The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988

Detail: The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988, 10/17/96
mixed media diorama housed in 15 glassed in panels in 3 frames, 5 1/8 x 114 x 2 inches

Around 1995, I began to wonder if there would come a time when I no longer needed the diorama. Although physical in nature, much of the depth inside was the result of plain old painting. The following year, the diorama became new again, when I started going through snapshots that had been stored away in an ice chest because there were so many of them. The collection contained pretty much everything shot while living in Richardson, Texas. My focus on the Dallas suburb had been disrupted by roads trips and moves that eventually took me home to Fillmore, Utah. Prior to then, I resided in the cities of Houston, Phoenix and El Paso. The neighborhoods of each place, seized my devotion as though I’d grown up as a local. That’s exactly why the diorama proved to be so effective. The formatting of everyday terrain gave me a way to say just how much I loved my surroundings. When the images were laid out across the floor, I saw that there was at least ten years of work that I wanted to complete in two. To cover so much ground, I would have to go small. I was living in Houston the first time I tried to make a diorama as tiny as the photographic image that it came from. I never understood just how minute the details could be until I tried to paint them. Photography is such a common way of seeing that we’ve lost touch with what distortion can really mean. We automatically fill in much of the missing scale that would have to be there in order for a print or snapshot to be seen as any kind of reality. In describing the veracity of a painting, how many times has it been said that it looks just like a photograph? It may seem like a strange thing to say, but photographic imagery has replaced reality as a point of comparison. The success of a painting is never measured against the splendor of the great outdoors. As I tried to translate petite details into the making of a diorama, I discovered I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the chops or stamina to get it done. Over time, the diorama grew ever more refined. Perhaps, it was that process that enabled me to successfully complete a few miniature renditions of the format while I was living in El Paso.

While in Richardson, I shot numerous sprawling vistas of the city. Several swept away by a desire to see the next connection, followed the panoramic swirl to unfurl 360 degrees of suburban habitation. With a conservative scale that made the vertical side of a diorama just 8 inches high, those ocular accomplishments spread out to be at least 10 feet long without ever trying. Imagine what 16 to 24 inches of verticality would do to a horizon. The latter measurement could easily mean 30 feet or more of a suburban sprawl consuming the span of a colossal wall. The length of a diorama was a measurement of time. Because of that fact, I’d completed only one of them. With the reduction in size, I was able to complete 5 or 6 of the fully surveyed portrayals of the city. Besides the profile of the cutout and the sloped horizon, the thing that really made the diorama work, was its dependence on the density of color. The much smaller scale, made the compiling of color a less time consuming thing to do. A diorama that had taken two or three months to complete, could be finished in a couple of weeks. The reduction in size, made moving through my old neighborhood into something that could be done.

The smaller scale turned scrap into something that could be used. Because reflection free glass was almost like gold, I couldn’t throw any of the fragments away. Instead, I wrapped the pieces up so they wouldn’t scratch, hoping to find a way to use them. Working with the bits of this and that, invited a kind of playfulness. The parameter for many images was determined by the size and shape of leftover glass. An insignificant piece of wood, to small or narrow to safety reshape into a frame, suddenly became valuable. Something like a ¼ inch strip of plywood with a ½ inch piece of matboard glued to the top of it, could be made into a frame. Because structural materials were often not the same, something had to be done to make the raw combinations compatible. Stained paper and wood simply wouldn’t look very good. Paint was an obvious remedy. I discovered that brushed on paint could be sanded into an exquisite finish. Although there was nothing new in that, I never understood what it took to get it done. Because walking was a constant part of my consciousness, I began to collect some of what I saw. Bits of chipped and weathered paint, autumn leaves, sifted samplings of dug up dirt, and the inside lining of bark from fallen trees became the veneer facing for many of my put together frames. Working this way, meant there was less of a need for a wood shop.

Of all the miniaturized dioramas, The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988 was likely the most decisive one for things to come. Inspired by the David Hockney travel paintings that try to illuminate movement, the prospect of taking a short journey filled me with ecstasy. Early on an October Sunday morning, I got up to walk Hampshire Lane. With camera in hand, I chronicled all the buildings on the west side of street with enough overlap to show that the photographs had the same roadway in common. The distance from one image to the next involved walking. The collection of snapshots documented travel. For the first time in my life, a string of photographs didn’t try to seize upon the sweep of a fixed horizon, and yet there seemed to be some kind of connection. Perhaps, that’s because navigation is a function of sight. A vista is just suspended travel in a continuous stream of visual sub consciousness. Because we’re designed to see, we don’t perceive the entirety of the data crush that makes getting around so easy. The primary reason I enjoy travel by foot or car, is that it takes me to a place where continuously shifting vistas obliterate the compositional conceit of thinking that beauty is so rare that it needs to be dug out to be found.

 

The West Side of Hampshire Lane… united 15 separate scenes in a frame that was divided into three sections. Those divisions were made for the sake of handling. Between each scene there was a space that opened up to the wall. The serial configuration of buildings along the street was repetitive enough to form a kind of horizontal laddering that was reminiscent of a filmstrip. Although not part of the thought process, the fact that the combined images recorded a short journey, meant that the framing turned out to be a perfect fit for the depiction of travel. A roll of chronological stills is how movement is recorded. Without knowing it, the sequencing of individual images would eventually become the primary way of portraying panoramic scenery. The depiction of a vista as a singular event never really existed. The span of any horizon always required movement from the camera. Even while eyes scan the breadth of a horizon, seeing renders the fragmentation of sight as a complete picture. The camera can’t do that. The viewfinder can only know frozen moments. It can’t comprehend time as continuum. Although the diorama closely resembled what we think we see, that link was missing. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. That would come later on, when I tried to align some overlapping photographs that refused to go together. When I pulled them apart, the separation revealed an interlude that I hadn’t noticed before. The walk along Hampshire Lane foreshadowed that knowledge in format and framing. The division or intervening pause meant that paint could showcase more than a frozen moment. Although the illustration of time was still made of stills, the collection of more than a single moment represented a measurement in time. Partitioning breaks within the framing, recorded the passage of time like the demarcation of tree rings. We can see the representation of place as a cross section in time, however fleeting a scene may be.

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.

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.

 

The Diorama and a Move to a New Curved Surface

acrylic on a shaped ragboard panel

 

I recently started painting on a curved surface that leans forward. That physically places the sky in front of the foreground. Although the positioning is the opposite of the dioramas I made for many years, the sense of space it creates is about the same.

 

The diorama changed the way I saw painting. Once the element of space was included, I realized composition no longer mattered. There was no reason to worry about how things related to the edge of canvas or paper, because conceptually, I eliminated the picture plane. I was painting space. I was painting the world around me, and the world already happened to be composed. This related to that simply by the fact that it was there.

 

mixed media diorama

 

 

Although I loved what the diorama did, the problem of shadow and glass always bothered me. In 2002 I stopped making the diorama. There was a lot of looking over my shoulder at the past that initially got in the way of painting. I lacked the confidence I had. Even though painting had always been my strong point, it was now something I feared. The diorama had become my calling card and I did not know how to function without it. The problem with specialization is that you become a craftsman, a person that no longer has anything new to say, and art thrives in a life of the unknown.

 

The curved surface I am painting on is not something I consciously struggled to discover. I simply woke in the middle of the night with the idea. Although it looks like a straight line from the diorama to the curved surface, the fact is I never would have thought of it as long as I was making the diorama. If what you have is seen as a solution, the only thing you will ever be able to do is refine the problem. It is difficult to think outside the box without actually leaving it.

Thoughts on Dallas and Landscape Painting: An All Day Excursion of Richardson Heights Shopping Center



End of the Day at the North End of the Richardson Heights Shopping Center...
Left panel detail
mixed media diorama
11 7/8 x 63 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches
1987

 One of the joys of not having to rely on composition is that the entire world is open to you.  The world abounds in the local.  The exhilaration of travel can be had by riding a bike or strolling down an alleyway.  A walk across a parking lot can fill with a sense wonder. The peeling paint of a rusted dumpster may be a bit of a kick, a heart rising skip, the arrested freshness that comes with every new encounter.  With this state of mind, every day, every time of day, every atmospheric condition is splendid.  Life is even bright in stormy weather when design no longer denies a child eye view of everything as treasure.  A vacant lot becomes a place of nature.  Even blacktop and shiny metal cars beam radiantly.  Stepping towards the theatre, life happens in the wind.  Trees and shrubs throw off pollen dust to the flutter and buss of flying insects.  Car doors open and close in moments of lowly grandeur.

End of the Day... full two panel view

 

I once spent an entire day observing the habits of Richardson Heights Shopping Center.  I arrived before dawn, and left just after dusk.  It was Sunday.  There wasn’t much going on.  The Texas Blue Laws were still enforced.  Given the current political conditions of the state, the past could easily seem like a golden age of liberalism.  Anyway, the idea was to do an entire exhibition based on a single day in a parking lot.  I know that’s taking the idea of local to the extreme, but I was confident there was more than enough to see to make for a very exciting show.  Although I didn’t go that route, I easily could have, and some very nice dioramas came from the all-day excursion around the grounds of the shopping center.

The tools of the trade didn’t include pencils, sketch pads, canvas or paint.  The engagement with any particular place is too enjoyable to be distracted by the practice of painting.  I came to see and feel the life of a specific place in my neighborhood.  To help with that endeavor, I had a camera and a notebook.  I brought a folding chair to sit in and a tape recorder to capture sound.  Most of the noise was traffic.  The ebb and flow was the aggravated ease of a lazy summer Sunday.  The recorder also captured a chirping scurry of birds as dawn gave way to shape and shadow.  Early in the morning, a Corvette pulled into the north end of the shopping center.  The car door opened and a policeman stepped out.  Within no time at all, I understood what was happening.  The shopping center filled in with cars.   He was a crossing guard for those going to church.  There is no way to explain this if you have not lived in Dallas.  Although most people don’t seem that pious during the week, when Sunday comes around church overtakes state, and traffic patterns are managed to meet the needs of church going people.  When church was over, the parking lot quickly emptied out.  I wandered around taking pictures.  I noted business names, inspected litter and paid some attention to the activity of ants.  When you have all day, you have all kinds of time for long drawn out yawns and internal bouts of fascination.  Both modes of being seem to be completely compatible.  I noticed meandering cracks.  I stumbled on bits of scattered gravel no longer the embedded compression of blacktop conglomerate.  Faded paint, an exquisitely eroded layer of cap rock divided gray from gray.  The powerful glare of an ever present sun was everywhere.  In pale gray heat, little puffy clouds followed a shadowy path of quiet annihilation.

Around noon, cars crowded in around Wyatt’s cafeteria.  Dining out on Sundays also seemed to be an eventful part of going to church.  Dallas was the churchiest place I’d ever seen, and I grew up in Utah.  Perhaps, when religion is practiced that casually, there isn’t any cost to looking handsome or pretty.  You simply change clothes and persona.  Anyway, the one thing parking lots seem to have in common is an inability to encourage walking.  I once worked a couple of doors down from a fitness center.  Women drove around and around looking for the perfect spot.  God forbid if hips should have to walk.  I wonder if any of them stopped to consider how ridiculous it was to labor that hard to avoid exercise while trying to exercise.  Steps don’t seem to count for much unless they include dues, mirrors, and a cold interior of fitness machines.

Over the years, I’ve heard people say that people are the hardest things to paint.  Naturally as a landscape painter, I don’t much care for the idea.  The statement insinuates that trees are not as hard to paint as faces, and further proclaims that an apple, napkin and hat, and a cold beer stand in lower tiers of difficulty.  I am certain that is not in fact a fact.  Almost any mountain slope is far more varied than any variation in the human face.  The noted difficulty comes from a consciousness that places the human race as the crown of creation.  We spend all our time thinking of ourselves.  Even in societies where a reverence for nature was more prevalent, that reverence was still centered on the inhabitants of man.  With that mindset, nothing else has ever received equal time or consideration.  The standard for mountains has never even matched that of kitchen utensils.  Anyone can paint a mountain.  It’s not hard to see why we would have environmental problems.  We only see ourselves.  As a result, landscape painting has never received true scrutiny.  It is perfectly fine for a mountain to be nothing more than a few gray lines on a horizon.  Very few deeply care about nature.  You can tell that just by the way they drive.  A highway is nothing more than a forgettable stretch between destinations.   Since a person is not a tree, a cloud, or a sage covered bluff, there is no need to heed the particularity of how cloud movements continuously reconfigure cloud formations.  Many painters simply make the stuff up and never really seem notice that the grey underbelly of a cloud isn’t really any darker than the blue sky that surrounds it.  The same kind of laxness won’t fly when considering the profile and tone of a human face.  Try making one up.  You won’t get away with it.  That’s why I have a bit of a problem with the outdoor crowd.  They just paint to feel artistically free.  Painting outside has nothing to do with understanding the subtlety of light.  I think it’s time to put the people thing in perspective.  John Singer Sargent would never have had the success he had if he had plein aired the privileged faces of the Gilded Age.



End of the Day... left panel view

 

As evening began to settle in, my day of observation came to a close.  Although short lived, the pastel atmosphere began to relinquish heat.  After initial cooling, the air seemed to warm up again.  I know that’s probably not the case.  The sensation was most likely tied to increased humidity.  The sun had set.  It was safe for trees to begin to release some of the moisture that had been stored during the heat of the day.  The sound of crickets could not yet compete with cicadas, the noisy creatures of heat that pass the day away in marked intervals of intensity.  Deciduous trees leaned more and more toward evergreen.  Lavender meandered twilight across the sky.  Street lamps intensified the weight of darkness.  Starlight was nothing more than a glimmer of major constellations and possibly a passing satellite.   I snapped a few finals shots as evening settled in.  I loaded my stuff into the truck glad to call it a day, and drove home to my apartment on the other side of Central Expressway.




End of the Day... right panel view

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

 

Lucas B&B Restaurant and Other Dallas Sites; Charcoal, Paint, Claude Monet, Two-Dimensional Space and Self-Taught Referencing

Lucas B&B Restaurant, Oak Lawn Avenue, Dallas, Texas
charcoal, burnt matchstick, drawing pencil, water soluble crayon
9 1/2 x 15 x 1 5/16 inches including integral frame

Lucas B&B Restaurant, Oak Lawn Avenue, Dallas, Texas began as an attempt to recapture a way of working in the 80’s where I applied powdered charcoal to paper with a sponge.  Much of drawing was lifting and cutting into the charcoal with and eraser.  The Volkswagen Bus is a good example of that method.   I should have known better.  Competing with my past is far worse than having someone peer over my shoulder; that intrusion is never permanent, but I never can get away from myself.  Because memory has a tender spot for the affirmative, time colors the past with the charcoals that survive.  The failures were pitched; and those that remain have a power that fills me with trepidation.  Although I know many drawings failed, when I glance at the past framed behind glass all I see is continuum, success upon success, an arresting array of fear and frustration.



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

Fear seems to accompany every new endeavor.  When I can, I prefer to work first thing in the morning.  That way I have little time to think about what I have to do.  I hate starting anything new, groundwork can remain groundwork indefinitely and that hardly feels inspiring.  Art only arrives after compiling a certain amount of time in marks that defy description of sky or pavement.  I often use paint as a word for process.  I feel the divide between it and drawing is an artificial one; after all, changing materials doesn’t turn sculpture into something else.  I don’t know why we speak of two kinds of illusions; both occupy two-dimensional space and deal with the limitations in the same way.



Lucas B&B Restaurant, Oak Lawn Avenue, Dallas Texas was not a failure; I wasn’t going to throw it away.  It was just not what I intended it to be.  The charcoal was sharper than I desired due to too much tooth, although the rag board felt fairly smooth, the charcoal didn’t flow easily.  I was also filled with apprehension.  Art and writing always rely on adjustments.  While firm and determined to be true to content, there are many avenues by which to grasp the distillation of place.  Many of my paintings demonstrate this idea.  Canvas or panel, divergent brushstrokes describe reality through painting.  As much as I admire Claude Monet and French Impressionism, it puzzles me why the same kinds of strokes are used to describe brush and sky.  The diorama was rooted in painting before I knew anything of Impressionism.  My paintings as a child deciphered a world through brushstrokes that divided earth from sky.  I would have never thought to use similar strokes throughout a painting.  In that sense I guess I never was a painter.  I don’t know how to construct the surface of a rock with a couple of broad brush strokes. 



Grandy's on New Year's Day
mixed media diorama
7 5/16 x 10 1/16 x 1 7/8 inches including integral frame

Woodall Rodgers Freeway and Olive Street, Dallas, Texas (Detail, Right Center Panel)
acrylic
18 x 56 7/8 x 6 1/2 inches including integral frame

Having used color on charcoal before, I introduced color.  Everything has its origins in something else.  Even self-taught artists are not without references.  Dividing artists into groups overemphasizes the significance of college; learning is internal, making everyone self-taught.



As I slowly added the color of water soluble crayon, the drawing acquired a presence I really liked.  I am not sure what others mean when they use the word presence, but for me it means the respiration of atmospheric light.  Presence as a sound spells diffusion; two-dimensional constraints cannot contain the life of painting.  Pleased with the results, Blackburn Avenue, Dallas, Texas followed.  When I got to Tillery Avenue Psychic, Dallas, Texas; I flipped things around by starting with acrylic and covering everything over with charcoal and the residue of burnt matchsticks.  That may sound strange, but no matter how diligently a surface is covered up, the previous layers of paint always remain influential.  That is why I treat painting as watercolor.  The arrangements are mapped out ahead of time.  Oil and acrylic are more like watercolor than people realize.  Once the light of white is covered up, it can never entirely be retrieved.  That means that the acrylic would shine through even when covered in charcoal.  A mystery of charcoal is why carbon traces on paper so easily reveal a feeling of an atmospheric clarity often missing within the layering of paint.

Blackburn Avenue, Dallas, Texas
charcoal, burnt matchstick, drawing pencil, water soluble crayon
9 5/8 x 28 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches including integral frame

Tillery Avenue Psychic, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, charcoal, burnt matchstick, drawing pencil, water soluble crayon
9 9/16 x 15 9/16 x 1 1/2 inches including integral frame