in 1983, abstract expressionism was the definition of new for me.  I often wondered how I could possibly surpass it.  I decided that drawing would be my route to discovery.  Years later, I realize that the new can come from what is already known if seen through questions.  While the revolutionary is almost always out of reach, it is not that hard to be a little bit different.

 

Volkswagen Bus
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches

 

I was extremely shy, so I sought something extraordinary.  With the diorama, I thought I had hit upon something that needed no explanation.  Rather than compete, I ended up creating my own category.  Unfortunately, such comfort and bliss never really lasts.  After having this truly beautiful thing define me, I began to resent the fact that parts of me had been left behind.  To be totally invested in the diorama in the beginning made perfect sense.  It was new.  Years later, you cannot remain a master of your craft by repeating the past.  I never stopped loving the dioramas.  I simply quit making them in the same way I quit making many other things many times before.  There is no reason to hold onto knowledge that always remains, and discovery should be thought of as a journey through provisional truths.  In my quest to capture aspects of nature, I am never going to be handed the ultimate answer.  I’m always giving something away in order to attain something else.  What can be gained by walking away from accomplishments?  Knowledge.  That is the one way in which I am better than the 26 year old that made charcoal drawings.  I could never outdo those drawings today, but I am no longer at the mercy of mood swinging muses or luck.  I can resolve most any problem, and artworks seldom end in failure.

 

Residential Romanticism, Richardson, Texas
mixed media diorama
7 5/16 x 10 5/16 x 2 1/16 inches

 

Entering the second year of the diorama, I began to realize that the world was already composed.  All I needed to bring to the table was engagement.  And, how difficult could that be when life permeates the sparkle of sunshine and the weight of cold winter rain.  Composition was quickly tossed away along with a need for the painterly.  I was no longer interested in paint as a statement.  A brushstroke’s only function was to convey information.  I focused my attention on what had been previously thought of as meaningless detail.  It was not a heroic brushstroke that identified the moment as time and place, but rather a wind chastened paper cup meandering through gravel near the weed infested hedges of a Chinese restaurant that didn’t quite make it.  What happened when there was nothing but content left?   Awareness.   Before the time of the diorama, I never realized that most of the drama I saw as evening settled in was not the result of stunning contrasts, but rather the coming together of light and shadow.  Trees on a horizon only ignite because colors like orange, purple and pink are on the verge of merging into obscurity.  We never think of contrast as noonday concrete and dark stunted shadows.  But if contrast actually had anything to do with drama, Caravaggio would have painted sun baked parking lots.  Another misconception I had was the idea that contrast created space.  Try to imagine painting the depth of shadows on grass or capturing the weight of a stellar sky after a cold front has blown all the tiny clouds away.  Subtlety is the thing that is needed, otherwise a painting of a soccer ball ends up looking like the moon, flat in any of its phases.  There is no replacement for observation.

 

The making of dioramas and paintings can be best understood if you think watercolor.  I took a watercolor course in college.  As a medium it never served my purposes, but the methodology of laying things out ahead of time became vital to describing the world around me.  The dioramas changed the way I painted.  What I wanted to do required drafting.  There was still plenty of freehand things to do.  In fact success depended upon them, but in the long drawn out world of freeways and parking lots, mathematics kept everything together.  The very structure required forethought and planning.  Without realizing it, art had become a kind of architecture.  The photograph also became central to painting because the details mattered.  There was no other way to capture the nature of place.  I saw acrylic and pastel as flawed mediums.  Acrylic was dull and pastel was just too vibrant.  An acrylic base coat close to the pastel colors on top solved that problem.  In watercolor, detail is achieve by going over what is already painted with what is called a dry brush.  The brush has just enough pigment to catch the tooth of the paper, leaving the lower areas unscathed by the new layer of paint.  I applied the same idea to the diorama.  The pastel and the glued on bits of paper and fabric functioned as dry brush on washes of acrylic paint.  With something like pastel, it is important to know where the light areas are ahead of time, otherwise you end up with a dusty pile of mush that resembles no concrete street ever seen before.  Even with something like oil, once the white canvas is gone, there is no getting back to such a light and airy place.  As transient as clouds seem to be, they often need the permanence of a set aside blocked out from the very beginning.  Otherwise, you may never capture the anvil rise of water vapor in the sky.

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
center panel

 

The abstract painting reminded me of a splash.  I immediately thought of the photographs from Super Bowl Saturday.  Snowmelt flew into the air as momentum divided standing water.  The phenomenon was easy to catch, it happened over and over again as traffic passed through poorly drained intersections.  I made a little painting of a shining intersection and placed inside the abstraction.  In drawing and painting, I’d been playing with black and white and sepia toned imagery.  I included both as a part of the design.  Although the abstraction was based in white, the right side of it leaned sepia, while the left end leaned more towards a black and white spectrum.  The paintings of the woman and the splash extended that pattern.  I wanted both ends to be in color and painted them on slanted panels.  I didn’t want any sections to be the same.  It is an odd thing to say, but I was looking for irregular symmetry.  

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
2 right panels

 

As I hit McKinney Avenue, I began to see people out and about.  Some were even walking.  A woman walked ahead of me for a couple of blocks until she reached her destination.  I don’t hesitate to photograph people if they happen to be a part of the landscape, but I never set out capture them anymore than I seek out cars or utility poles.  I am not searching for specific things, but rather all the information that a moment can hold.  Having said that, it is always more difficult for me to photograph people.  I require a lot of personal space to feel comfortable, so when I photograph others, I feel like I am violating privacy.  The nice thing about painting the woman is that it dealt with a fallacy I’ve heard my entire life.  The idea that people are harder to paint is never questioned.  It is easy to see why the idea thrives.  It is simply a matter of focus.  We are people, not mountains or trees and we want to see ourselves portrayed accurately.  We’re not nearly as concerned about our surroundings.  In some sense, this was obvious to me even as a child.  I remember seeing kids at the park pounding out mountains of sand that resembled loaves of dough.  Obviously, they had never really looked at mountains or sand.  The forces of erosion are the same on any scale.   I have to say that the woman was the easiest thing for me to paint.  The slush of melting snow was much more trouble.  Without a people bias, that should not be surprising.  Our environmental surroundings are more varied than we will ever be.

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
inner right panel

 

I saved the splash for last because I thought it would be the most difficult panel to paint.  What concerned me was the waves of water droplets raining up and down a randomness that is never random.  There are always patterns, so it was a matter of capturing those patterns while maintaining the sense of energy that had created the splash.  I wasn’t sure I had it in me.  But once I had the basic structures established, my hand began to catch the kind of brushstrokes that evoked the joyous rage of water droplets in flight.  Thankfully, it was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. 

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
2 left panels

 

I became aware of Gerhard Richter sometime in the mid-80s’.  Flipping through a magazine, I saw representational and abstract paintings made by the same painter.  Finally, someone did what should have done from the very beginning.  The divide between figurative and nonfigurative painting created a kind of schizophrenia.  Art world factions couldn’t seem to see that all painting was related.   Art talk can be a bit misleading.  Although action painting as a phrase is descriptive, it veils the fact that it is also all about inaction.  What makes a De Kooning great is all the brushstrokes that never happened.  A lot of inaction allowed the movements that mattered to remain.  In this way, a De Kooning has a restraint that something painted outdoors simply cannot afford.  Plein air painting can’t escape chasing the sun.  The imitation of nature as an idea completely misses the point.  It implies that rendering the visual world around us is less thoughtful, that it isn’t that sophisticated to replicate what already is.  The problem with that attitude is that a painted cloud is no copy.  There are no readymade brushstrokes that symbolize sky.  Painting is always a form of abstraction.  There is the idea that a painting that does not try transcribe the visual world around us is somehow newer than a painting that depicts an old neighborhood.  There was a time when that would have been true.  But such occasions are rare and never last very long.  Once painters like Rothko and Pollock painted the unnamable, all the hard work was already done.  At great risk to themselves, they pushed the limits of what paint could be to where it currently stands.  Many of the brushstrokes and splatters we now use are the ones they made acceptable.  So contrary to popular belief, an abstract painting is not any further from the idea of imitation than a painting of an ominous cloud.  A cloud must always be invented.  Although abstract painting may not be about the predetermined, it does imitate the language of paint.  That is what gives it credibility.  That is not to say that abstract painting is no longer relevant.  Not having an objective can be extremely dangerous and requires a tightrope kind of focus that doesn’t happen painting puddles of slush.  Slush has its own challenges.  As a surface it is hard to quantify, and it really pushes your ability to see color.  The two disciplines enhance one another.  Although art is all about ideas, it has no capacity for language.  Whether it is a graphite grid on canvas or field of sunflowers this side of a railroad crossing, the question that always remains is an abstract one.  Is it beautiful?  As old fashioned as that may be, that highly subjective question is the only one that really matters.