Spring, Something from the Early 1980's

Spring
acrylic
6 5/8 x 10 inches

To me this seems reminiscent of the East.  The curious thing is at the time, I didn’t have any interest in the East.  In a world of the preconceived, this could never happen.  I simply had no interest in Chinese painting.  That’s the beauty of abstraction. 

Crazy Water, Something from the Early 1980's

Crazy Water
mixed media
9 7/8 x 14 7/8 inches

It’s so long ago; I don’t remember how the cut up squares came to be.  Collage a part of my practice often included removal.  The paper remains of something missing can be so beautiful.  The pairing of a grid with free flowing pigment and the random weight of charcoal marks is not how a painting begins.  Freed by the thought that there is nothing left to lose, acts of desperation sometimes lead to beautiful solutions.  Instead of being inspired from on high, creativity is an awareness of what just happened and a willingness to listen. 

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

 

Artifacts Reclamation Project Number 227

Artifacts Reclamation Project Number 227
mixed media construction
21 1/4 x 12 x 9 1/2 inches

For many years, I’ve been a foot-traveler.  The habit had nothing to do with trying to be physically fit.  It was all about seeing, and seeing was so much more than just pedestrian pleasure.  Although often aimless, every footstep maintained a connection to ever changing place.  There was so much to see.  Congregating clouds often housed pools of the deepest of blue.  Breaching the reach of leafless trees, pools of azure shattered into shards, lashing branches whipped a high pitched whistle of the wind.  Transition was a place where texture began to fade away.  I loved the horizon.  When I say horizon, I am not referring to a dividing line, a pictorial joint, a flatland abutment, or a right angled sky welded to the edge of circumference.  When speaking of horizon, it is the fringe of distance I’m talking about.  Recall identifies frail rectangular shapes as motels, hamburger stands and traffic.  Cattle graze within a band of ethereal trees.  Power lines ripple threaded direction to an enclave of indiscriminant buildings on a rise beyond visible highway.  The land of the pedestrian was not only a distillation of blue, but the treading of terrain was a stout round of reality.  It was hard not to see cracked concrete, or a flattened battery corrode in a rainbow puddle of scum.  Civilization comes with hard surfaces.  Sophistication is littered with chunks of consumption that can never be consumed; cigarette butts are fibrous lumps among them.

When I paint, I pay special attention to the close up stuff.  Without that stuff, all you wind up with is a scene, an abstraction, the veracity of décor that hangs over a sofa.  Though never a smoker, I’m fascinated by discarded cigarette butts.  Of course, my attention extends beyond their ashen remains.  Broken glass shimmers in flash and shadow.  Empty cans canter a rolling effervescent sound of aluminum castaway.  Scattered bits of gravel blaze a trail of tread and exhaust across chipped and faded paint.  Grass reclaims habitat crack by crack.  Leaves decay on oil stained pavement.  A puddle implies recent rain, front yard drainage, or the cleansing power of a grimy car wash.  Elements coalesce.  The array contains a history of weather and habitation.  Light warms the foreground.  The vista feels ceaselessly fleeting.  Without scrapes of relatedness there is no grounding.  The sky insufficiently blue fills in with petrochemical slogans, a choir of young crystalline unicorns sweetly beam never ending rays of sunlight.   

MATERIAL LIST OF INGREDIENTS: A COLLECTION OF DRIED  CIGARETTE BUTTS, ONE COMMUTER CRUSHED STARBUCKS’S BOTTLE TOP, A PILE OF TORN NAME BRAND CIGARETTE PACKS, AN OIL PAINT MIX OF WAX, ANTI REFECTIVE GLASS, SHELLAC, BASSWOOD PICTURE FRAME MOLDING, RAG BOARD MATS AND SPACERS, SCREWS, A WOODEN DOWEL, SOME HOUSE PAINT SELECTED FROM A COLLECTION OF CANS ON A SHELF, A STACK OF CARDBOARD CUTOUTS WITH THE EXTERIOR SURFACES PEELED AWAY, ELMER’S GLUE, WEBSTER’S NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY FOUND IN A VACANT HOUSE BY A HOT SPRING ON THE WAY TO TOPAZ MOUNTAIN, A TITLE PAGE PRINTOUT, A SANDWICH BAG, GRAPHITE, A MICA POWDER MIX OF WAX, A NEWSPAPER PAGE BACKDROP, AND THE POST-CONSUMER PACKAGING OF WHAT WAS PROBABLY A CRACKER BOX, ALTHOUGH, AT THIS POINT IT IS VERY HARD TO TELL.

There was an evening when I got very excited about doing something with cigarette butts.  The artifacts of soft cotton littered the outdoors, the playground of childhood.  I saw consumptive beauty early on.  Here I am not referring to the human cost of smoking.  We all have bad habits.  I’m reflecting on the graphic side of nature.  Nature is not only unspoiled places.  It abounds within the sound of urban living.

When I woke, a rare snow coated the streets of Dallas.  Walking to work, I questioned the spectacle of collecting cigarette butts.  I wondered and worried about what others might think of me.  As an artist, I like to think I am free of such preoccupations.  Although, I have never freed myself from the weight of social expectation; I went ahead and tried to ignore the judgment of others.

I didn’t have much luck finding the wet and muddy discards along the streets until I wandered through a drugstore parking lot.  There they were more plentiful especially around some hedges that separated the parking lot from some shops behind a bus stop.  In collecting more and more cigarette butts, I began to feel more at ease in my endeavor.  Then a woman called out to me.  Turning around, I found her standing there handing me a ten dollar bill to buy some smokes of my own.  I explained that I didn’t need her money.  I told her that I was an artist working on a crazy project and thanked her for her generosity.  In watching me, the only thing she could assume was that I was homeless.  Rather than turning away, she offered to help.  Though I was not in need, the gesture filled my soul with joy.  How difficult can it be for us to temporarily alleviate suffering?  Consider what a kind gesture can mean the next time you see someone down and out.  It was nice not to be written off because of my appearance.  I don’t wear a suit and tie.  By simply looking for cigarette butts, I am sure I looked the part.  This kind woman didn’t care how I came to such a desperate situation.  Instead, she chose compassion as a way to begin a day cloaked in the cold of winter.

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.

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.

 

Ten October Leaflets and a Routine of Understanding: the BLM, Juniper, Grasslands, Fire Suppression, the Artifice of Art, the Plausibility of Scale, Paper Frames, and an Ever Present Center

Ten October Leaflets
paper, pastel, acrylic, fabric, glass and wood
5 3/4 x 44 1 7/8 inches

In the habit of collecting autumn leaves, one day I selected the smallest specimens I could find.  Seeing comes from being in front of things over and over again.  In the routine the unexpected may reveal itself.  An oak leaf calls to mind shape and size, but that’s a narrow spectrum when compared with a grove full of oak leaves.  Much of my knowledge comes from sights so familiar that they finally grab my attention.  That may be why we can easily be fooled.  It takes some kind of recognition to realize that the parameters of an argument may not support its position.

My Brother Steve Standing by a 20 Year Old Juniper

This country has a lot of juniper.  An argument states that much of the West was more open than it currently is; juniper invaded grassy lands due to fire suppression.  It is unlikely that anywhere there are now vast stands of juniper, that 50 to 100 years ago those areas were mostly open.  I live where I can watch them grow, and know the timeline needed to go from seedling to tree simply doesn’t fit the scenario.  A 20 year old tree in a field that is regularly watered is not much bigger than a man.  Junipers grow slowly and are among the last trees to reseed after fire.  A fire on a nearby ridge 17 years ago is still waiting for junipers to show while everything else has taken off.  The idea that juniper once burned with a regularity that mirrors that of other kinds of forests isn’t supported by the trees.  Large trees mean there hasn’t been any fire in quite a while.  Past grasslands described on Bureau of Land Management signs seem to be a ranching theme without a bias for science.   

Ten October Leaflets (left end detail)

The leaves selected are not the leaves I framed.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t frame any leaves at all.  Drawn to scale, the leaflets stage a way to plausibility.  In landscape painting, that situation never arises.  No matter how accurately a ridgeline is rendered, it is never mistaken for the real thing because of scale.  Although art is always a lie, it is not very good at deception.  Basic truth gives it away.  We enjoy the con, failing to realize that brushstrokes are nothing but marks and abstraction is considered another thing altogether.  Many need to see things in things never realizing that everything is essentially abstract.  The leaves are not leaves.  Paper framed abstractions stand in for fallen leaves.  Here the plausibility of scale buys paper a shelf life of deception.

Ten October Leaflets (center detail)

I liked the word leaflet; it applies to the tiny side of leaves and pages of information.  The leaflets can also be thought of as propaganda for the month of October.  Not only are the leaves misleading, the frames are also paper.  The shelf is covered in handmade book coverings identifying the individual leaves by number.  Within the simplicity of a specimen box, the centered designation of a leaf is the only arrangement that makes any sense.  Framing compositionally makes it seem like we can achieve a vision that is not centered.  However, there is no way of denying the center; every shift in sight is a new center.  We only perceive asymmetry because what we see is based on conditioning.  The only way to center or not center a road or the edge of a building is by not seeing the rest of the scenery.  Vision does not care where it is positioned; it always sees what is in front of it.  Visual significance is just a manifestation of a hierarchy of interests that have nothing to do with sight.

Ten October Leaflets (right end detail)