Highway Altarpiece: “The Child Is Father of the Man”; from Kingston, Ontario, Canada to Holden, Utah; U.S. Highway 50

Highway Altarpiece: "The Child Is Father of the Man"; from Kingston, Ontario, Canada
to Holden, Utah; U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on a shaped ragboard and paper construction, artist-made frame
8 7/8 x 23 13/16 x 3 7/8 inches including frame

It is hard to know what kinds of things I would have painted as a child. However, I believe that the primacy of sight ultimately determined the path I would follow. Although the journey was anything but straight, I came to believe that at any given moment the world is already composed. In thinking of life, a line from William Wordsworth’s poem, “The Rainbow” comes to mind, “The Child is father of the Man.”

 

Because I am primarily a visual person, memory takes me back to a time that could precede speech. I remember the neon sputter of a sign in the night when I was two. 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 three. I remember snowflakes that I caught in a pot, and the pleasure of digging in the dirt come summertime. A highway drive, gloomy skies, and an A & W Root Beer sign occupy early childhood memories. There was the body of a great lake long before I knew the name Ontario. I remember grandparents, the scent of tobacco, and the sound of small boats on the bay. Even now, the faint sound of a lawnmower recalls a Canadian infancy.

 

Painting became a conscious thought when I was five. I was with my father. We stopped to look at a yard sale of landscape paintings. That’s when I realized that seeing was something that could physically be described. But because what I saw was a small sampling of what a landscape could be, without knowing it, my vision ended up being restricted. The possibility of painting routine scenes from Division Street receded with seeing paintings devoted to the depiction of pristine nature. 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 is presumed to be, that information has a habit of shutting down the thought process. Knowledge can mean freedom, but it can also be a trap. Once a narrative is set, it can be extremely difficult to see beyond the plot.

 

I outgrew my Green Card long ago. If I’d had the skills of a portrait painter, I would have made a large painting based on its tattered history. However, because my knowhow was driven by the lift of earth and sky, my desire to embrace the challenge of a self-portrait remained just a fantasy. Something began to shift for me, when my brother Steve shot an image of me standing by a highway sign outside of Holden, Utah. The photograph became part of a beautiful catalog designed and compiled by Cheryl Vogel, entitled Lloyd Brown: Framing America. 

 

The bookend nature of the painting appealed to me. The two views, with a gaze back to an age when I’d already decided to become an artist, through to a time when I’d lived much of that life made the depiction less about me individually, and more about what it means to grow up seeing. Even though painting people was completely out of my domain, the double self-portrait was something I wanted to confront. In my mind’s eye, I immediately saw the shape and structure. Although, it didn’t include the rendition of a faded paper cup, a vision of a highly polished column roughly the same shape stood in its place. It is only natural that an abandoned paper cup should fill that position, a division in time separating man and child. While it might be a great framing device, the separation created by the discarded cup could also be continuum. When it comes to the joy of seeing, the things that please me now are the same things that thrilled me as a child. However, I didn’t draw or paint most of those things, because as I explained earlier, they didn’t fall within the canon of what was worthy of art. Landscaping painting was a specific kind of seeing. It didn’t include most of what the outside had to offer. I had to enjoy the rocks, the weeds, and the weathered remains of tossed off packaging by myself. But, the secret thrill of seeing beauty in the insignificant bits of travel made walking to school an extremely fun thing to do.

 

While it’s not difficult to abhor litter, and admit that the planet would be better off without it, I can’t help but see a kind of history behind each piece of degraded paper, broken glass, or tossed off plastic. They are manifestations of life choices, triumphs and decay scattered within the bunching of ever present weeds. Even under the pressure of a highly offensive wind, a rolling paper cup can become blocked by a thicket of tall grass, or become encrusted in a substance no longer bearing any resemblance to mud weathering away into a mystery cup, where a fast food logo, completely undone by the sun sustains a dying refrain, “OF THE GREAT AMERICAN BURGER.”

 

As a two year old, life remained largely undefined. Without the framework of gender, race, church or state, there was no separation between me and being. Meaning was a thing unto itself. It didn’t require God or belonging to see wonder and significance. Perhaps, remembering those early impressions led me to object to the compositional take, which eliminated so much of what I saw everyday on my way to college. However, the need for that procedure didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

 

It took me years to fully understand what the compositional problem was. The paintings we base our concepts on didn’t come from observations of the countryside. In the beginning, it was Biblical and mythical figures that took the stage. Events from literature are happenings that we can’t witness. Story sourced paintings can’t emerge without an arrangement of models and props, or without relying entirely on imagination. Either way, composition comes into play. Paint that way long enough, and the methods become rules, which begin to shape the way we see everything around us. They can even persuade us to rearrange items placed on a table, so that a salt shaker or glass can have the prominence that a Greek goddess would hold. The layout of everyday living stops being a thing we want to see. The notion of having a dominant object applied to observations of a countryside seems like a very curious thought. Why should the act of positioning, a consideration equivalent to the placement of king or prophet be a thing needed to capture the abundance of pasture? The need for focal points seems to defeat the freedom that the open spaces are supposed to offer.

Although I’ve painted landscapes without the aid of staging for more than three decades, I’m not entirely at odds with those that choose to use composition. Because the domain of observation always exceeds me, I don’t apply the needs of hierarchy to a horizon that will continue on long after I’m gone. However, since not everything I paint is a situation or place that can be observed, I must also sometimes rely on composition. This piece is a good example of that. It is impossible for me to see separate events in my life side by side. The visualization of that requires some kind of staging. While “The Child is father of the Man,” the adult rendering of me comes first in this painting, because we cannot see the future. We can dream, which I did as a child; but we can only evaluate the impact of our imaginings by looking back in time. The landscape paintings I grew into come from who I was as a child. What I could not have known, when I saw those paintings at the age of five was how long it would take to get to a place, where landscape painting could embrace the wonder I beheld in the very beginning. When I’m on the highway, the connections can be so strong, that the outlines of humanity simply begin to slip away. When you begin to feel a part of everything you see, what could be more sacred than the refrain of an open highway?

 

 

The Rainbow

 

 

My heart leaps up when I behold

   A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

   Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

 

William Wordsworth 1807

 

Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50

Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on six shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames
12 5/8 x 60 1/4 x 2 3/16 with a 2 3/4 inch spacing at the base of each frame

The view of Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas comes from a trip taken in 2013. I was in Dallas for the opening of The Dallas Years, a show intended to commemorate the time I spent living in the city. On the way home from Valley House Gallery to Utah, I headed north on U.S. Highway 75.

Because I went to the Dallas Museum of Art before I left, it was perhaps early afternoon, before I cleared the outer reaches of the city. The journey into Kansas, is an all day trip. In the later part of March, the days are not long enough, without an early start, to cover any distance without driving into the night. I’d been informed by a gallery staffer, that a huge snow storm blew through Kansas. Ignoring the warning, I assumed that the roads would be clear enough, by the time I reached Emporia, where I planned to spend the night.

Seeing any part of the eastern side of Kansas, happened so long ago, that I really looked forward to the excursion. An old friend of mine, who became my wife, and then ex-wife, was going to school in Lawrence at the time. The year was 1988. When I went to see her, I’d leave on a Friday just after work. Because it was late in the day, the sun always set before I got to Kansas. The countryside vanished into a line of oncoming headlights, long before crossing the bridge over the Arkansas River into downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Because it was late, beyond the Kansas border, most travelers had already retired for the night. Highway miles would slip away, with the headlights of a single car, riding a fixed position, a far-off reflection, centered in the abyss of my rear view mirror. In the dead of night, it was not hard for me to envision, something from a movie scene playing out in real life. Then I’d breathe a sigh of relief, when the headlights left the highway, headed in the direction of some late arrival, buried deep within the quiet hours of starlight.

Until I drove home on Sunday afternoons, I never got to see Kansas by daylight. Although the state is still part of the plains, the countryside seemed less stubby than either Texas or Oklahoma. Memory is a vague kind of thing, an impression of events with most of the details missing. Retracing the mileage of any highway, fills in with bits of familiar information. The succession of events, recovers all the missing details that quickly vanish chasing down whatever lies just behind a receding horizon. Every oncoming mile, becomes knowledge based anticipation. Remembering previously seen sites, is played out in a recognition that comes from the motion of momentary photographic memory. I find, that I remember all the insignificant bits of a trip that time had forgotten.

When I pulled into Emporia, the night air was as brittle as the plowed up snow that surrounded the motel. Because I was late leaving Dallas, I never got to replay the familiar sights of the Kansas countryside. In the morning, heading in a westerly direction, every mile of horizon on U.S. Highway 50 would be new, until I got to Colorado.

By the time I got to Stafford, I’d traveled nearly a 150 miles, taking pictures all along the way. Although primarily a two lane road, the current highway bypasses most of the towns of Kansas. If you hope to see anything affiliated with Main Street, you will need to leave the highway. The pull of the horizon, is punctuated every ten miles or so, by a colonnade of white silos. Travel any distance and you’re bound to witness, a freight train overtaking the fortress of a grain installation overseeing the plains.

The waning Martin Avenue, may feel like the perfect combination of clutter, a rare something that I’d come upon, that was just waiting to be painted. Standing in tracks of gravel, it is hard not to see many things that register as canisters of the past. There is the profile of silos. Piles of new and used tires, anchor the fluting of a metal shed, which intrudes into the view of a deserted service station. Behind it hide, a couple of old houses weathered nearly all the way to gray. There is a classic car, that has become such, by surviving the ravages of time. There is the back end of a pickup truck, which has become a homespun trailer. The front windows of a pink clapboard house, with a handicapped ramp and railing, are covered over in tinfoil. A blue sky of thinly veiled clouds, lends to the sensation that the place is barely hanging on, not quite ready to surrender to the shade of silence that echoes across most any horizon. I guess it could be easy to believe, that this scene was a lucky find, but a ballad of loss, can be found anywhere. I know this from walking. If you’re open to the nature of place, there is a story ready to unfold.

I happen to be fond of architectural form, whether it be the lift of a high-rise condominium, a picture frame that sharpens the breadth of a painting, or the inverted shape of a tapered paper cup, that is all about volume and circumference. Even a blank sheet of paper, feels complete to me. I see no separation between the artwork and the surface that supports it. Picture plane and paint are both significant. Within the panels of Martin Avenue, I wanted to get away from the constraint of vertical rectangles. I didn’t want the sequence to hang as pillars of 2-dimensional space. The shape of a rectangle amplifies the impression of a plane. It is difficult to experience a sensation of space within the confines of a shape so stable. The squared up framing of information, resists the influence of horizontal spin and the impact of gravity. The rectangle offers no possibility for periphery, or a chance to be distracted. Without the sweep and dive of perspective, it is hard to know where you are. Imagery becomes a flat abstraction, a postcard kind of a thing that can’t be inhabited. The perception of space is dependent on a perspective that is hard to achieve within limitations of a standard rectangle. That is why when I photograph a place, the process almost always involves more than just one picture.

The panels were designed to amplify sky. However, they happen to point in every direction. Although the shape favors the pitch of the rooftop and the angle of the left corner, the structure also leans to the right, encouraging you to repeatedly take in every direction. That bit of visual wanderlust embraces the nature of place. You no longer remain a spectator outside the picture plane. The depiction of a moment in time, begins to take on a note of recognition that hopefully extends a little beyond the limits imposed by 2-dimensional space. I hope the painting has a presence, a sense of atmosphere, close enough to provoke a feeling of kind of like being there. And if you happen to know this sort of place, the landscape, much like a song, becomes your narrative.