Painting by William Vaughn Howard, Dated 6/30/1980

William Vaughn Howard, Title Unknown, 6/30/1980
acrylic and graphite on paper

 

William Vaughn Howard was my painting professor when I attended the University of Nevada, Reno in the early 1980s. This painting was a gift from him when I flew from Dallas to Reno in 1986 to see his final show. Although I no longer practice abstraction, his work helped me to see the power of horizon. The span was all that mattered. There was no need to find a focal point or seek an asymmetrical division of earth and sky. Seeing was more than enough. The moment was intelligence beyond design. When you realize that, then you’re entirely free within your surroundings. You can painting anything, from any time of day, or from any place or angle. Seeing reality, you realize that you are no longer boxed in by the agenda of painting. No longer bound by a stage designed for depicting people hundreds of years ago, you can finally embrace the space that surrounds you.

A Small Unsigned Painting by William Vaughn Howard

William Vaughn Howard
Unsigned
acrylic, graphite and pastel
3 5/8 x 22 1/2 inches

This painting 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 80s. Unsigned, I imagine that it was painted not long before he died in 1986.

The sweeping span feels like taking in a vista, a view given to the arc of the horizon, where the implication of distance is what seeing is all about. Having nothing to focus on, movement is a wonderment that extends well beyond the singularity of a moment associated with the composed. Not bounded by a fixed position, you are free to examine the painting as you will. I had never seen anything like this before.  The paintings in Bill's last show were a revelation to me. In the form of abstraction, he tackled the act of seeing, which involves a lot more than composing pictures that replicate arrangements based on paintings from the past. When the contours of design were being considered, landscape painting wasn't in the picture. Painting wasn't about navigating the fields or getting around town. It was about literature. Artists were painting stories that couldn't be observed. No one had seen Adam and Eve consume the forbidden fruit. Composition was a creation that made it possible to portray events that couldn't be observed. There is no need to create a stage to observe the observable. Bill's paintings capture events of seeing. Seeing is primarily about navigating life. It doesn't have to be about manufacturing hierarchies. William Vaughn Howard's paintings made it possible for me to freely paint my surroundings without having to worry about how things should be taken in. His paintings eliminated the need for a stage. Landscape painting no longer needed to conform to the compositional huddle that never considered the breadth of earth and sky when it was being devised as a way to describe the unseen events of literature. With the elimination of focus, landscape painting could finally express the ramifications of space.

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

 

The Paintings of William Vaughn Howard Made it Easy for Me to Remain a Painter

William Vaughn Howard
Title Unknown
acrylic and charcoal
27 1/2 x 22

This is a painting by my college professor William Vaughn Howard.  When I entered his classroom, I was finished with painting.  I remained an art student because I didn’t know what else to do.  Although, I had found a place in drawing, an activity seldom practiced as a child because I painted.  In my view there was no need for drawing; painting was the statement I wanted to make, and since I worked from photographs there was no need for planning.  There was no advantage to a sketch, painting was drawing with a brush.  For some odd reason, the next drawing class never fit into my schedule and I was forced to take painting.  If I had had my way, I would have focused on drawing and printmaking.

The reason for being disillusioned was a simple one.  Painting in practice separated observation from believing that sight was decisive.  The theology of paint stated that the visual experience of day to day living could not engage without making changes to the nature of place.  This approach prefers staged arrangements over happenstance.  It is hard to image the staged as a comprehensive encounter when happenstance colors every situation.  A tea kettle whistles burner aglow.  A phone rings into the sound of hello.  A child screams out an enormous so are you!  A blue hued television seeps through panes of glass to catch a flash of passing light.  Rivulets rain weight into a sagging black hammock.  A puddle of a parking lot is a long shot from the warmer quarters of a dry café, the betrayal of a thoroughly wasted day started by the startle of an alarm clock set for another occasion.  The menu reads like faded paper, a half-life of gazing print, the compensating squint of a man that cannot stand reading glasses.  How can the staged ever manage to capture the meager sights of life, the true test of living?

Because art claimed to be more compelling than life, I gravitated to drawing.  Drawing wasn’t as lifelike anyway.  We don’t see a world of black and white.  Without color, drawing was all about abstraction.  There wasn’t the same kind of tension.  The decision had already been made for me; I wouldn’t have to worry about making what I saw fit the demands of art, an idea I truly detested.    

When I saw my professor’s abstractions, I thought I saw a poetry of place.  Although nothing could be directly linked, I thought I saw landscapes veiled within paint.  I found another place to be and began to paint again.

It is hard to know what to say about a painting.  Paint here represents paint.  Content is a collection of movements, changes made many times to a rime of indecision until not knowing becomes a knowing that says this is it.  Broken into many facets, this is a beautiful looking glass of abstraction.

 

Contemplation within the Small Space of a Closet Library: Cardboard Flooring, Sculpture, Ivory Soap, Chinese Painting, Nature and Discipline, William Vaughn Howard, and the Gravitational Pull of a Drop Cloth

Closet Library with Window, Paintings, Sculpture and Shelves

The closet library is a 42 x 96 inch space behind a studio wall.  It is so small that walls lean in to grace the camera lens.  Because the closet had a window, I saw it as a space for contemplation.  

Cardboard Flooring, Table, Handmade Boxes, Chair, Paintings and Shelves

The lack of space made it difficult to move while remodeling.  Some sheetrock was removed; bookshelves were hung from inside the studs to save space.  Carpet was replaced with a corridor of cardboard.  The wall to wall cardboard strips are quite firm.  Though not efficient, the experimental floor was worth the undertaking.  Although art is often defined as nonfunctional, it is hard to image anything more useful.  There is no better way to change or rearrange the thought process.



Soapstone
soap, paper, acrylic, pastel, fabric, plexi-glass, cedar and black primer
28 1/4 x 17 5/8 x 14 1/2 inches

A few years ago I decided to carve rock.  Unlike some sculptors, I didn’t want to chip away at something that beautiful.  I seldom start from a place easily defaced.  There is little risk to squeezing paint out onto a palette.  Of course with quarried stone, much of the damage is already done.  But even so, crystal, layer and grain retain a beauty that arranged dabs of paint on a plate of glass just don’t have.  I settled on soap.  I remembered trying to shape it in grade school.  The great thing about it was it wouldn’t require the purchase of new tools to whittle away at a craft I wasn’t committed to.  I liked the idea of working in reverse.  While some make something out of stone, my aspiration was just to mimic rock.  Though the process may sound like a perverse curse hurled upon the faithful, I purchased a year’s supply of soap and stuck a stack of bars together.  The carved Ivory Soap was gradually wrapped in bits of torn print making paper and painted with acrylic, pastel and fabric.  Unsealed, it was encased to protect it from dust and handling.

Chinese Painting, Stir Stick, Handmade Boxes, Burl, Table and Chair

A door-less doorway frames a Chinese painting.  On a table stands a stir stick, a history of stain and paint sustain beauty without implication.  The Chinese painting and the stir stick correlate in an unusual way.  One was intentional; the other acquired natural saturation free from the slight of design.  We seldom pay attention to the unaltered, ignoring astounding beauty all around.  Instead we’re transfixed by tricks we control.  A composition is never free to let things be.      

I’ve enjoyed the freeness of the Chinese painting for many years.  Freeness may seem out of place when you consider that the painting is an exercise filled with all the rigor exercise brings, but freedom is the vigor of discipline.  By the time the bamboo was painted, it had already been painted so many times that the artist was free to feel bamboo in the breeze without thinking.  Through discipline, the painting becomes natural in the way nature shapes drainage.  Repetitive weather conditions come and go.  Canyons unfold.  The stir stick was stained, an implement of history designed to mix consistency back into a can of paint.  It was colored by time, a mind greater than any design ruled supposition.  Order is often too simplistic to consider an array of associations without a disposition for restriction.  Why should order mean the elimination of information?  Rules decide somewhat arbitrarily.  Couldn’t arbitrary justifications also be a form of chaos? 

At the start of a semester, my professor William Vaughn Howard hung a drop cloth on the wall.  When asked why by a friend, he said something like this: I want my students to have something to shoot for.  In those drops and splatters reality is devoid of self-consciousness.  Gravity speaks without flinching to see if it complies with or denies rules of design.  The paint like lichen takes hold where it will take hold.  Time is a designer without question.  Instead of trying to find ways to emphasize setting, it may be better to consider the beauty of always arriving.  Then hamburger stands are as grand as kitchen tables.



Table, Handemade Boxes, Stir Stick, Burl and Drawing