The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50

The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on five shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames
6 x 48 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches

The historical marker for The Battle of Coon Creek is located two miles east of Kinsley, Kansas, on U.S. Highway 50. Although the sign failed to position the conflict, I am fairly certain that it didn’t happen right by the highway. The Arkansas River crossing comes up before that of Coon Creek, on the way in to town. It may have made more sense, to place the historical marker somewhere along the creek. Although where it is might be closer to the actual site, it’s not that easy to envision the battle terrain, surrounded by mounds of prairie covered sand dunes. I liked the historical maker; it was a designated place to pull over. That fondness extends to any set of trashcans cans, with or without the presence of picnic tables. The opportunity to stop and inhale a spot along the highway is a significant part of traveling. Without it, a journey can be reduced to mileage, a meaningless quest for destiny, where time steals from the spectacle of oncoming horizons.  

 

The battle involving U.S. troops and Plains Indians occurred in 1848. I’ve decided to skip most of the posted information. In two trips across Kansas, separated by a year and a half, a new sign replaced the old with a different history. That discrepancy could be due to what to cover in the limited space of couple of paragraphs. However, what each sign had in common was the description of an Indian woman clothed in silver ornaments and a scarlet dress, supervising the removal of the wounded while riding around on horseback. Based on the difference between signs, a motorist restricted to seeing just one of them, would come away with a less complicated view of the solidity of history, written about events grounded in the shifting sands of Kansas.

 

The intriguing thing about photographing a site is that I usually know how much to include. However, once a scene is moved to my computer, I no longer recall exactly what I saw, until the information is laid out for painting. When I saw the pencil rendering extend across the panels, I was delighted and surprised by the latitude of the tree’s shadow. Although I keenly remember seeing the shadow, I was unaware of how much it would influence the mood of the painting.

 

Painting a designated place to pull over is not a new arena for me. I’m smitten by any landscaping that leans into the immediacy of scenery. I find such a site a difficult invitation to skip. Although my father was not in my thoughts when I stopped to look around, when the painting begin to materialize, something about the broad shadow and the vista beyond, reminded me of traveling with him. I’ve consumed a lot of time wondering why that should be. Traversing the plains of Kansas was not an experience I had with my dad. Everything about life included something to do with mountains. When you’re raised in Utah and Nevada, there is no place to go, where you can outpace the face of geology. Anywhere out on the highway, slumbering mountains arise all the way to the coast of California. The only thing that this painting shares with the memories of traveling with my dad is the presence of a trashcan. It’s hard to believe that such a minor detail could be so meaningful. But as he drove, he seemed to fill ordinary mileage in with a sense of adventure. The highway wasn’t just about getting to an astonishing site, it also included a veneration for all the places in between.

 

I never uncovered a specific reason why this painting reminded me of traveling with my father. Perhaps, it just comes down to where I happen to be. He has been dead ten years now, and so it may be easier to fully appreciate the vision his living gave to me. With his dedication to the highway, it is not surprising that I grew to love the swell of every oncoming horizon. The clout of topography can be measured by the fact that it precedes the parameters of meaning. It is there. It is out there. And as such a place, narrative has no sway within the realm of surroundings. That’s the thing I admire about landscape painting. It is an open ended enterprise, mysterious enough to be the original Rothko. Because earth and sky defy description, painting never reveals anything about me, leaving the terrain vacant for anyone wishing to engage in a narrative free mystery.

 

US Highway 50 and the Great Basin: A Young Boy Discovers a Lonely Highway, (Second Installment of a Highway Journey)

This is a continuation of the previous post that touched on the discovery of a mysterious highway when I was 10.  Although what I saw may have been affected by weather, it was the strange geology of the place that captured my imagination. The endless succession of mountains and valleys was nothing but hypnotic.  



A dry lake along US Highway 50. Since I left the details unidentified in the writing, I did the same thing here.

There may be a need to explain the voice of the piece being written.  There could be a thought that says this does not sound like a ten year old.  Although, I intend to write what comes to mind of the drive I experienced, the way I encounter things remains the same.  When I was two, I stepped outside a drugstore and felt the weight of neon sputtering light into cast iron darkness.  Of course, language was limited then.  At the age of six, seven, or eight, I wondered whether I was a physical presence, or just an idea with the impression that it had a reality.   My mind isn’t anything but average.  It just happens to cling to things like the sights and sounds of a playground.  It is not sharp enough to find banality loitering around a parking lot.  All it sees is the light that illuminates crumbling pavement.  Story telling can be tricky, and although I intend to give it to you straight, all truth winds up being fiction.  I will try to work from a place of honest deception.  When a narrator is needed, I will rely on a travel guide.

 

Getting back to the sand dunes, the range to the south is closer than it was, there is another beyond that, and it stretches out for as far as the eye can see.  A single butte in silhouette, rides the horizon.  From any position, the valley is like a sea with this island sailing away in hues of blue and gray.  Here a shift in blue has everything to do with how far away you are from your destination.  I have never thought about this that way before, but blue is separation.  In a strange way, if the separation is severe enough, earth and sky merge into a swell of uncertainty.  As a phrase, “the cutting edge” is an odd way to describe the pursuit of the unknown.  An edge is a boundary, and boundaries define.  It might be better to portray a lot of what goes on as “cutting corners.”  My way of thinking about the edge, may be unfair.  The phrase probably refers to the extension of something beyond where it was before, like from city to suburbs, but right now, I am in a place where art cannot not compete.  It never has.  It never will.  We are not dealing with empty walls that could use the break that paintings often provide.  Our vaulted ceiling is sky.  The butte seems to move as we roll along.  A river is crossed, a town creeps up on a slowing car, and one highway turns into another simply by taking a right at the stop sign.  Now, that didn’t take long.  Skim through a few pages, and the highway arrives.  This is it.  This is our point of entry.  In the presence of a ten year old, there is no distinction between highways.  All I know is that this is supposed to be the scenic way home, and as far as I can tell, it is.  As far as I am concerned, the highway has no number.  It is my favorite though, and I can feel it.

 

The fields around town display gray combinations of sandy soil and plants compressed by the bitter weight of winter.  Windbreaks give way to sage.  The mileage markers are lean and the desert is spare.  Stunted brush grows close to the ground in clumps no larger than clenched fists.  The land is mean.  The desolate environment endorses a trickle down reality.  Annual stockpiles of rain, sleet, frost and snow may measure less than 4 inches.  Mountains to the west capture the promise of rain by taxing the clouds rolling over their summits.  The earth grows prosperous.  If the right’s enterprise creates wealth for the nation as a whole, they should have chosen a better image to prove their point.  Nature does not produce abundance on scant rainfall.  Conditions like these generate desert.  Try a little trickle down economic philosophy on your garden and see what comes up.  Who in their right mind, would want to be trickled on anyway?

 

A dry lake shimmers.  Blue mountains break the shoreline.  Surrounded by hills and mountains, it reminds me of the Bonneville Salt Flats.  In fact, I wonder if it is connected.  I look to see if I can tell.  I can ask dad.  He will know.  I don’t.  I ride in silence.  It is interesting to see bleached mud flats.  The lakebed is substantial.  The sky is overcast.  There is nothing ominous about the weather overhead.  Gray can be kind to shades of green.  However, there is none along the highway that now looks down into an empty lake.  I begin to wonder how much longer the desert will last.  Even I tire of the subtleties that subterfuge separation.  Simple sentences can stun, but I seem to be shying away from them.  I should stop the shameful game I am playing, but so sleepy now, shall my mind succumb to something as severe as reason?  Should I save this sad search for satisfaction found in the sound of the letter S as the highway steels away from the lake, or shall I leave it lying on the shallows of shoreline silence?  Now that sentence is hard to surpassed, at least by someone like me.  I have been out here too long and I am tired of trying.  Is this pure nonsense?   I mean, can it be clean?   Or, do unraveling thoughts prevail?

 

sky shatters

over a dry lakebed

 it could have been

a thunder clap command

conducted by a bolt of lightening

  the laceration,

the blast

military flight

divides sky

asunder

                                                                               

In an effort to skirt a mountain, the highway climbs a fan only to fall away.  A valley is waiting just over the rise.  Below, the scenery has shifted.  Openness closes down into a narrow basin.  The facing ridge is a row of rough and tumbling outcrops that disfigure falling shadows.  This spectacle takes place out in the open and in the light of day.  Who knows what goes down when the sun slips behind the horizon.  Actually, the temperature does, and night can be brutal.  If the temperature was 90 degrees during the day, you may be facing a low of 45 under a canopy of stars.  I hope you planned for this and not some soft yielding Texas evening filled with the sound of cicadas.  Summer is a season that climbs into the sky each morning.  Autumn rules the night.  I’ve even seen ice hiding in a garden hose strung out across the lawn in July.  Rise and shine to the bite of a frosty morning.  The thrill of a new day is chilling, and in the arid atmosphere, steam quickly withers away.  A freeze can take place at anytime of the year, and it is rare for it not to cool off when darkness settles in.  This is not Las Vegas, and contrary to common perception, the state is not excessively hot.  Even though Utah snows are more abundant, they melt away more quickly when summer arrives.

US Highway 50, Utah, Nevada and the Border Inn

Border Inn Motel, Slots, Café
oil on canvas
16 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches

This painting can be seen at William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

The Border Inn lies on the Utah-Nevada between Delta and Ely, Nevada. It is a welcomed sight for those not noticing the sign that read NEXT SERVICES 83 MILES back in Hinckley, Utah. That is a long haul without any habitation. The course of the highway and the signs that remind you to watch for deer, cattle and falling rock lie in brush and stubble. Because of the beautiful nature of desolation, bullet holed trashcan pullovers pass by in silence.

If the border tied into traffic from Salt Lake City, it would be like Wendover and Mesquite crawling with Mormons on gentile retreats for the weekend. The alpine peaks of Great Basin National Park are not much of a draw. Before the park, nobody knew what was there. As it is, most of the time, you can have much of the park to yourself.

On many Nevada highway borders, there are places like the inn proudly displaying gambling signs. This is too small for anything more than a few slot machines. Still it is small town Nevada away from the industrialized gambling of Reno and Las Vegas. The West survives in these towns along the highway due to isolating wind, heat, cold and snow. Because of the lack of water, farming was never really an option. When the ore played out, many towns vanished in the sage. Part of what kept these hanging on was vacant highway. You’ll probably have to stop at two or three of these for a hamburger and gasoline. Nevada takes openness for granted. NEXT SERVICES 83 MIILES was a courtesy of Utah. Nevada goes on the assumption that you are not going to gamble on the accuracy of a fuel gauge as you leave Ely for Eureka or Lages Station.

Handmade booklet for painting
4 9/16 x 3 1/8 x 3/8 inches

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

Thrashing Birds and a Notion of Ownership

The west face of Notch Peak, House Range, Millard County, Utah

The question of ownership was illustrated to me one Thanksgiving Day.  There had been too much food, television and talk.  I needed fresh air.  Realize this is hard to obtain, when a development is surrounded by feedlots.  Outside, there’s an occasional house.  Open fields are turned up and over.  To the west, the direction of my walk, the House Range rises.  Somewhere between here and there are the remains of Topaz, a Japanese Internment Camp, a subject never taught while I was attending school in Utah.  As I travel, my awareness is asphalt.  The course gray lane heads for the horizon.  A mound of manure, cattle and flies await at the end of an extremely long block.  To the right, there is an irrigation canal; the fields are much lower.  A wood frame house sits in the bottom of one of these fields.  Scattered trees are bare.  Clouds are thin and the sky is high.  Whether this is the way it was, I can’t really say.  Even the strongest memories are more poetry than prose.  However, I am fairly certain about the thrashing of birds, a heated squabble over land, and that’s not just because they were in flight.  The trespasser was gliding in with ease.  The other, was a fluster of homeland panic.  Horses roam fields filling in with wind.   Deeds mean nothing to the mice, rabbits, cats and dogs that wander around staking out territory.  An array of overlapping inhabitants claim to own the place.  Every layer seeking control while coyote calls rule the night.  And who or what has claim enough to stop all this clamor?  The wind will be the wind you know.  And the wind picking up a little dust is carried away.

My sister's home in rural Utah

The fields are lower on the north  side of the lane.

One end of the feedlot.

House in the bottom of one of the fields.



Topaz Japanese Internment Camp, one of ten concentration
camps that imprisoned 120,000 citizens and immigrants
for 3 1/2 years beginning in 1942.

Topaz Japanese Internment Camp hospital foundation.