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.

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]

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

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

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



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





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

 



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



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

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



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





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

 



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

 

CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50
acrylic
8 3/8 x 26 x 4 inches

Holly, Colorado was the last town before crossing over into Kansas on east bound U.S. Highway 50.  The plan was to a camp north of Stockton, Kansas so I could drive with sunrise back into Colorado.  Exhausted, I stopped at a closed filling station to examine a map.  Turning around, I searched for a road I failed to spot.  At that hour, the highway hosted only intermittent trucks.  In an area of fog I saw the turn off.  The methane fog filled with dust driving in a land of feedlots.  With each and every turn I wondered if I was getting any closer.  The road came to a tee.  On the left, there was a hollow of trees.  A lane straight ahead led to a house and other structures that hovered around a small porch light.  I turned right.  Headlights highlighted insect collisions when a sense of destiny began to settle in.  Continued travel on gravel only led deeper into starlit fields with a moon that would soon slip behind the horizon. 

It was nice to be on the highway heading back to a rest area I past just before leaving Colorado.  Although the plan was to camp, sleeping in the car was not impossible.  By folding the backseats forward, the trunk could accommodate 8 foot lengths of molding, it seemed like a sleeping bag could also fit into that space.  With part of the bag encased in the hollow of the trunk, getting in was a bit tricky.  Climbing through one of the back doors, I slid into the sleeping bag.  With my feet in the trunk, I embraced starlight from the calm of my pillow.  Although more comfortable, the car provided a private viewing of the nighttime sky that a tent denies.  It was nice to no longer be moving.  I settled in listening to the sound of crickets and other travelers pulling in.  With a sweep of idle headlights, car doors opened and closed.  Restrained voices trailed off; time acquired the weight of late arrival.
 

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50 (Left Side Detail)

I arrived by morning light.  The main street was off the highway as many main streets are out on the open plains.  Back on the highway, CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL was surrounded by piles of tires.  It was hard to tell exactly what Cliff did.  Outdated pumps stood in front of a rundown building, yet his business seemed to carry on.  I liked the station’s architecture.  It reminded me of a time when I enjoyed the highway as a child.  To say I like something implies a preference for the subjects I select.
While that may be true, it doesn’t happen in the ways you might expect.  I like everything.  Every place has moments, and one of those moments was a moment when I happened to be somewhere.  That may sound egocentric, but the only moment I know is the one I’m living in.  I realize dawn has come to Holly many times before, and that morning is an ordinary affair, but it is that common occurrence that seems to be so rare.  Instead of trying to create or capture the spectacular, I am thoroughly invested in minor events.  And since life is always happening, it doesn’t matter whether I am standing by a pile of tires or overlooking a vale of the Great Basin.  The same light that revels in sedimentary uplift sparkles in bits of broken glass and the asphalt patina flash that skips past fast food carcass discards along an open highway.  Feel the exhilaration in a swirl of rough and dusty leaves kicking up ruts and sailing across puddles permanently plaguing the bend of an alleyway. 

CLIFF'S GAS DIESEL, Holly, Colorado; U.S. Highway 50 (Right Side Detail)

With the filling station withstanding the ravages of time, I thought it might be nice to capture the historic nature of the place.  Of course, that could easily be achieved by using color.  Although color generally belongs to the realm of painting, I thought I would paint the station in shades associated with photography.  And although we see in color, thoughts of yesterday can be layered in shades of gray.  That is not to say that memory is colorless.  It is just that the paper trail of the past includes books, newspapers and magazines printed in black and white.  Photography dated parents and grandparents while still young in pallid shades of gray.  In that mix fell sepia prints.  Painting in shades of photography plays into a placement of frames on a desk, mantle or shelf.  Though not portraiture, landscapes have a capacity to spark hidden bits of consciousness.  Simple sights or sounds may remind us of other times and places.  Nostalgia is a riddle of the familiar.  The frame is reminiscent of snapshots, the evidence of a planned vacation, except no happy couple stands in front of an exquisite destination.  It is the domain of place, any place that is so compelling.  Another day arises on a highway in the town of Holly, Colorado.  As dilapidated as the filling station seems to be, CLIFF’S GAS DIESEL is still in business.  I could hear work  going on in the garage as I got into the car ready to hit the highway.