Road Trip Recollections of Offerle, Kansas, and the Limitations of Language and Paint

Large Puddle, Offerle, Kansas; US Highway 50
acrylic on ragboard panel
10 15/16 x 40 1/4 x 2 7/8 inches

I’ve been through Offerle, Kansas before. On this trip, I started documenting US Highway 50 in Ocean City, Maryland.  From there, I headed west photographing every town along the way. Even though it rained for several days, it is hard not be drawn to water. I stopped the car and stood as close as I could to the large puddle. I say puddle because it didn’t greet me as I rolled through town on a previous trip. However, the grasses that grow in the heart of the depression, indicate that it can often be a captivating place for moving water.

I’ve heard that a picture can paint a thousand words. I must say, that has seldom been my experience. It has never left me feeling chatty. I always seemed to be completely blank when it came time to explain the why of what I painted during college critiques. As I looked at this most recent painting, I found I had nothing to say, and wound up looking at Wikipedia for inspiration. About all it offered was the name of Lawrence Offerle as one of the settlers that founded the town in 1876. The last census placed the population at 199. Over time, that figure has not varied much. It appears to have always been a small town surround by sky.

If painting can paint a word or two, that language is going to be limited to visual symbols. That means painting is just a mouth full of nouns that can never form a sentence. Without the ability to form a sentence, painting can never be narrative. The idea that there is a kind of painting that can tell a story is fiction. Although painting can be very good at describing things we can see, it can’t carry on a conversation. If a painting is of a woman handing an apple to a man, it can say “woman handing apple to man.” It cannot say “Genesis, God, Eden, or the fall of man.” The painting is just a painting. The story comes with us. That is why the meaning behind an archaeological site can be so hard to decipher. If we were not the Egyptians, all we’re going to see are rows of people, birds and cats standing in strange positions. A painting of little moving people is likely to be described as narrative. But, how does that differ from a painting of cattle grazing a rolling hillside? The one thing narrative paintings seem to have in common is the ingredient of people. I guess that differentiation does tell us something. We only think people are important enough to inform us. The rest of nature doesn’t really seem to matter. If we insist that one kind of painting can tell stories, then we must extend speech to all painting, because little moving people can’t say any more than a painting of a rotting apple in a basket. If a painting is of little moving people, all it can say is “little moving people.” The idea that an angry chicken shrunk them comes from us.

I thought I might try to describe another scene of Offerle in writing. Although it could take a month or more to paint that scene, it would in fact be an easier thing to do. Nothing captures the moment better than a picture. But, human thought is not a painting or a snapshot. To tackle the thought process requires language. The painting of the puddle could never reveal any daydreams, or say that it was just one of many stops along the highway as I made my way across the nation.

Around a slight bend, a stone marker reads WELCOME TO OFFERLE. The supporting posts for the horizontal sign are also stone. On the left one, EDWARDS is vertically written. The stone post to the right chimes in with the word COUNTY placing the town on the western flank of Kansas. Gray grass is littered with a green touch of spring. A surviving snowbank remains cradled in a depression by the shoulder of the road. Behind the sign, a display of farm equipment covers a large patch of grass. It is not hard to tell that the machines are from the past, exposure has left the paint extremely weathered. An elongated building of corrugated steel resembles an arena. Three out buildings are painted white. A two story house with a porch faces the highway.  It too is white with a roof of green singles. The sky is light. The trees are bare. Three utility poles string a strand of wire out to the highway. Out in front of the house, two rows of junipers, browned by the bite of winter, separate the yard from the sporadic flow of traffic. Although radiant at the edge, a distant water tower is hollowed out by shadow. A small portion of the road momentarily rolls out of view. A knitted thicket of trees and utility poles hides behind the massive colonnade of a grain elevator. On that side of the highway, there’s predominance of metal buildings in colors of steel gray, pale ochre and cream. Yellow canisters shine bright in a field where nearly all the other propane tanks are painted white. There’s also a building of brick with a low pitched roof that could be a school or church. A radio tower would pierce the sky if it were closer, but at this distance, it is a faint line rising out of an industrial horizon. The highway is a polished gray. The white line that separates the shoulder from the rest of the road occupies two thirds of the pavement. The yellow line that divides the highway, merges into a ridge of weeds and a rail line of steel.

What I tried to describe, reads right to left because the welcome sign was the reason for my stop. If I painted what I tried to describe, it would probably read in the opposite direction, with the pale pavement sailing towards a distant water tower. However the remains of a bright white snowbank may have countered the pull. I have never really cared to address the question of balance. My only concern has been to give voice to the entirety of a location. The importance of angles and focal points can be settled by those interested in composition. The idea of time and place is easier to see without the overlay of artificial restrictions. Although a little long, what was written didn’t begin to capture what could be grasped in an instant with a painting or snapshot. I found I could not describe what I saw with any accuracy. Most of the detail had to be deleted to remain readable. Any image that fills your head cannot be what I saw as I stopped the car to take a picture. In this sense, a picture can paint a thousand words, but seeing does not begin to be a thing called language. Although I may be able to paint the brightness of spring, the wind can never whisper or reveal the origins of a town named after Lawrence Offerle.

  

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 [LB1]

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.

 

Childhood Memories of Canada, the Discovery of Painting, the Conflict between Content and Design, and Finding a World Already Composed

This is something I painted when I was 11 years old.  Even then, I didn't
 always go for the most dramatic thing I could find.

I was lucky to have a dad that bought me oil paints for Christmas when I was 10.  Although, I didn’t know how to use them, I proceeded as if I did.  I painted this as an 11 year old.  At that age, art meant nothing.  I wasn’t looking to capture some kind of drama.  The concept of a composition was an idea that did not exist.  When I looked at something, I was interested in a feeling.  Here, there is a road of trees, mountains, sky, and shadows.  The day is like many other days.  Looking back on those early paintings, it seems to me that I must have been interested in the moment.

Although I was in love with mountains and clouds by the time I started painting, there was a time when I had no such preferences.  That is probably true of all children.  At first, all is wonder.  Then when we learn that weeds are weeds, wonderment becomes judgment.  Because I am primarily a visual person, memory takes me back to a time that could precede speech.  I remember the sputter of a neon sign in the night when I was 2.  To the surprise of my mother, I could describe our apartment over the drugstore years later.  I remember my baby sister Kim coming home from the hospital when I was not quite 3.  I remember snowflakes caught in a pot, and the pleasure of digging up dirt and discovering that halves become whole when practicing the magical math of cut up earthworms.  The sound of frogs filled the woods.  A ship stood at the end of a street.  Church consisted of a world that existed outside its windows.  Chain link fencing secured backyard grass.  The house stucco was rough to touch.  Music played on reel to reel tape.  A highway drive, gloomy skies and an A & W Root Beer sign occupy memories of early childhood.  There was the panic of almost losing my best friend by leaving her behind on a bus, a doll I called Suzie.  There is the memory of a great lake long before I knew the name Lake Ontario.  I remember grandparents, the scent of tobacco, and the sound of small boats on the water.  Even now, the faint sound of a lawnmower recalls a Canadian infancy.

So much of who we are can become lost by the time we leave early childhood.  Painting became a conscious thought when I was 5.  I may have seen paintings before, but that is when I realized that the visual world was something that could be described.  I was with my dad.  We stopped to see a yard sale of paintings.  They were landscapes.  I realized I could describe what saw, but because I saw a small sampling of what a landscape could be, without knowing it, my vision had been narrowed.  I didn’t understand that I could also paint something like activity around a school bus until I saw a painting of a school bus stopped at a crosswalk.  That is the problem with art.  It is difficult to conceptualize painting without first seeing a canvas covered in paint.  But once you know what painting looks like, that information has a habit of closing down the thought process.  Knowledge can lead to freedom, but it can also be a trap.  Once a narrative is set, it can be extremely difficult to imagine any other alternative.

 I took a design class in college that emphasized the importance of composition.  Although I was aware of the concept, the idea suddenly troubled me.  Though I never considered painting everything, once much of what I saw was taken off the table due to the implications of design, I grew to hate the idea that the depiction of life was subservient to the demands of art.  Had I had a B plan, my life as an artist would have been over.  I instinctively felt the idea was wrong, but I saw no way to debate it.  For the next few years, I lived a life of compromise.

I thoroughly enjoyed the highway, and walking was always a joyful occupation.  I did these two things to see my surroundings.  I felt alive inhabiting the spaces around me.  I began to realize that the idea of placement only applied if you were living in the 2 dimensional space of paper or cannas, that the randomness of gravel had a kind of intelligence that exceeded that of the observer, that there was no need to worry or fuss because the world was already composed.  It dawned on me that I no longer needed to be the captain of my surroundings.  I could simply be.  I could be clouds billowing in the arrival of spring.  I could be rust, or the rustle of brittle leaves.  I could be shimmering heat waves on the horizon, a mercury colored dance of desolation.  I could be a hillside dotted with grazing cattle.  I could be industrial steam, indignation belching out disbelief in a Texas sky.  I could be the moment of encounter.  I could see the world as it really was.  I could leave the restrictive thoughts of rectangular lines behind and begin to paint my surroundings.  That had always been the point anyway.  As a child, I would have never thought that design was indeed needed to justify a depiction of life.

Hazen Market, Hazen, Nevada, Alternate US Highway 50
acrylic on 4 shaped ragboard panels

I’ve never argued that you cannot compose, or that great things cannot be accomplished by doing so.  I am just saying that it may not be necessary, that my work really has nothing to do with that thought process.  I know it is hard not to think, but the paintings look composed.  Perhaps, it may be instructive to think about that thought for a moment.  You have been given no other way to consider the things you see, so that is the only response that you could possibly have.  Again, it is hard to escape the notion that the camera simply did not point itself in this or that direction.  I agree.  But in thinking of continuum, any part of the whole is going matter, and that section, whatever section that might be, is definitely going to be worth seeing.  The point is that whatever happens to be selected is vitally important to the idea of time and place.  I don’t allow for the composed to manhandle the moment away.  To eliminate this or that thing for the greater good of a painting is to end up painting a place that never was.  That might be fine, it might be great, it might make for a fantastic painting, but that is not my reason for being a painter.  I never think I can improve upon a view of a reclining highway, let along do it justice.  The fact that it is completely out of my reach is what makes a little success so beguiling.  In all fairness, I am probably not the best person to discuss the merits of design.  When I look at a painting, I never see composition.  I can never find the focal point because I tend to see the entire canvas.  I don’t happen to care where the horizon is, or which way a woman may be facing.  If what I see intrigues me, I will remain a while.  If not, no amount of design can keep me from pacing down the hallway looking for something else to catch my attention.

Old Neighborhood Garage, Richardson, Texas
mixed media diorama

I guess a question worth asking is where did the principles of design come from?  We behave as if they were never invented.  While I can see why the church would want to make sure that Christ was the focal point of a painting, I wonder why the same kind of care should be given to a pear.  Given the wisdom of indifference that is inherent to nature, does it make any sense to select an element from earth or sky and treat it as if you were trying to please an egotistical king?

End of the Day at the North End of the Richardson Heights Shopping Center...
Left panel of 2 panels
mixed media diorama

While living in the suburbs, I often painted the suburbs.  People frequently thought I had a bag of tricks to shake things up with.  They had the idea that I did something to transform the everyday into something new and compelling.  The truth was that I didn’t do anything to the scenes around me other than include them in my life in much the same way that I embraced the sights of early childhood.

US Highway 50 and a Drawing of Ottawa, Kansas

Street Corner, Ottawa, Kansas, US Highway 50
burnt matchstick and charcoal
9 11/16 x 17 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches

 

 

Ottawa, Kansas is the first image to come from a recent trip across the country on US Highway 50. The drawing was made using the tips of burnt matchsticks and charcoal. The carbon closest to the unburnt section of the matchstick is a wonderfully unstable color of brown.

 

I never drew much as child because I was painting.  I thought drawing was an incomplete process and saw no reason to pursue it. When I discovered charcoal in college, I realized that the medium was more painterly than paint could ever hope to be.  A broad wash was as simple as pushing dust with a sponge across paper, and the rub of an eraser made an impact that a single brush stroke seldom achieved.  I worked almost exclusively in charcoal for a while in college and repeated that process for a couple years after graduation.  Because painting had been my background, I treated charcoal as paint. Charcoal consumed the vacancy of paper.  It filled the page.  It was no place for a vignette.  I never saw drawing as an exercise, or a study for something else.  Although I see the value of exercise, I’ve never been able to do it.  I am either fully engaged, or I don’t want to have anything to do with the process and would rather go walking.  

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.

Charcoal, Paint, Plaster and Collage: Listening to The Fixx and Trying to Find a New that Doesn’t Include Abstraction

Downtown
mixed media
29 1/8 x 37 1/8 inches
1985

In the mid-1980s’ the FIXX was a large part of my consciousness.  Their sound represented something new as I was trying to find something new myself.  The sound sounded urban, and confined to an apartment building, Richardson, Texas was the most urban lifestyle I had ever lived.

I worked in charcoal.  For me the medium was not about sketching.  I took it seriously and saw the drawings as painting.  Some of the paintings wound up being very large.  At 40 x 60 inches, I’d pretty much reached the upper limits of paper.  To go any further, I needed a path that didn’t include paper or glass.  I am not sure why I thought charcoal on plastered canvas would work.  Although it had to be sealed, the combination of charcoal, plaster, canvas and paint had a physical grit that was fitting for a vision of the city.

Downtown near DMA
charcoal and acrylic
40 x 56 inches
1985

Although not on plaster, previous experience had included stretched fabric, so I began to think of black and white paint.  Most of the time, I didn’t use paint out of a tube, but chose to mix charcoal powder in with matte medium.  I liked the fact that it lacked consistency.  It was like a gritty black pancake batter that sometimes cracked as it dried.  The painting didn’t happen as a single phase or endeavor.  Although always urban, it was a while before it acquired the edge I was looking for.  When I started, it may not have been about Less Cities, More Moving People.  However, I frequently listen to the FIXX.  I didn’t use it as background music.  I never cared to listen passively.  Which means, I listened to a lot of silence.  I hated places where people automatically turned the music on as soon as they got to work, and then played it the entire day as a way of escaping.  I’m all for music as another realm, but continuous sound only confirms a drowning reality of an inability to break away for even a moment.  I don’t know if this is the case, but it seemed to me that people who needed television or radio as a constant companion were afraid of being alone, that an empty mind might hold the mangled sounds of desperation.  It is not that I was free from pain, it’s just that I enjoyed thought even when it hurt.  There was a part of me that didn’t want to hide.  Instead of trying to dull my senses with drugs or alcohol, the weekend was all about seeing.  Life often happened within the cracks of a morning stroll.  I didn’t need a hot cup of coffee to get me started.  There was never any need to start a day of observation.  Sights and sounds simply invited life in.  It was easy to love the discarded cigarette butts and fallen leaves of my surroundings.

Moving from black and white to color included elements of collage and spray paint.  I guess I didn’t want definite edges, or maybe the spray can was just sitting around and I grabbed it to see what would happen.  Painting often goes no deeper than that.  Meaning comes from action.  An idea is just an idea until it becomes a physical presence.  For example, I decided to write about this painting.  However, I never really know what I want to say, so I start typing.  Most of the time the sentences are a mess, and vision is a collision of unexpected thoughts.  For some odd reason, writing is sharper than the mind behind it.  If there happens to be an eloquence of sound, it is a compound of labor, a sorting out of sorts, a routine of shaking out shapes from within the instigation.  Inspiration is not that useful.  It is highly unreliable.  It seldom shows up until most of the work is done.  Inspiration is greedy and should never really be trusted.  When the writing finally comes to a conclusion, it feels like taking all the credit, sounding like a pie in the sky job creator.

Although I don’t know anything about music, it was something I always wanted to do.  I like the way it makes me feel.  I guess I am not alone, it does the same for many others.  When I listened to the FIXX, I thought I heard the familiar sounded out in the new.  Often, sudden jarring stiffs seemed to fit.  The music reminded me of collage. The ripping of guitar and the edginess of torn paper seemed to be related.  Listening back on the music now, a lot has changed.  The Cold War is over.  However social isolation remains in check even with the added connections of social media.  With ever present connectedness, the new becomes old in a flash.  Eloquence can quickly be trivialized by a piling on of posts, and I suspect revolution can sound like a round of passive advertising.  Oh my, I’m a Liberal got 37 Likes. 

I liked the music because it wasn’t about sex, drugs or rock and roll.  It was about things like fear and taking a stand.  I often wonder how the young can be so smart.  I don’t really know the lyrics, although I hear them in the sound that moves through my mind.  Less cities, more moving people lyrically stated the pace of industrialization.  What a great chorus line.  Farming became so productive, that smaller communities were no longer self-sufficient.  Less cities meant bigger cities as more and more people moved away from the countryside.  Employment can be a kind of isolation.  Without control, creativity can easily be spent just working to survive.  With no ties to the environment, consumption can tend to become a measure; I spend therefore I am.  However, it provides no connection to the ballad of playground swing.  One legal dose of environment can never compare to being tied to a land of blue skies where crops are dependent upon water.  Unfortunately, many no longer have those connections and live in world where weather was never intended to rain on anyone’s parade.  Because water is always on tap or bottled in plastic, a sense of security is based on a notion of control.  I think that in fact leads to more isolation.  In a world where devices equal connection, what happens when the power goes out or a friend doesn’t respond immediately to a text?  The ability to connect has always come from knowing the power of isolation.  With that, I will let the FIXX close with the song Outside.

One legal dose of environment and The ballad of a playground swing are lines written by Cy Curnin of the FIXX for the song Camphor.

 

Dusk and Construction
charcoal, acrylic, collage, plaster and canvas
33 x 47 1/4 inches
1985

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