54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50

54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50, 2014-2017
acrylic on 54 panels, artist-made frames, 51 3/8 x 77 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches
Courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

Left side view of 54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake,Utah,
US Highway 50, Courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

A favorite painting of mine, is divided up into a grid of 450 squares. It certainly did not begin that way. When first painted, I was living in Richardson, a suburb north of Dallas, Texas. In the tiny apartment, there was no space to paint anything of scale. A small kitchen table, that couldn’t possibly fit in the minuscule kitchen, doubled as a studio. On the other side of the elevated railroad tracks, which ran behind the block of nondescript brick apartment buildings, there was an empty field. That is where I’d go to work on large projects. Sometimes while working outside, I’d draw a small audience of kids, usually arriving on bicycles. Although, I always tried to answer their questions directly, it was never that easy trying to explain abstraction while painting.

When the weather was pleasant, I’d search for a section of beaten down weeds, as far away from the street as I could find, and lay some raw canvas on the ground. The resistant stubble of wild plants, felt nothing like the smooth studio walls that backed the stapled expanses of canvas that I painted on in college. On the ground, the fabric was never flat. The pressure of the brush against the debris underneath, left impressions in the paint similar to rubbings made with crayon on paper. Brushstrokes lack a sense of calligraphic weight when trying to glide over a rumple of woven ridges. Abstraction in the field, quickly moved from Franz Kline like gestures, to gravity centric acts, which were more in line with the layered constellations of Jackson Pollock. While flinging paint from the end of the brush, I also dumped large quantities of white onto the fabric. Stepping into the puddles, I began kicking the paint around, leaving the imprint of my shoes as part of the overall imagery. Into those impressions, I poured a watery mix of pigment and let it run all over the canvas. I liked the result, but it always felt like there was something missing.

While attending the University of Nevada in Reno, I saw a canvas covered with a grid of graphite lines. Agnes Martin had carefully painted the spaces in between with white. The simplicity was striking. It reminded me of the shimmer of reflected sky on the side of glass buildings. While attending the university, my parents moved to Dallas. Visiting them on a Christmas break, we circled the city as the sun began to set. Within a cold yellow sky, glass high-rises burned like hot coals on a circular horizon. I remember distinctly feeling that I’d never seen anything quite like that before.

When I moved seven years later to El Paso, Texas, I had another go at it. This time, I overlaid the embedded footprints and splatters of paint with a graphite grid of squares. While it broke some of the dead areas up, it still didn’t get me there.

A couple years after that, I move to Fillmore, Utah. One day while looking at the painting, I decided that the grid needed to be more physically defined. I had an old painting from college that I never entirely liked. Composed primarily of pinks and blues, I thought it was a little too pretty. I decided to cut it up into squares. Back then, I frequently painted into wet gesso and raw canvas and watched the pigments bleed into the cream colored fabric. Subtle patterns happened on the back side of the canvas where it had been stuck and stapled to the wall. With all the pieces piled in the middle of the floor, I randomly began to glue them into the grid of the field painting. Some pieces remained face up, while others were turned upside down. As I did this, I intentionally left many of the spaces blank so as not to conceal all of the embedded footprints. The grid became a combination of three paintings because both sides of the cut up canvas were applied to the original artwork. What I was looking for was a kind of randomness. To reinforce that, I traced the grid with linear beads of glue. Into those wet ridges, I pressed a couple different colors of sand. When the mortar like lines dried, I had a restrained mosaic of graphic atmospheric squares.

I always enjoyed the randomness that inhabits nature. Because nature was a better designer than I could ever be, composition was never an obsession. I just went with what I saw, knowing that I could never improve reality. When I began thinking about the sky panels, I wanted to take the randomness I saw on walks and apply it to the sky. Of course, sky already has an ambiguity that I could never match, it’s just that the blue skies of beyond, are never equated with the splendor of lowly weeds or erosion. Yes, I said it. Weeds are absolutely beautiful!

One day, on the way to the mailbox, the light in the sky was exceptional. Studying the mosaic of canvas squares, I determined that to get a similar shimmer with paintings of clouded atmosphere, that I would need at least 54 panels. With that knowledge, I headed for Sevier Lake on US Highway 50 stopping along the way to shoot fragments of the sky. It took around an hour to arrive at the dry lakebed. When I got there, I photographed the ground and highway as well. I had plans for several paintings.

When I viewed the 54 thumbnails of sky on the computer screen, I had my doubts. It was a monotone mosaic of blue. Although light, the abstract painting I was modeling it after, was full of all kinds of color. I decided to go ahead with project. There is no real way to tell if an idea will work if it is never executed. With a utility knife and handsaw, I cut all the materials I would need to make the panels. In my spare time, I glued things together. Because I’ve done a lot of framing, I know nothing is ever an exact match. To compensate for that fact, the ragboard panels were cut a little larger than the frames or platforms that they were to be mounted to. Sandpaper brought all the uneven edges together. The practice of sanding was never anything I desired to pursue, but because I make everything myself, sandpaper has become a constant companion. Instead of dreading it, I just accept it as a key part of making art.

At any size, 54 paintings are going to require a lot of time. Because of that fact, I decided to change the way I usually paint, otherwise it would take a couple of years to complete. The work would have to be a little more loose or painterly. With my experience as an abstract painter, I learned to be open to what a situation desires. The scale of the project was the equivalent of an unexpected drip. Listening to its direction changes what needs to be done.

When I completed the first three paintings, I saw that all the blue was going to be okay. Because many of the images were similar, when a painting was finished, the corresponding photograph was immediately deleted to avoid any confusion about what had or had not been completed. Being a framer, I couldn’t help but frame a piece as soon as it was done. When originally imagining the project, I saw all the framing in white. I had a handful of small paint cans sitting around and decided to use the pale colors. Following that path, the framing for the final piece would be an array of slight variations on taupe or beige. The delicacy of the color scheme pleased me.

Having so many panels to paint gave me a chance to play around a little. That was even in keeping with what I was trying to do. The painting was intended to be about the beauty of randomness. Not having it front of me now, I don’t remember all the different things I did. But beyond a generalized looseness, there were some references to Pointillism that I really enjoyed making. One of the more surprising pieces for me, was a painting of clouds that primarily relied on the kind of lines I used when doodling in junior high school. Even while using them, I could still be fairly discreet.

I started the piece in 2014. Working on it between other projects, had gotten me as far 13 panels by the spring of 2017. Then I decided it was now or never, and set everything else aside. Being able to delete a digital image as each painting was finished was a good way to keep track of progress. But, every time I counted how many images there were left to paint, I felt overwhelmed. I looked forward to thresholds like I’m almost halfway there, or there are only 19 panels left to go. The countdown helps. Over my career, most of the things I’ve made were time consuming. Immediate gratification is something I seldom experience. I get up each morning and go to work, and somewhere down the line, much to my surprise, I’ll find that I’m almost finished.

By the time I decided that it was now or never for the project, most of the small paint cans that I mentioned before had dried out. I planned to go to the hardware store and pick out some new colors, keeping with the theme of subtle variation. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to mix in a little acrylic with the colors that remained viable, that way there would be a little more variation. In mixing the paint for one the frames, I overshot a color and initially thought it was a little too intense. But rather than repainting it, I decided to make a shift to the color scheme. The painting was to be about the acumen of chance, and having a mix of colors could strengthen that sense of randomness.

Part of the inspiration for this painting, came from an abstract piece that I began 34 years ago. In it, all the squares are fixed, but because there are 450 of them, a certain amount of randomness is inevitable. The sky panels were painted individually so they could be moved around. Initially, the configuration of the grid was the only restriction I had on their placement. I liked the idea of not having a particular order in which to hang them. Going for a form of randomness, none of them would have been numbered. But as I thought about it, it was not hard for me to imagine some poor perfectionist struggling to get them hung. How could anyone ever really know if they found the perfect combination? I decided to take the stress away. I quickly laid everything out on floor without much thought about where anything should go. For anyone interested in creativity or design, that is part of the secret. Don’t over think things. Being casual or relaxed gets you at least halfway there. Standing on a chair, I began to move things around. When I saw a configuration that I really liked, I stopped to number them. It is impossible to ever know if my combination is the perfect one, but as far as I can tell, it works absolutely well enough.

As I work, change often happens along the way. I thought I was seeking randomness, but what I was really looking for, was the power of chance to help me find or design something beautiful. In this painting, I became like the nature that I rely on. You don’t have to figure out where the sky panels are supposed to go. I’ve done it for you. That’s what nature has always done for me. I never have to figure out where things need to be. I simply look out at the land in front of me. Because of that fact, I’ve never fully understood the concept of chaos. Everything appears to be related; even when things seem to happen for no reason, randomness is a form of order. A germinating seed becomes the weed that leads to a full blown forest.

Voran Realty Co., Post Office, and City Park, Belpre, Kansas, US Highway 50

Voran Realty Co., Post Office, and City Park, Belpre, Kansas, US Highway 50, 2016, acrylic on 18 shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames, 8  1/4 x 120 x 2 3/4 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of Valley House Gallery

Perhaps, Belpre can best be described as a small town around 20 miles east of Kinsley, Kansas. That in and of itself is not much of a description, but since I’ve driven the highway, I know that Kinsley, Kansas is Midway U.S.A. There is a sign there with arrows pointing in opposite directions to New York and San Francisco. From that location, it is 1561 miles to either city. There is a roadside park with a black steam locomotive, picnic tables, and a small museum. I considered the mileage posted on the large painted arrows and without much thought decided to remain on the open plains for a little while longer.

As a proponent of the long view, I drove the length of the nation and saw only a few sites that could be described with a single snapshot. Without at least two consecutive views, it is hard to capture the idea of place. If you only shoot the barn, you have no field to tie the structure to the horizon. If you shoot only the field, there is no element to measure the distance between weeds stranded in clods of dirt and the sky. Without a sense of place, an image no matter how beautiful it may be is always a bit of an abstraction.

When I pulled into downtown Belpre, the first thing I saw was the abandoned real estate building. Looking at the surroundings, it was not difficult to see that business had been rough. The streets had been reduced to a covering of sandy gravel and commerce was limited to the US Post Office and another building that may have been a bar. On the other side of the street, there was a park with a painted playground in a field of trees that pretty much concealed the water tower. From that spot, there were also views of grain elevators, a steel building, a rutted country road, houses, a church, a building with no identifiable store front, and the possibility of an apartment building. I had come to capture the American scene; everywhere I looked it surrounded me, there was nothing to do but shoot everything I could see. Because of the height of the trees, I shot the expanse with the camera held vertically. I frequently go long, and there is always the option to shoot a 360 degree view of any location, but rarely is it imperative to capture the essence of a place. I’ve always liked parks and cemeteries. Often, they are the only visible things holding a town together. Once they go, a town is bound to be nothing more than crumbling rubble along a highway.

My father liked to camp and travel. As a child, I was only interested in mountains. The habitation of in-between places bored me. When I moved to Dallas after college, I was a long way from Saturday drives up into canyons. In the isolation of the big city on the plains, there was no way for me to connect to the nature I loved without several days of vacation. I had to learn to see other things. That separation from the mountainous West was the best thing to ever happen to me. In the absence of what can easily be identified as nature, I began to see cracks in the sidewalk and sky. Nature went from being the scent of tall pines on a mountainside to the idea of being there. As long as you are still living, you can connect, and that connection may be the storefronts of a shopping center, a barn, or vacated real estate building 20 miles east of Kinsley, Kansas. The moment was the thing I learned to really see and appreciate.

In 2005, I began painting the Nevada section of US Highway 50 known as the Loneliest Road in America. It was a familiar highway; my parents divorced when I was a child; 500 miles of mountains and valleys separated them. School years were spent living in rural Utah with my mother. Summertime took us to Reno, Nevada to live with my father. With the exception of a couple of years, I’ve been painting the highway ever since 2005. I expanded the survey in 2014 to include the entirety of the highway from Maryland to California. A vast project, it is not something that can be completed in a single season. It will likely require the rest of my life. I like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway. A theme without limitations, I see the highway as a kind of a clothesline to hang innovation on.

When I moved to Dallas in 1983, I took a job as a picture framer. It is a skill every artist should have given that it is a large part of the material cost of making art. Over the years, I’ve done some innovative framing, but it would be a mistake to think it was driven by the frame shop experience. I started painting when I was ten and was pretty confident in my ability, but I didn’t realize that I was creative until I hit college. I had become disenchanted with landscape painting and latched onto abstraction. That is the thing that saved painting for me. Being able to respond directly to what was happening on the canvas taught me that anything was possible. If anything was possible, then any box could be rethought or imagined. In the embrace of abstraction, I acquired the thinking skills to remake the landscaping painting I grew up with as a child. I could learn to paint the moment which is what I did when I started making dioramas of my neighborhood in Richardson, Texas. Of course, it wasn’t that straightforward. It never is. As an artist, you can’t be standing at point A and look out into the distance at position B and think “that looks pretty nice, I think I will go over there” because the beautiful place called B doesn’t exist until you create it, and that can’t happen without a willingness to leave part of your identity behind. You can never realize who you really are by remaining in the same place. While you may have some ideas of where you want to go, vision is not about culmination.

An initial drawback of the diorama was that it was housed in the structure of a shadow box and a shadow box casts a lot of shadow. My solution to reduce unwanted shadow entailed parting ways with the structure of the frame. That meant that in the entire framing industry, there were no moldings that I could use. At that point, I would have been better off if I’d been a cabinet maker. If I’d been one, perhaps I could have imagined a better solution, but even so, the one I came up with hung nicely on the wall and changed the relationship between the art and the frame. The two were no longer separate things to me. The diorama made painting a kind of architecture, and although I no longer make dioramas, I continue to see painting that way.

Four years ago, I woke up one night with an image of a concaved surface that leaned forward in my mind. If it came from a dream, I don’t remember it. A few years earlier when I left framing, I replaced my table saw, scroll saw, chop saw and router with a plastic miter box and handsaw. Speed is not everything. It eliminated a lot of noise and I could work anywhere. Also, there was the added satisfaction of knowing that my hands were basically safe. The structure I imagined would have required a lot of the equipment that I’d gotten rid of. I decided that what I wanted to do could be done using ragboard. The solution was a typical one. I always seemed to find a way to innovate within the confines of the situation. Building the structure out of layered ragboard really was the best solution; acid free paper isn’t going to crack with age, as wood has the habit of doing.

Once a shape is imagined, others come to mind. Although I’d already painted a couple pieces with pitched rooflines, I wanted something that was asymmetrical. I covered the laptop monitor with a window cut out of cardstock and made adjustments to it until I found the right angles. I liked what I saw. The asymmetry felt more dramatic. The sensation was a little more like being outside. The view was less fixed or stable. It is all too easy to see a rectangle as a plane. Although no longer a rectangle, the shape was still a plane. The tilt forward forced a sense of direction into the flatness of the panel. Even though the positioning moved in the opposite direction of the perspective I was trying to illustrate, conceptually it was the right way to go. Perhaps that sounded a little confusing, but if you look at what I’ve done, you will see that the sky is literally closer to you than the gravel of the street. Although overhead sky can never be reached, in a sense it is very close to us. When walking down the street, we never see our feet, making the connection to earth more distant than the drift of sunlit clouds in a shifting atmosphere.

The pitched roofline was fairly new when I decided to paint downtown Belpre, Kansas. I had painted just one of the asymmetrical variations before and it was on a horizontal panel. I wondered how a vertical version of it would work, and to answer the question I settled on a symmetrical sweep of 18 asymmetrical panels. A 360 degree view of a place has no fixed beginning. As long as the images are in sequence, you can start any place, and every time that is done the composition changes. Before the digital camera, I painted from photographs glued to matboard. I knew what the composition was going to be because I had joined everything together. If Belpre was a painting from back then, it would be a single panorama where everything was joined. I worked that way for years, and then one day tried to overlay photographs that didn’t want to align. When I pulled them apart, I liked being able to see them individually and how they related to one another at the same time. The separation retained an element of time that the joined image concealed. With the panorama it was easy to believe that you were looking at a frozen moment instead of a collection of them. The separation of the photographs was a better reflection of what I saw. The place wasn’t seen all at once. It took time to assemble the slanting of a horizon. I don’t think that a panorama made of separated images is better than one where the separation is removed. Whatever can be achieved is never going to be exactly what we see. Now that I know that there are at least two ways to view the horizon, I use both of them. I enjoy being able to look at things in new ways, and the new way really suited the 18 panels I chose to use for Belpre, Kansas.

Working from a monitor is different. Since I no longer print anything out, I’ve skipped a step. The completed painting is the same kind of surprise that I used to get when I aligned the photographs into what essentially was the sketch for the diorama. It’s interesting that the sequence I shot of the street just happened to be symmetrical. I could have started with the camera anywhere, and anywhere else it would not have been the same. Of course, I could have moved the sequence around until I achieved that balance. But, I painted the panels in the exact order that I shot them. I find that on some level to be really surprising. That was always the exciting thing about gluing the photographs together. Looking through the view finder, I never knew exactly what I had until the negatives became prints and they were joined together.

I am as surprised as anyone by the painting. Since I had never painted anything like this before, I didn’t know what the repetition of the pitched edges would look like hanging on the wall. Cheryl Vogel of Valley House Gallery in Dallas, told me a visitor saw a picket fence kind of thing in the configuration. I can also see that, but I never really knew what the individual panel would look like when it was repeated 18 times, particularly because I was building the panels at the same time I was painting them. That is part of the reason for making art. You can never be sure of what an idea will look like until you make it a physicality. I can see a picket fence kind of thing in the structure, but I also see the possibility of headstones. Both images are appropriate when thinking of small towns. One appeals to the safety of knowing your neighbors and all the things that go with small town living, the other considers the difficulty of trying to maintain a community outside the economic engine of the city. After having driven the length of US Highway 50, I am not hopeful about the fate of many of the in-between places. Having a small college nearby seems to help, as does having all the historic buildings intact. But even in the ruins of small communities, the romantic side of me has always seen a kind of richness out in the places where there is still room for a view.