A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada

The following is from a handmade book for one of the paintings in The Loneliest Road in America exhibition at Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas 2010.  In describing the Great Basin, my thoughts turned to wildfires.

A Railroad Crossing Outside of Hazen, Nevada
oil on canvas
16 1/16 x 36 1/8 inches
2008

Although it had been green across most of the state, many low-lying areas remain barren even in years of abundance.  All of us have seen or heard how deserts bloom after rain showers.  That happens here as well, but not as often as it does in Texas or New Mexico.  It is not only a matter of it being dryer; it is also due to the timing of the rainy season.  The monsoons of the desert Southwest arrive in summer.  In much of the Great Basin, precipitation falls as snow when plants are dormant.  Because most of Nevada has no drainage, snowmelt stands in low-lying areas awaiting evaporation, saturating soils with mineral salts that never make the sea.  The soils are toxic to an awful lot of plants, including many weeds.

 

I wonder how so many of the world’s plants came to be weeds.  Until recently, anything native qualified, and juniper are still thought to be in need of clearing.   Nevada is said to have had vast grasslands when the cattle arrived; the sea of sage is explained as overgrazing.  At Great Basin National Park, displays say the landscape is new due to fire prevention.  From driving around, I agree that northern Nevada was mostly grassland, but the pinion and juniper that drape mountainsides along US Highway 50 have been there for a very long time.  That can be a problem with scholarship.  Historical documents talk about vast grasslands and some assume that applies to the entire state.  Early travelers followed the Humboldt River where mountains and hills are simply sage.  It is a mistake to extend that description to other ranges of the region.  If the Snake Range was not thick with juniper and pinion pine 100 years ago, where did the evergreen abundance come from?  It takes hundreds of years to grow trees of any size in the dry climate.  Count the tree rings; fires were not routinely roaring through the forests.

 

There are some parts of the country, where burning the undergrowth is the same thing as burning up trees.  Nevada is not a land of towering pines like Florida or northern California.  The brush cannot be burned without torching the oak, juniper and pinion pine.  The many fires have more to do with climate change than unwise fire suppression.  When you go from three dry years in ten, to seven, fire becomes reality.

 

 

Suppressing fire with fire promotes grass, as any rancher knows.   A few years ago, a ridge burned not far from my parents’ house.  Before the fire, the flat was open, and most of the oak and juniper grew along the hillsides.  It was lichen-covered rock, dwarf sage, wildflowers and very little grass.  The quick burning fuel that drives wildfires was in short supply.  Afterwards, golden waves of grass tumbled into the woods waiting to be thunderstruck.  Instead of quelling the threat, it is raring to explode.  That might be why ranges that burn keep catching fire.    

 

 

 

  

Handmade Book
4 1/2 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches
2010

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