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.

Painting never is an Imitation of Nature

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, charcoal, paper, canvas, and wood
12 1/8 x 90 11/16 x 1 5/8 inches

Although, I’ve spent nearly 30 years dedicated to landscape painting and the idea of time and place, none of that would have been possible without my background in abstraction. The two are often thought of as completely separate ways of being. That has never been my experience. Painted observation is frequently seen as the imitation of nature. The problem with that idea is that there are no ready-made colors or brushstroke that symbolize earth and sky. A tree painted of lines, dots and scribbles is not a copy, any resemblance to a swaying pine is in every sense an invention.

Dallas, Texas Construction Site
acrylic, charcoal, water soluble crayon, wood, cardboard, and canvas
7 15/16 x 35 1/2 x 1 11/16 inches

Recently, I’ve made a few pieces that include both ends of the spectrum. In each case, abstraction was my starting point. As I considered the abstractions, they seemed to suggest things like slush and snow, or the subtle colors of an early Kansas spring. These combinations are not intended be a direction, but when they arise, I will let them happen. Over the years, I’ve done many things. I’ve painted leaves, vacant lots, cattle, mountaintops, and residential neighborhoods. There is no escaping nature. It can be found in the sights and sounds all around us. Walking always enabled me to tap into a place where the Grand Canyon and a trashcan are equal. I came to see that the moment was the thing that mattered. In it, all I could see was the lay of the land. From gravel to sky, came the understanding that the topography of paint, no matter how real, can never ever be anything but abstraction.

Battle of Coon Creek, Kansas Sampler, US Highway 50
acrylic, canvas, graphite, paper, and wood
34 15/16 x 7 5/16 x 1 1/2 inches

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.

 

One Way Off Mckinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas

This painting can be seen at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, ragboard, canvas, charcoal graphite and wood
52 9/16 x 17 3/8 x 2 1/2 inches

One Way Off McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas is abstraction in just about as many ways as can be imagine. It started with the middle piece and for a while it was nothing but that painting. The bottom piece was also completed the same evening; it just so happened that the paintings fit existing frames. Abstraction embraces a game of chance. It was a lucky break. The frames fit the new paintings.  Even though I did not know it, chance had already played a role in the structure of the painting.

 My focus remained on the center painting. Although I thought I was finished, I continued to make subtle changes. As I evaluated what I saw, my mind would say yes, then it would say no, and no always required further action. Abstraction is always at risk from the very beginning. A wash or simple gesture is almost always beautiful. Yet the question of whether it is enough is always lurking. Any advance could mean destruction. Ease no matter how exquisite, is not that satisfying. Painting was never meant to be routine and ease can be just another form of boredom.

This was the original orientation of the painting. The bottom part of
this pairing is where it all began. In the beginning it was simpler and developed over time. 

As I looked at the two paintings, I considered putting them together. Because I saw them as a vertical expression, there was no way to see them standing on one another. They needed to be physically connected. Doing that was risky because it would be hard to undo. I liked what I saw. The horizontal abstraction occupied the top spot. When I began to think of introducing a street scene into the mix, I decided to flip the whole thing around and the top became the bottom. That change in orientation meant that I needed to do more painting. The problem was resolved one night listening to the Beatles’ album Revolver.

When I flipped the painting around, I thought of adding imagery
to the top of the frame. Here we see some imagery of the wet street between the
two abstract paintings.

To make a place for what would be a new painting, I extended the frame. I had no way of knowing if a street scene on top of a couple abstractions was something that would work. I pressed ahead. As snowmelt began to coalesce, I imagined a section of the wet pavement and cobblestone painted on the top angle of the bottom frame. I liked the idea of imagery fanning out from underneath the middle frame and bumping up to the beaded lip of the frame below. I placed a blank piece of paper in that position to get a feel for what it would do to the overall structure. Again, I liked what I saw. Because the information on the angle of the frame was limited, it would remain abstract no matter how accurately it was rendered. I liked the idea of a vague reference and painted it that way.

Here the frame was extended to accommodated the new painting of McKinney Avenue

Part of my experience with abstraction has been collage, and this ended up being collage as I never imagined it. The entire process including the frame was based on being open and alert. When you paint that way, there is no telling what will happen. There has been a trend in the art world to limit the range of imagination. You were supposed to paint bottles, or cats, or abstractions that were light and airy, or abstractions that were stockpiles of paint. The other was to be ruled out in favor of a singular position that stood for commitment, sincerity and vision. I immediately responded to the work of Gerhard Richter because it blew all that nonsense away, demonstrating that it was okay to be involved in many things. Knowledge should not be shut out just to become a specialist. We look up to and admire those that can speak more than one language. If painting were language, a multilingual understanding of paint would be a celebrated thing. By bringing the abstractions and cityscape together, I demonstrate a grasp of some of those language skills and show that in many ways, they really are the same. If you can do one, you should be able to the other. The artists that gave us modernism could do many things. What happened? 

Full view of the finished painting.

 

 

 

The Imitation of Nature, Impaled Leaves, Photorealism, and a Plausibility of Scale

Imitation of Nature Number 21: An Impaled
Drawing of an Autumn Leaf
mixed media
11 1/2 x 11 11/16 x 1 1/2 inches

Made in the late 1990’s, these drawings grew from a harvest of leaves.  Gathered from many walks in the bottom of the canyon, the collection matured in diversity.  The search was for different types and sizes.  I was interested in color variation and patterns of damage.  I wanted the not so pretty along with specimens of perfection.  Perfection was sought in a range of life inhabited by leaves.  The sampling was similar to science.  I was invested in an aesthetic that was democratic in its representation; I thought quotas were an appropriate way to view the abundant nature of leaves.  



I’ve always liked leaves.  However, having a degree in painting caused me to examine patterns in ways that I may not have done as a child.  Painting is what I do.  Not that many years ago, I was entirely devoted to abstraction.  It was hard not notice how well nature did what I strived for in paint.  Every leaf was unique.  Yet, there was no struggle.  Autumn knew exactly how to blot spots of pink in fields of yellow, burgundy and brown.  I liked how miniscule holes broke the cellulose weave of fibrous treads, a brittle screen as delicate as tobacco.





Imitation of Nature Number 32: An Impaled Drawing
of an Autumn Leaf
12 7/8 x 12 3/16 x 1 1/2 inches

 



For quite a while I thought of enlarging the specimens I collected.  I imagined them as large painted shapes, plywood cutouts covered in canvas.  They were to be hung far enough from the wall to cast shadows.  The presentation I imagined was fairly standard.  Contemporary thought seldom thinks outside the box.  The very phrase as a matter of fact verifies mass entrapment.  Anyone I mentioned the leaves to, saw or imagined them hung in the same manner.  The fact that it was easily seen, was for me a strike against the concept.



I finally decided that the thing I really wanted to do was draw them to scale.  This gave me an opportunity to play with the plausibility factor.  Normally, it doesn’t matter how masterfully a thing is rendered, the truth gives it away.  There is no way a painting of a mountain or house can be seen as real.  The inaccuracy of scale clearly gives it away.  While a painting may remind viewers of Mount Catherine, or the wilds of childhood, no one is fooled by the representational illusion of paint.  The best that can ever be achieved, is to fool some initially into believing that paint is photographic, as in photorealism.  There again, it’s a matter of scale.  Although larger than snapshots, the paintings of Chuck Close and Richard Estes could possibly be large photographic prints.

It was then a matter of presentation.  I decided the drawn should be cutout.  I thought of hinging them to a background like you would with any drawing or print, but decided to mount them on tacks.  This gave them a physical presence.  The extension added sculptural weight to paper.  Now paper had the power to cast shadow.  No longer two-dimensional, paper became an object to display in a specimen box.



When thinking about titles, I considered possible objections to the leaves.  One was the fact that they might be seen as leaves. Being that literal leaves no luscious brushstrokes to grab onto, and in an environment where paint is paint for its own sake, there’s a straight up fear of imitating nature.  Although sometimes considered a lowly act, it may be wise to consider that painting in not language.  There are no existing symbols that can be strung together to form even a simple rendition of a banana.  Imitating nature as a concept comes from a place of not understanding paint.  All painting is abstract.  The formation of imagery out of lines, dots and scribbles is nothing but invention.  No one is imitating anything.  A brushstroke that’s more than a brushstroke could be the highest form of abstraction.  I incorporated the possibility of derision as a badge of honor.  Because the mounting was unusual, I labeled punctured paper as impaled.  I wanted the drawings of leaves to be a celebration of nature, and that coincidentally can only be achieved through observation.





Imitation of Nature Number 28: An Impaled Drawing
of an Autumn Leaf
mixed media
14 3/8 x 13 x 1 1/2 inches

 



A Ragtag Rendition of Topography, Something from the Early 1980's

A Ragtag Rendition of Topography
mixed media
12 x 15 3/4 inches

Sometimes half the fun is finding a name for a painting.  I am not sure it ever had a title.  Yesterday, while walking in the woods it came to me.  I already knew I wanted to use topography.  Looking at snow hidden within the thicket of sticks and branches, I heard the word ragtag.  It seemed to fit in a literal kind of way.  The painting was in part old paint rags.  The random arrangement was left mostly untouched.  I liked the unsaturated nature of the paint.  The fabric was still free to breath.

Spring, Something from the Early 1980's

Spring
acrylic
6 5/8 x 10 inches

To me this seems reminiscent of the East.  The curious thing is at the time, I didn’t have any interest in the East.  In a world of the preconceived, this could never happen.  I simply had no interest in Chinese painting.  That’s the beauty of abstraction. 

Crazy Water, Something from the Early 1980's

Crazy Water
mixed media
9 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches

It’s so long ago; I don’t remember how the cut up squares came to be.  Collage a part of my practice often included removal.  The paper remains of something missing can be so beautiful.  The pairing of a grid with free flowing pigment and the random weight of charcoal marks is not how a painting begins.  Freed by the thought that there is nothing left to lose, acts of desperation sometimes lead to beautiful solutions.  Instead of being inspired from on high, creativity is an awareness of what just happened and a willingness to listen. 

William Vaughn Howard and a New Framework for Painting

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

The painting above 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 80’s.  He spent the summers in Greece on the Island of Paros; I bet that is where this was painted.  Although small, it has the structure I want to discuss.   

Detail of the left end

In 1986 I flew back to Reno from Dallas to see what turned out to be Bill’s last show.  What I saw was a group of paintings, the likes of which I had never seen before.  As I recall, 18 inches of verticality rolled out across the walls for another 12 feet.  The 1 to 8 ratio was hard to fathom.  The minor extremity of a 1 to 2 ratio troubled me.  I never knew how to handle the extra space.  The structures were shifting peripheries.  The sweeps eliminated the ability to focus on any particular part of a painting.  Moving through shifting views seemed to be the point of the exercise.  Eyesight could not help but move and vision became a kind of travel.  The absence of a focal point was not a loss.  Instead of leaving, I found myself wanting to resume the sweep of freedom that had carried me away.

Detail of the middle

Although fascinated by the arcs, I couldn’t understand how they came to be.  A rectangle encourages rectangular thinking especially when working abstractly.  When there are no observable curves that you are trying to fit within a space, the action of brushstrokes and splatters happens with an awareness of the outside edge of the stretcher.  It is hard to work a space that is not a conventional rectangle.  When the picture plane is extended, it is visually difficult to stay away from the middle.  This is not a matter of mathematics, but rather one of perception.  Almost any division seems to dangerously align with the middling core of the middle.  The wider the span, the more significant the middle becomes.  Within elongated space, the practicality of a two thirds rule applied to the horizon is exceedingly useless.  How do you compose in any meaningful way covering all that space without becoming lost?

Detail of the right end

When I visited Bill’s studio, he showed me photographs taken in panoramic fashion.  The photographs represented continuous views of coastline running into sea.  I failed to see the significance.  I wondered why align so many photographs together.  I found it a bit confusing.   He died not long after I was back in Dallas.  Within a few months of that visit, I was photographing in the same manner.  Nothing had ever been so exciting.  My neighborhood came alive.  And as I overlapped photographs on the apartment floor, I began to understand the origins of those wonderful waves and how they signaled a need for extremely long paintings.  The arcs are natural to panoramas.  They are the photographic records of a camera turning to embrace the surroundings.  Although, Bill is no longer here to confirm the nature of his compositional structures, it seems plausible that he saw a continuum in photographic prints that were then abstracted onto expansive canvases.

The new views quickly expanded the latitude and capacity of my dioramas.  Once the lay of the land extends beyond the parameters of a single snapshot, landmarks are no longer limited to highway milestones, but include the faded veneers of mom and pop shops along pock ravaged access roads.  There is a realization that composition is comprised of two or more frames of the view finder.  Or put another way, there is no composition to find because the composed is all around.  Point the camera here, there, or anywhere and the added space embraces continuum.  The confines of a standard viewfinder is alien to the everyday navigation of moving around.  Composition is about placement.  Although often thought of as the arrangement of outside objects, there is no need to define or compose when information positions you within your surroundings.  I quickly found this to be true.  When I composed prominent sites, frequently people didn’t know where they were because traditional compositions sever everyday relationships.  When I started painting the insignificant bits of habitation, I wound up painting locations that people instinctively knew much to their surprise.

I believe those last paintings tackled a new kind of vision.  Although the terrain of landscape had been a staple of abstraction, it never contained the breadth of time seen along a highway.  The new was housed within traditional strictures.  Canvasses had the proportions of portrait painting.  Ratios appropriate for the interior life of habitation may not be fitting for the great outdoors.  There was no vista, or distance sprawling out in sunshine, a gleaming rise of stubble gray, pasture, baled developments replacing hay, the magnetic skip of high tensioned power lines, the blue cast slant of earthen furrows, the widespread lisp of horizon outside Deming, New Mexico, the spotted dots of juniper and mesquite tabled between lowly mesas, tin, a windmill that no longer spins, freight on rails, churning smoke, and the elm sheltered trash that marks significant bits of history along an open highway.  The makings of a time horizon that I’ve grown to know as place came into play with the paintings of William Vaughn Howard. 

Information for the images below

City of Richardson from Central Expressway and

Spring Valley Rd. on the Morning of July 4th, 1987

mixed media diorama

8 3/8 x 124 x 3 7/8 inches

 

The Paintings of William Vaughn Howard Made it Easy for Me to Remain a Painter

William Vaughn Howard
Title Unknown
acrylic and charcoal
27 1/2 x 22

This is a painting by my college professor William Vaughn Howard.  When I entered his classroom, I was finished with painting.  I remained an art student because I didn’t know what else to do.  Although, I had found a place in drawing, an activity seldom practiced as a child because I painted.  In my view there was no need for drawing; painting was the statement I wanted to make, and since I worked from photographs there was no need for planning.  There was no advantage to a sketch, painting was drawing with a brush.  For some odd reason, the next drawing class never fit into my schedule and I was forced to take painting.  If I had had my way, I would have focused on drawing and printmaking.

The reason for being disillusioned was a simple one.  Painting in practice separated observation from believing that sight was decisive.  The theology of paint stated that the visual experience of day to day living could not engage without making changes to the nature of place.  This approach prefers staged arrangements over happenstance.  It is hard to image the staged as a comprehensive encounter when happenstance colors every situation.  A tea kettle whistles burner aglow.  A phone rings into the sound of hello.  A child screams out an enormous so are you!  A blue hued television seeps through panes of glass to catch a flash of passing light.  Rivulets rain weight into a sagging black hammock.  A puddle of a parking lot is a long shot from the warmer quarters of a dry café, the betrayal of a thoroughly wasted day started by the startle of an alarm clock set for another occasion.  The menu reads like faded paper, a half-life of gazing print, the compensating squint of a man that cannot stand reading glasses.  How can the staged ever manage to capture the meager sights of life, the true test of living?

Because art claimed to be more compelling than life, I gravitated to drawing.  Drawing wasn’t as lifelike anyway.  We don’t see a world of black and white.  Without color, drawing was all about abstraction.  There wasn’t the same kind of tension.  The decision had already been made for me; I wouldn’t have to worry about making what I saw fit the demands of art, an idea I truly detested.    

When I saw my professor’s abstractions, I thought I saw a poetry of place.  Although nothing could be directly linked, I thought I saw landscapes veiled within paint.  I found another place to be and began to paint again.

It is hard to know what to say about a painting.  Paint here represents paint.  Content is a collection of movements, changes made many times to a rime of indecision until not knowing becomes a knowing that says this is it.  Broken into many facets, this is a beautiful looking glass of abstraction.