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

Dallas, Texas on Arrival: Painting, Drawing, Photography, Monet and French Impressionism



Downtown Construction
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches

Although made in the 1983 when I was just out of college, I still admire these drawings.  Having just finished the Master Workshop at Southampton College, Southampton, New York, I moved from Reno, Nevada to Dallas, Texas.  I was an abstract painter out of money and paint.  Believing I should work even if I had nothing to work with, I made drawings on the back of mailers that showed me sitting in front of one of my large paintings.  The charcoal images came from snapshots my younger brother Steve had taken.  I had no plans of leaving abstraction.  I was just killing time that otherwise would have been wasted waiting to windup in a better place financially.

Parked Car
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches

The charcoals demonstrate the kind of imagery I would soon pursue.  Without even knowing it, the reality of my surroundings began to settle in.  I was no longer in or around the mountains of the West that characterized the paintings I made as a child.  I was now around buildings and traffic, which by the way was a pretty good fit.  Much of what we know of the city has been dressed in black and white.  The drawings have a bit of a patina for me; I mean they have a stature that makes it difficult for me to ever tackle drawing in the same way.  Some of that comes from the gloss of photography.  The black and white nature of the print signifies the past; our knowledge of urban life was recorded by photography that also includes TV, movies and newspapers.  Information primarily came in shades of gray.  This is just a thought, but perhaps Impressionism and the movements that followed were reacting to a world increasingly seen through technologies that captured life in black and white.

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

The drawings were made with stick and powered charcoal and an eraser.  The process was all about simplification.  This can be seen particularly well in the drawing of a Volkswagen bus.  Nearly the entire street scene takes place in shadow.  Definition is defined by slight shifts awash in the gray tailings of a charcoal filled sponge.  A little shove with a charcoal stick here and an eraser rub over there assail abstraction in representational rendering.  The foreground is bound by a single mark separating street and curb from blind whiteness.  Even to this day, I do not know how I made this drawing.  Although, I know the process, I am afraid I would fail if I tried it again.  This is due to its simplicity.  Whereas the complexity of painting provides endless opportunities to get it right.  Painting a manifestation of patience is not reliant on luck.

Cars
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches

Ever since the onsite spontaneity of French Impressionism there has been high praise for the painterly.  Just out of college, I was well aware of that position and never really questioned it.  A great attribute of charcoal is its ability to move.  There is nothing quite like it in the realm of paint.  Watercolor may come to mind, but there’s always a danger of harsh and unwanted waterlines.  Providing that the compressed charcoal is left for last, the application of charcoal remains fluid through the process of editing.  Here charcoal easily becomes a car and the refraction of light in tight spaces that jam downtown.  It is difficult to sweep layers of paint across canvas and maintain the atmospheric light Monet caked onto countryside.  Few do it in fact.  Paint became celebrity, gone were the days when content drove painters outside to spontaneously grasp at the sight of changing light.  These days about all that remains is paint, the commodity of meaning, few see that thickness can be a bit thick.  Vigorous painterly paint may not be that bold.  Meeting preconceived notions of what greatness entails avails painters a pass.  Real scrutiny only goes to those doing the unexpected.  We seldom evaluate the known stances and practices that define the climate of our times.  

Hotel
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches