A Small Unsigned Painting by William Vaughn Howard

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

This painting 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 80s. Unsigned, I imagine that it was painted not long before he died in 1986.

The sweeping span feels like taking in a vista, a view given to the arc of the horizon, where the implication of distance is what seeing is all about. Having nothing to focus on, movement is a wonderment that extends well beyond the singularity of a moment associated with the composed. Not bounded by a fixed position, you are free to examine the painting as you will. I had never seen anything like this before.  The paintings in Bill's last show were a revelation to me. In the form of abstraction, he tackled the act of seeing, which involves a lot more than composing pictures that replicate arrangements based on paintings from the past. When the contours of design were being considered, landscape painting wasn't in the picture. Painting wasn't about navigating the fields or getting around town. It was about literature. Artists were painting stories that couldn't be observed. No one had seen Adam and Eve consume the forbidden fruit. Composition was a creation that made it possible to portray events that couldn't be observed. There is no need to create a stage to observe the observable. Bill's paintings capture events of seeing. Seeing is primarily about navigating life. It doesn't have to be about manufacturing hierarchies. William Vaughn Howard's paintings made it possible for me to freely paint my surroundings without having to worry about how things should be taken in. His paintings eliminated the need for a stage. Landscape painting no longer needed to conform to the compositional huddle that never considered the breadth of earth and sky when it was being devised as a way to describe the unseen events of literature. With the elimination of focus, landscape painting could finally express the ramifications of space.