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.

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

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



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

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

End of the Day... full two panel view

 

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

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

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

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



End of the Day... left panel view

 

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




End of the Day... right panel view

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

U.S. Highway 50 at Robinson Summit: The Loneliest Road in America Climbs another Summit on a Path across Nevada

A Bend in US Highway 50 at Robinson Summit,
White Pine County, Nevada (The Loneliest Road in America)
oil on canvas
20 3/16 x 32 1/8 inches framed

A few years ago, I made some paintings based on a stretch of U.S Highway 50 known as the Loneliest Road in America.  This section crosses Nevada.  Although that designation and the making of Great Basin National Park have increased traffic, the road is still a highway of desert isolation.  Two summers ago, my brother’s family and I tried to camp at the national park.  All the sites were full.  We ended up spending the night below Sacramento Pass at a Bureau of Land Management camp.  After twilight, travel completely stopped.  Crickets occupied the night.  A starlit sky defined pinion, a thicket so deep detail had the absence of black water.  I was stunned.  The highway was a part of my childhood.  I thought I knew the lonely nature of the place.  But even at the height of the tourist season, night was completely still.  For each painting I made a small book.  The following comes from one of those written descriptions.

Summits sometimes fail to provide sweeping vistas.  While a highway may make the grade, and cross the divide, spectacular views may be winding miles away.  After climbing the embankment, it was obvious that there was no panoramic blue to examine.  However, it did give me an interesting view of the highway.

When I was young, I was so taken by mountain peaks, that I missed the matted fabric of forest floors.  Never rambunctious, I had little or no interest in sports.  However, if a mountain was around, I wanted to climb it.  I had an obsession to see as far as I could see.

I remember hiking in the foothills above Salt Lake City with a friend when I was eleven in the snow.  His feet grew cold; he stayed below, while I scrambled to the top.  I loved perspective’s swoop and dive into tiny woven streets reflecting sunlight below towering mountains.  Basking in the curvature of exhilaration, I thought my friend was a wimp.  I loved high places, but it was never for an adrenaline rush or exercise.  I had a passion for seeing seas of topography.

In many respects, that made me blind.  I was only interested in the spectacular, and it was years before I learned how to see.  I remember a trip back to Ontario where my family comes from, and being bored with states like Iowa.  No mountains towered over corn fields, and I disliked the whiteness of skies and the deep stinking heat of humidity.  I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could stand a land of fields and trees where puffy little clouds floated around in atmospheric anemia.

When I moved to Texas, I was always searching for higher horizons, and eventually began to see beauty in the turned up fields of the countryside.  Weekends found me on roads to places like Meridian and Clifton.  I never knew where I was going, but enjoyed driving.  However, because I always had to return, I was undeniably tired.  Going anywhere required miles of driving; exhilaration turned into weariness and defeat.  I began staying closer to home and looked for adventure in the city.  In a sense, this was not new; as a child, I could see topography in any empty field.  My thoughts turned to the content of walks.  I began to see the vagaries of life in heat crushing concrete.  Even weeds defined the high and mighty sky.  Being in step with the pedestrian really set me free.

Handmade book placed on the back of the painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches