The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988

Detail: The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988, 10/17/96
mixed media diorama housed in 15 glassed in panels in 3 frames, 5 1/8 x 114 x 2 inches

Around 1995, I began to wonder if there would come a time when I no longer needed the diorama. Although physical in nature, much of the depth inside was the result of plain old painting. The following year, the diorama became new again, when I started going through snapshots that had been stored away in an ice chest because there were so many of them. The collection contained pretty much everything shot while living in Richardson, Texas. My focus on the Dallas suburb had been disrupted by roads trips and moves that eventually took me home to Fillmore, Utah. Prior to then, I resided in the cities of Houston, Phoenix and El Paso. The neighborhoods of each place, seized my devotion as though I’d grown up as a local. That’s exactly why the diorama proved to be so effective. The formatting of everyday terrain gave me a way to say just how much I loved my surroundings. When the images were laid out across the floor, I saw that there was at least ten years of work that I wanted to complete in two. To cover so much ground, I would have to go small. I was living in Houston the first time I tried to make a diorama as tiny as the photographic image that it came from. I never understood just how minute the details could be until I tried to paint them. Photography is such a common way of seeing that we’ve lost touch with what distortion can really mean. We automatically fill in much of the missing scale that would have to be there in order for a print or snapshot to be seen as any kind of reality. In describing the veracity of a painting, how many times has it been said that it looks just like a photograph? It may seem like a strange thing to say, but photographic imagery has replaced reality as a point of comparison. The success of a painting is never measured against the splendor of the great outdoors. As I tried to translate petite details into the making of a diorama, I discovered I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the chops or stamina to get it done. Over time, the diorama grew ever more refined. Perhaps, it was that process that enabled me to successfully complete a few miniature renditions of the format while I was living in El Paso.

While in Richardson, I shot numerous sprawling vistas of the city. Several swept away by a desire to see the next connection, followed the panoramic swirl to unfurl 360 degrees of suburban habitation. With a conservative scale that made the vertical side of a diorama just 8 inches high, those ocular accomplishments spread out to be at least 10 feet long without ever trying. Imagine what 16 to 24 inches of verticality would do to a horizon. The latter measurement could easily mean 30 feet or more of a suburban sprawl consuming the span of a colossal wall. The length of a diorama was a measurement of time. Because of that fact, I’d completed only one of them. With the reduction in size, I was able to complete 5 or 6 of the fully surveyed portrayals of the city. Besides the profile of the cutout and the sloped horizon, the thing that really made the diorama work, was its dependence on the density of color. The much smaller scale, made the compiling of color a less time consuming thing to do. A diorama that had taken two or three months to complete, could be finished in a couple of weeks. The reduction in size, made moving through my old neighborhood into something that could be done.

The smaller scale turned scrap into something that could be used. Because reflection free glass was almost like gold, I couldn’t throw any of the fragments away. Instead, I wrapped the pieces up so they wouldn’t scratch, hoping to find a way to use them. Working with the bits of this and that, invited a kind of playfulness. The parameter for many images was determined by the size and shape of leftover glass. An insignificant piece of wood, to small or narrow to safety reshape into a frame, suddenly became valuable. Something like a ¼ inch strip of plywood with a ½ inch piece of matboard glued to the top of it, could be made into a frame. Because structural materials were often not the same, something had to be done to make the raw combinations compatible. Stained paper and wood simply wouldn’t look very good. Paint was an obvious remedy. I discovered that brushed on paint could be sanded into an exquisite finish. Although there was nothing new in that, I never understood what it took to get it done. Because walking was a constant part of my consciousness, I began to collect some of what I saw. Bits of chipped and weathered paint, autumn leaves, sifted samplings of dug up dirt, and the inside lining of bark from fallen trees became the veneer facing for many of my put together frames. Working this way, meant there was less of a need for a wood shop.

Of all the miniaturized dioramas, The West Side of Hampshire Lane from Arapaho to Vernet, Richardson, Texas, October 1988 was likely the most decisive one for things to come. Inspired by the David Hockney travel paintings that try to illuminate movement, the prospect of taking a short journey filled me with ecstasy. Early on an October Sunday morning, I got up to walk Hampshire Lane. With camera in hand, I chronicled all the buildings on the west side of street with enough overlap to show that the photographs had the same roadway in common. The distance from one image to the next involved walking. The collection of snapshots documented travel. For the first time in my life, a string of photographs didn’t try to seize upon the sweep of a fixed horizon, and yet there seemed to be some kind of connection. Perhaps, that’s because navigation is a function of sight. A vista is just suspended travel in a continuous stream of visual sub consciousness. Because we’re designed to see, we don’t perceive the entirety of the data crush that makes getting around so easy. The primary reason I enjoy travel by foot or car, is that it takes me to a place where continuously shifting vistas obliterate the compositional conceit of thinking that beauty is so rare that it needs to be dug out to be found.

 

The West Side of Hampshire Lane… united 15 separate scenes in a frame that was divided into three sections. Those divisions were made for the sake of handling. Between each scene there was a space that opened up to the wall. The serial configuration of buildings along the street was repetitive enough to form a kind of horizontal laddering that was reminiscent of a filmstrip. Although not part of the thought process, the fact that the combined images recorded a short journey, meant that the framing turned out to be a perfect fit for the depiction of travel. A roll of chronological stills is how movement is recorded. Without knowing it, the sequencing of individual images would eventually become the primary way of portraying panoramic scenery. The depiction of a vista as a singular event never really existed. The span of any horizon always required movement from the camera. Even while eyes scan the breadth of a horizon, seeing renders the fragmentation of sight as a complete picture. The camera can’t do that. The viewfinder can only know frozen moments. It can’t comprehend time as continuum. Although the diorama closely resembled what we think we see, that link was missing. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. That would come later on, when I tried to align some overlapping photographs that refused to go together. When I pulled them apart, the separation revealed an interlude that I hadn’t noticed before. The walk along Hampshire Lane foreshadowed that knowledge in format and framing. The division or intervening pause meant that paint could showcase more than a frozen moment. Although the illustration of time was still made of stills, the collection of more than a single moment represented a measurement in time. Partitioning breaks within the framing, recorded the passage of time like the demarcation of tree rings. We can see the representation of place as a cross section in time, however fleeting a scene may be.

54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50

54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50, 2014-2017
acrylic on 54 panels, artist-made frames, 51 3/8 x 77 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches
Courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

Left side view of 54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake,Utah,
US Highway 50, Courtesy of Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden

A favorite painting of mine, is divided up into a grid of 450 squares. It certainly did not begin that way. When first painted, I was living in Richardson, a suburb north of Dallas, Texas. In the tiny apartment, there was no space to paint anything of scale. A small kitchen table, that couldn’t possibly fit in the minuscule kitchen, doubled as a studio. On the other side of the elevated railroad tracks, which ran behind the block of nondescript brick apartment buildings, there was an empty field. That is where I’d go to work on large projects. Sometimes while working outside, I’d draw a small audience of kids, usually arriving on bicycles. Although, I always tried to answer their questions directly, it was never that easy trying to explain abstraction while painting.

When the weather was pleasant, I’d search for a section of beaten down weeds, as far away from the street as I could find, and lay some raw canvas on the ground. The resistant stubble of wild plants, felt nothing like the smooth studio walls that backed the stapled expanses of canvas that I painted on in college. On the ground, the fabric was never flat. The pressure of the brush against the debris underneath, left impressions in the paint similar to rubbings made with crayon on paper. Brushstrokes lack a sense of calligraphic weight when trying to glide over a rumple of woven ridges. Abstraction in the field, quickly moved from Franz Kline like gestures, to gravity centric acts, which were more in line with the layered constellations of Jackson Pollock. While flinging paint from the end of the brush, I also dumped large quantities of white onto the fabric. Stepping into the puddles, I began kicking the paint around, leaving the imprint of my shoes as part of the overall imagery. Into those impressions, I poured a watery mix of pigment and let it run all over the canvas. I liked the result, but it always felt like there was something missing.

While attending the University of Nevada in Reno, I saw a canvas covered with a grid of graphite lines. Agnes Martin had carefully painted the spaces in between with white. The simplicity was striking. It reminded me of the shimmer of reflected sky on the side of glass buildings. While attending the university, my parents moved to Dallas. Visiting them on a Christmas break, we circled the city as the sun began to set. Within a cold yellow sky, glass high-rises burned like hot coals on a circular horizon. I remember distinctly feeling that I’d never seen anything quite like that before.

When I moved seven years later to El Paso, Texas, I had another go at it. This time, I overlaid the embedded footprints and splatters of paint with a graphite grid of squares. While it broke some of the dead areas up, it still didn’t get me there.

A couple years after that, I move to Fillmore, Utah. One day while looking at the painting, I decided that the grid needed to be more physically defined. I had an old painting from college that I never entirely liked. Composed primarily of pinks and blues, I thought it was a little too pretty. I decided to cut it up into squares. Back then, I frequently painted into wet gesso and raw canvas and watched the pigments bleed into the cream colored fabric. Subtle patterns happened on the back side of the canvas where it had been stuck and stapled to the wall. With all the pieces piled in the middle of the floor, I randomly began to glue them into the grid of the field painting. Some pieces remained face up, while others were turned upside down. As I did this, I intentionally left many of the spaces blank so as not to conceal all of the embedded footprints. The grid became a combination of three paintings because both sides of the cut up canvas were applied to the original artwork. What I was looking for was a kind of randomness. To reinforce that, I traced the grid with linear beads of glue. Into those wet ridges, I pressed a couple different colors of sand. When the mortar like lines dried, I had a restrained mosaic of graphic atmospheric squares.

I always enjoyed the randomness that inhabits nature. Because nature was a better designer than I could ever be, composition was never an obsession. I just went with what I saw, knowing that I could never improve reality. When I began thinking about the sky panels, I wanted to take the randomness I saw on walks and apply it to the sky. Of course, sky already has an ambiguity that I could never match, it’s just that the blue skies of beyond, are never equated with the splendor of lowly weeds or erosion. Yes, I said it. Weeds are absolutely beautiful!

One day, on the way to the mailbox, the light in the sky was exceptional. Studying the mosaic of canvas squares, I determined that to get a similar shimmer with paintings of clouded atmosphere, that I would need at least 54 panels. With that knowledge, I headed for Sevier Lake on US Highway 50 stopping along the way to shoot fragments of the sky. It took around an hour to arrive at the dry lakebed. When I got there, I photographed the ground and highway as well. I had plans for several paintings.

When I viewed the 54 thumbnails of sky on the computer screen, I had my doubts. It was a monotone mosaic of blue. Although light, the abstract painting I was modeling it after, was full of all kinds of color. I decided to go ahead with project. There is no real way to tell if an idea will work if it is never executed. With a utility knife and handsaw, I cut all the materials I would need to make the panels. In my spare time, I glued things together. Because I’ve done a lot of framing, I know nothing is ever an exact match. To compensate for that fact, the ragboard panels were cut a little larger than the frames or platforms that they were to be mounted to. Sandpaper brought all the uneven edges together. The practice of sanding was never anything I desired to pursue, but because I make everything myself, sandpaper has become a constant companion. Instead of dreading it, I just accept it as a key part of making art.

At any size, 54 paintings are going to require a lot of time. Because of that fact, I decided to change the way I usually paint, otherwise it would take a couple of years to complete. The work would have to be a little more loose or painterly. With my experience as an abstract painter, I learned to be open to what a situation desires. The scale of the project was the equivalent of an unexpected drip. Listening to its direction changes what needs to be done.

When I completed the first three paintings, I saw that all the blue was going to be okay. Because many of the images were similar, when a painting was finished, the corresponding photograph was immediately deleted to avoid any confusion about what had or had not been completed. Being a framer, I couldn’t help but frame a piece as soon as it was done. When originally imagining the project, I saw all the framing in white. I had a handful of small paint cans sitting around and decided to use the pale colors. Following that path, the framing for the final piece would be an array of slight variations on taupe or beige. The delicacy of the color scheme pleased me.

Having so many panels to paint gave me a chance to play around a little. That was even in keeping with what I was trying to do. The painting was intended to be about the beauty of randomness. Not having it front of me now, I don’t remember all the different things I did. But beyond a generalized looseness, there were some references to Pointillism that I really enjoyed making. One of the more surprising pieces for me, was a painting of clouds that primarily relied on the kind of lines I used when doodling in junior high school. Even while using them, I could still be fairly discreet.

I started the piece in 2014. Working on it between other projects, had gotten me as far 13 panels by the spring of 2017. Then I decided it was now or never, and set everything else aside. Being able to delete a digital image as each painting was finished was a good way to keep track of progress. But, every time I counted how many images there were left to paint, I felt overwhelmed. I looked forward to thresholds like I’m almost halfway there, or there are only 19 panels left to go. The countdown helps. Over my career, most of the things I’ve made were time consuming. Immediate gratification is something I seldom experience. I get up each morning and go to work, and somewhere down the line, much to my surprise, I’ll find that I’m almost finished.

By the time I decided that it was now or never for the project, most of the small paint cans that I mentioned before had dried out. I planned to go to the hardware store and pick out some new colors, keeping with the theme of subtle variation. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to mix in a little acrylic with the colors that remained viable, that way there would be a little more variation. In mixing the paint for one the frames, I overshot a color and initially thought it was a little too intense. But rather than repainting it, I decided to make a shift to the color scheme. The painting was to be about the acumen of chance, and having a mix of colors could strengthen that sense of randomness.

Part of the inspiration for this painting, came from an abstract piece that I began 34 years ago. In it, all the squares are fixed, but because there are 450 of them, a certain amount of randomness is inevitable. The sky panels were painted individually so they could be moved around. Initially, the configuration of the grid was the only restriction I had on their placement. I liked the idea of not having a particular order in which to hang them. Going for a form of randomness, none of them would have been numbered. But as I thought about it, it was not hard for me to imagine some poor perfectionist struggling to get them hung. How could anyone ever really know if they found the perfect combination? I decided to take the stress away. I quickly laid everything out on floor without much thought about where anything should go. For anyone interested in creativity or design, that is part of the secret. Don’t over think things. Being casual or relaxed gets you at least halfway there. Standing on a chair, I began to move things around. When I saw a configuration that I really liked, I stopped to number them. It is impossible to ever know if my combination is the perfect one, but as far as I can tell, it works absolutely well enough.

As I work, change often happens along the way. I thought I was seeking randomness, but what I was really looking for, was the power of chance to help me find or design something beautiful. In this painting, I became like the nature that I rely on. You don’t have to figure out where the sky panels are supposed to go. I’ve done it for you. That’s what nature has always done for me. I never have to figure out where things need to be. I simply look out at the land in front of me. Because of that fact, I’ve never fully understood the concept of chaos. Everything appears to be related; even when things seem to happen for no reason, randomness is a form of order. A germinating seed becomes the weed that leads to a full blown forest.

Voran Realty Co., Post Office, and City Park, Belpre, Kansas, US Highway 50

Voran Realty Co., Post Office, and City Park, Belpre, Kansas, US Highway 50, 2016, acrylic on 18 shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames, 8  1/4 x 120 x 2 3/4 inches, Private Collection. Courtesy of Valley House Gallery

Perhaps, Belpre can best be described as a small town around 20 miles east of Kinsley, Kansas. That in and of itself is not much of a description, but since I’ve driven the highway, I know that Kinsley, Kansas is Midway U.S.A. There is a sign there with arrows pointing in opposite directions to New York and San Francisco. From that location, it is 1561 miles to either city. There is a roadside park with a black steam locomotive, picnic tables, and a small museum. I considered the mileage posted on the large painted arrows and without much thought decided to remain on the open plains for a little while longer.

As a proponent of the long view, I drove the length of the nation and saw only a few sites that could be described with a single snapshot. Without at least two consecutive views, it is hard to capture the idea of place. If you only shoot the barn, you have no field to tie the structure to the horizon. If you shoot only the field, there is no element to measure the distance between weeds stranded in clods of dirt and the sky. Without a sense of place, an image no matter how beautiful it may be is always a bit of an abstraction.

When I pulled into downtown Belpre, the first thing I saw was the abandoned real estate building. Looking at the surroundings, it was not difficult to see that business had been rough. The streets had been reduced to a covering of sandy gravel and commerce was limited to the US Post Office and another building that may have been a bar. On the other side of the street, there was a park with a painted playground in a field of trees that pretty much concealed the water tower. From that spot, there were also views of grain elevators, a steel building, a rutted country road, houses, a church, a building with no identifiable store front, and the possibility of an apartment building. I had come to capture the American scene; everywhere I looked it surrounded me, there was nothing to do but shoot everything I could see. Because of the height of the trees, I shot the expanse with the camera held vertically. I frequently go long, and there is always the option to shoot a 360 degree view of any location, but rarely is it imperative to capture the essence of a place. I’ve always liked parks and cemeteries. Often, they are the only visible things holding a town together. Once they go, a town is bound to be nothing more than crumbling rubble along a highway.

My father liked to camp and travel. As a child, I was only interested in mountains. The habitation of in-between places bored me. When I moved to Dallas after college, I was a long way from Saturday drives up into canyons. In the isolation of the big city on the plains, there was no way for me to connect to the nature I loved without several days of vacation. I had to learn to see other things. That separation from the mountainous West was the best thing to ever happen to me. In the absence of what can easily be identified as nature, I began to see cracks in the sidewalk and sky. Nature went from being the scent of tall pines on a mountainside to the idea of being there. As long as you are still living, you can connect, and that connection may be the storefronts of a shopping center, a barn, or vacated real estate building 20 miles east of Kinsley, Kansas. The moment was the thing I learned to really see and appreciate.

In 2005, I began painting the Nevada section of US Highway 50 known as the Loneliest Road in America. It was a familiar highway; my parents divorced when I was a child; 500 miles of mountains and valleys separated them. School years were spent living in rural Utah with my mother. Summertime took us to Reno, Nevada to live with my father. With the exception of a couple of years, I’ve been painting the highway ever since 2005. I expanded the survey in 2014 to include the entirety of the highway from Maryland to California. A vast project, it is not something that can be completed in a single season. It will likely require the rest of my life. I like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway. A theme without limitations, I see the highway as a kind of a clothesline to hang innovation on.

When I moved to Dallas in 1983, I took a job as a picture framer. It is a skill every artist should have given that it is a large part of the material cost of making art. Over the years, I’ve done some innovative framing, but it would be a mistake to think it was driven by the frame shop experience. I started painting when I was ten and was pretty confident in my ability, but I didn’t realize that I was creative until I hit college. I had become disenchanted with landscape painting and latched onto abstraction. That is the thing that saved painting for me. Being able to respond directly to what was happening on the canvas taught me that anything was possible. If anything was possible, then any box could be rethought or imagined. In the embrace of abstraction, I acquired the thinking skills to remake the landscaping painting I grew up with as a child. I could learn to paint the moment which is what I did when I started making dioramas of my neighborhood in Richardson, Texas. Of course, it wasn’t that straightforward. It never is. As an artist, you can’t be standing at point A and look out into the distance at position B and think “that looks pretty nice, I think I will go over there” because the beautiful place called B doesn’t exist until you create it, and that can’t happen without a willingness to leave part of your identity behind. You can never realize who you really are by remaining in the same place. While you may have some ideas of where you want to go, vision is not about culmination.

An initial drawback of the diorama was that it was housed in the structure of a shadow box and a shadow box casts a lot of shadow. My solution to reduce unwanted shadow entailed parting ways with the structure of the frame. That meant that in the entire framing industry, there were no moldings that I could use. At that point, I would have been better off if I’d been a cabinet maker. If I’d been one, perhaps I could have imagined a better solution, but even so, the one I came up with hung nicely on the wall and changed the relationship between the art and the frame. The two were no longer separate things to me. The diorama made painting a kind of architecture, and although I no longer make dioramas, I continue to see painting that way.

Four years ago, I woke up one night with an image of a concaved surface that leaned forward in my mind. If it came from a dream, I don’t remember it. A few years earlier when I left framing, I replaced my table saw, scroll saw, chop saw and router with a plastic miter box and handsaw. Speed is not everything. It eliminated a lot of noise and I could work anywhere. Also, there was the added satisfaction of knowing that my hands were basically safe. The structure I imagined would have required a lot of the equipment that I’d gotten rid of. I decided that what I wanted to do could be done using ragboard. The solution was a typical one. I always seemed to find a way to innovate within the confines of the situation. Building the structure out of layered ragboard really was the best solution; acid free paper isn’t going to crack with age, as wood has the habit of doing.

Once a shape is imagined, others come to mind. Although I’d already painted a couple pieces with pitched rooflines, I wanted something that was asymmetrical. I covered the laptop monitor with a window cut out of cardstock and made adjustments to it until I found the right angles. I liked what I saw. The asymmetry felt more dramatic. The sensation was a little more like being outside. The view was less fixed or stable. It is all too easy to see a rectangle as a plane. Although no longer a rectangle, the shape was still a plane. The tilt forward forced a sense of direction into the flatness of the panel. Even though the positioning moved in the opposite direction of the perspective I was trying to illustrate, conceptually it was the right way to go. Perhaps that sounded a little confusing, but if you look at what I’ve done, you will see that the sky is literally closer to you than the gravel of the street. Although overhead sky can never be reached, in a sense it is very close to us. When walking down the street, we never see our feet, making the connection to earth more distant than the drift of sunlit clouds in a shifting atmosphere.

The pitched roofline was fairly new when I decided to paint downtown Belpre, Kansas. I had painted just one of the asymmetrical variations before and it was on a horizontal panel. I wondered how a vertical version of it would work, and to answer the question I settled on a symmetrical sweep of 18 asymmetrical panels. A 360 degree view of a place has no fixed beginning. As long as the images are in sequence, you can start any place, and every time that is done the composition changes. Before the digital camera, I painted from photographs glued to matboard. I knew what the composition was going to be because I had joined everything together. If Belpre was a painting from back then, it would be a single panorama where everything was joined. I worked that way for years, and then one day tried to overlay photographs that didn’t want to align. When I pulled them apart, I liked being able to see them individually and how they related to one another at the same time. The separation retained an element of time that the joined image concealed. With the panorama it was easy to believe that you were looking at a frozen moment instead of a collection of them. The separation of the photographs was a better reflection of what I saw. The place wasn’t seen all at once. It took time to assemble the slanting of a horizon. I don’t think that a panorama made of separated images is better than one where the separation is removed. Whatever can be achieved is never going to be exactly what we see. Now that I know that there are at least two ways to view the horizon, I use both of them. I enjoy being able to look at things in new ways, and the new way really suited the 18 panels I chose to use for Belpre, Kansas.

Working from a monitor is different. Since I no longer print anything out, I’ve skipped a step. The completed painting is the same kind of surprise that I used to get when I aligned the photographs into what essentially was the sketch for the diorama. It’s interesting that the sequence I shot of the street just happened to be symmetrical. I could have started with the camera anywhere, and anywhere else it would not have been the same. Of course, I could have moved the sequence around until I achieved that balance. But, I painted the panels in the exact order that I shot them. I find that on some level to be really surprising. That was always the exciting thing about gluing the photographs together. Looking through the view finder, I never knew exactly what I had until the negatives became prints and they were joined together.

I am as surprised as anyone by the painting. Since I had never painted anything like this before, I didn’t know what the repetition of the pitched edges would look like hanging on the wall. Cheryl Vogel of Valley House Gallery in Dallas, told me a visitor saw a picket fence kind of thing in the configuration. I can also see that, but I never really knew what the individual panel would look like when it was repeated 18 times, particularly because I was building the panels at the same time I was painting them. That is part of the reason for making art. You can never be sure of what an idea will look like until you make it a physicality. I can see a picket fence kind of thing in the structure, but I also see the possibility of headstones. Both images are appropriate when thinking of small towns. One appeals to the safety of knowing your neighbors and all the things that go with small town living, the other considers the difficulty of trying to maintain a community outside the economic engine of the city. After having driven the length of US Highway 50, I am not hopeful about the fate of many of the in-between places. Having a small college nearby seems to help, as does having all the historic buildings intact. But even in the ruins of small communities, the romantic side of me has always seen a kind of richness out in the places where there is still room for a view.

Painting never is an Imitation of Nature

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, charcoal, paper, canvas, and wood
12 1/8 x 90 11/16 x 1 5/8 inches

Although, I’ve spent nearly 30 years dedicated to landscape painting and the idea of time and place, none of that would have been possible without my background in abstraction. The two are often thought of as completely separate ways of being. That has never been my experience. Painted observation is frequently seen as the imitation of nature. The problem with that idea is that there are no ready-made colors or brushstroke that symbolize earth and sky. A tree painted of lines, dots and scribbles is not a copy, any resemblance to a swaying pine is in every sense an invention.

Dallas, Texas Construction Site
acrylic, charcoal, water soluble crayon, wood, cardboard, and canvas
7 15/16 x 35 1/2 x 1 11/16 inches

Recently, I’ve made a few pieces that include both ends of the spectrum. In each case, abstraction was my starting point. As I considered the abstractions, they seemed to suggest things like slush and snow, or the subtle colors of an early Kansas spring. These combinations are not intended be a direction, but when they arise, I will let them happen. Over the years, I’ve done many things. I’ve painted leaves, vacant lots, cattle, mountaintops, and residential neighborhoods. There is no escaping nature. It can be found in the sights and sounds all around us. Walking always enabled me to tap into a place where the Grand Canyon and a trashcan are equal. I came to see that the moment was the thing that mattered. In it, all I could see was the lay of the land. From gravel to sky, came the understanding that the topography of paint, no matter how real, can never ever be anything but abstraction.

Battle of Coon Creek, Kansas Sampler, US Highway 50
acrylic, canvas, graphite, paper, and wood
34 15/16 x 7 5/16 x 1 1/2 inches

Road Trip Recollections of Offerle, Kansas, and the Limitations of Language and Paint

Large Puddle, Offerle, Kansas; US Highway 50
acrylic on ragboard panel
10 15/16 x 40 1/4 x 2 7/8 inches

I’ve been through Offerle, Kansas before. On this trip, I started documenting US Highway 50 in Ocean City, Maryland.  From there, I headed west photographing every town along the way. Even though it rained for several days, it is hard not be drawn to water. I stopped the car and stood as close as I could to the large puddle. I say puddle because it didn’t greet me as I rolled through town on a previous trip. However, the grasses that grow in the heart of the depression, indicate that it can often be a captivating place for moving water.

I’ve heard that a picture can paint a thousand words. I must say, that has seldom been my experience. It has never left me feeling chatty. I always seemed to be completely blank when it came time to explain the why of what I painted during college critiques. As I looked at this most recent painting, I found I had nothing to say, and wound up looking at Wikipedia for inspiration. About all it offered was the name of Lawrence Offerle as one of the settlers that founded the town in 1876. The last census placed the population at 199. Over time, that figure has not varied much. It appears to have always been a small town surround by sky.

If painting can paint a word or two, that language is going to be limited to visual symbols. That means painting is just a mouth full of nouns that can never form a sentence. Without the ability to form a sentence, painting can never be narrative. The idea that there is a kind of painting that can tell a story is fiction. Although painting can be very good at describing things we can see, it can’t carry on a conversation. If a painting is of a woman handing an apple to a man, it can say “woman handing apple to man.” It cannot say “Genesis, God, Eden, or the fall of man.” The painting is just a painting. The story comes with us. That is why the meaning behind an archaeological site can be so hard to decipher. If we were not the Egyptians, all we’re going to see are rows of people, birds and cats standing in strange positions. A painting of little moving people is likely to be described as narrative. But, how does that differ from a painting of cattle grazing a rolling hillside? The one thing narrative paintings seem to have in common is the ingredient of people. I guess that differentiation does tell us something. We only think people are important enough to inform us. The rest of nature doesn’t really seem to matter. If we insist that one kind of painting can tell stories, then we must extend speech to all painting, because little moving people can’t say any more than a painting of a rotting apple in a basket. If a painting is of little moving people, all it can say is “little moving people.” The idea that an angry chicken shrunk them comes from us.

I thought I might try to describe another scene of Offerle in writing. Although it could take a month or more to paint that scene, it would in fact be an easier thing to do. Nothing captures the moment better than a picture. But, human thought is not a painting or a snapshot. To tackle the thought process requires language. The painting of the puddle could never reveal any daydreams, or say that it was just one of many stops along the highway as I made my way across the nation.

Around a slight bend, a stone marker reads WELCOME TO OFFERLE. The supporting posts for the horizontal sign are also stone. On the left one, EDWARDS is vertically written. The stone post to the right chimes in with the word COUNTY placing the town on the western flank of Kansas. Gray grass is littered with a green touch of spring. A surviving snowbank remains cradled in a depression by the shoulder of the road. Behind the sign, a display of farm equipment covers a large patch of grass. It is not hard to tell that the machines are from the past, exposure has left the paint extremely weathered. An elongated building of corrugated steel resembles an arena. Three out buildings are painted white. A two story house with a porch faces the highway.  It too is white with a roof of green singles. The sky is light. The trees are bare. Three utility poles string a strand of wire out to the highway. Out in front of the house, two rows of junipers, browned by the bite of winter, separate the yard from the sporadic flow of traffic. Although radiant at the edge, a distant water tower is hollowed out by shadow. A small portion of the road momentarily rolls out of view. A knitted thicket of trees and utility poles hides behind the massive colonnade of a grain elevator. On that side of the highway, there’s predominance of metal buildings in colors of steel gray, pale ochre and cream. Yellow canisters shine bright in a field where nearly all the other propane tanks are painted white. There’s also a building of brick with a low pitched roof that could be a school or church. A radio tower would pierce the sky if it were closer, but at this distance, it is a faint line rising out of an industrial horizon. The highway is a polished gray. The white line that separates the shoulder from the rest of the road occupies two thirds of the pavement. The yellow line that divides the highway, merges into a ridge of weeds and a rail line of steel.

What I tried to describe, reads right to left because the welcome sign was the reason for my stop. If I painted what I tried to describe, it would probably read in the opposite direction, with the pale pavement sailing towards a distant water tower. However the remains of a bright white snowbank may have countered the pull. I have never really cared to address the question of balance. My only concern has been to give voice to the entirety of a location. The importance of angles and focal points can be settled by those interested in composition. The idea of time and place is easier to see without the overlay of artificial restrictions. Although a little long, what was written didn’t begin to capture what could be grasped in an instant with a painting or snapshot. I found I could not describe what I saw with any accuracy. Most of the detail had to be deleted to remain readable. Any image that fills your head cannot be what I saw as I stopped the car to take a picture. In this sense, a picture can paint a thousand words, but seeing does not begin to be a thing called language. Although I may be able to paint the brightness of spring, the wind can never whisper or reveal the origins of a town named after Lawrence Offerle.

  

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 [LB1]

US Highway 50, Granada, Colorado and the Amache Internment Camp

Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50
acrylic
8 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches

In 2005, I began photographing US Highway 50.  My focus was a section of highway known as the Loneliest Road in America that traverses Nevada.  Raised in Utah and Nevada, I grew up crossing the Great Basin.  An area of interior drainage, the rivers never make it to the sea.  Instead, they vanish in shallows of stagnation.  The Great Salt Lake is a good example of this.  My parents lived at opposite ends of the 500 mile divide of mountains and valleys.  Highway 50 was the connection between Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada.  In 2012 I extended the highway theme to include Colorado.  This past fall, I covered the rest of the highway on a road trip that took me all the way to Maryland.  This is not a project to be completed in a single season.  It will likely involve the rest of my life, but I really like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway.

I wanted to capture all the towns along the way.  As I traveled, I realized that kind of exactness would never actually happen.  Maps never entirely capture the idea of habitation.  What constitutes a town or community is not always straightforward.  With all the clusters that happen along the way, the abstraction of a map was necessary.  I missed some towns because I didn't know I missed them.  Sometimes I turned around to fix the mistake, and sometimes I didn't.  Then there was the problem of cities and the surrounding suburbs.  I confined cities to skylines and downtown intersections.  I didn't hit museums or spend much time dining out.  This wasn't about tourism, although it often touched forgotten places, the kind of places only known to those coming home to houses shadowed by freight trains on tracks that preceded miles of automotive travel.

Heading west out of Kansas, the sun had just come up.  In Granada, Colorado, grain elevators bathed in morning sunlight.  I pulled over just in time to catch a passing Amtrak.  I didn't realize or imagine that Granada had been the site of an internment camp.  That knowledge came to me later at a rest area.  However, I recently caught it on my way home from Maryland.  There wasn't much. There never is.  The only standing structure was not from the past, but rather the reconstruction of a guard tower.  Signs at the entrance provided a brief history.  The Granada Relocation Center also known as Amache held 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry from August 1942 to October 1945.  This was one of ten camps that held 110,000 prisoners.  Two thirds of the prisoners were American citizens.  The interesting part about the figure is that another internment camp has the number at 120,000.  I noticed the discrepancy because there happens to be a camp not far from where I live.  Out in the desert of west Millard County, Utah are the remains of the Central Utah Relocation Center also known as the Topaz Internment Camp.  Whatever the number, wartime seemed to inflame racism, a racism that many are never willing to acknowledge. 

The reconstruction of a guard tower at the Granada Relocation Center,
 also known as the Amanche Internment Camp.

The Central Utah Relocation Center, also known as the Topaz Interment Camp.

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
acrylic, charcoal, paper, canvas and wood
12 1/8 x 90 11/16 x 1 1/2 inches

 

The photographs for this painting were taken as I was preparing to leave Dallas.  What got this started was not a photograph, but rather an abstract painting completed a couple years later in Utah.  Although the photographs were taken on Super Bowl Saturday 2011, I had no idea that there was anything special about the day until I started walking past all the banners on McKinney Avenue.  Snow is rarely an issue in Dallas, but I lived there long enough to have seen many snowstorms.

 

Though not part of the plan, it is appropriate that the painting grew out of abstraction.  In doing so, it captures the Dallas years from the very beginning.  When I arrived in the city, I was an abstract painter.  I never planned on doing anything else.  It just became a very uncomfortable way of being.  I believed that abstract painting was about chasing the unknown.  It seemed like the sustainability of a style didn’t really fit that position.  I didn’t see any way to continue that kind of openness and have any kind of a career.  Gallery representation implied style, something I could not do and remain open to the lifeblood of discovery.  And of course, there was the problem that a life devoted to total abstraction was also a rejection of nature.  There was no way to engage nature without imitating it.  The joy of abstraction may have been fine for a while, but it didn’t resolve the conflict I had with an art philosophy that expected the depiction of life to be designed.  Though I absolutely hated the idea, retreating to abstraction as though it were some kind of monastery had only taken me away from the nature that had been the reason for taking up painting in the first place.

 

Art history left an impression that art is ever changing and that great artists redefine the expected. Naturally, I wanted to be a great artist.  Who aspires to grasp the average?  Although I graduated from college in 1983, abstract expressionism was the definition of new for me.  I often wondered how I could possibly surpass it.  I decided that drawing would be my route to discovery.  Years later, I realize that the new can come from what is already known if seen through questions.  While the revolutionary is almost always out of reach, it is not that hard to be a little bit different.

 

Volkswagen Bus
charcoal
4 5/8 x 6 5/16 inches

 

I was extremely shy, so I sought something extraordinary.  With the diorama, I thought I had hit upon something that needed no explanation.  Rather than compete, I ended up creating my own category.  Unfortunately, such comfort and bliss never really lasts.  After having this truly beautiful thing define me, I began to resent the fact that parts of me had been left behind.  To be totally invested in the diorama in the beginning made perfect sense.  It was new.  Years later, you cannot remain a master of your craft by repeating the past.  I never stopped loving the dioramas.  I simply quit making them in the same way I quit making many other things many times before.  There is no reason to hold onto knowledge that always remains, and discovery should be thought of as a journey through provisional truths.  In my quest to capture aspects of nature, I am never going to be handed the ultimate answer.  I’m always giving something away in order to attain something else.  What can be gained by walking away from accomplishments?  Knowledge.  That is the one way in which I am better than the 26 year old that made charcoal drawings.  I could never outdo those drawings today, but I am no longer at the mercy of mood swinging muses or luck.  I can resolve most any problem, and artworks seldom end in failure.

 

Residential Romanticism, Richardson, Texas
mixed media diorama
7 5/16 x 10 5/16 x 2 1/16 inches

 

Entering the second year of the diorama, I began to realize that the world was already composed.  All I needed to bring to the table was engagement.  And, how difficult could that be when life permeates the sparkle of sunshine and the weight of cold winter rain.  Composition was quickly tossed away along with a need for the painterly.  I was no longer interested in paint as a statement.  A brushstroke’s only function was to convey information.  I focused my attention on what had been previously thought of as meaningless detail.  It was not a heroic brushstroke that identified the moment as time and place, but rather a wind chastened paper cup meandering through gravel near the weed infested hedges of a Chinese restaurant that didn’t quite make it.  What happened when there was nothing but content left?   Awareness.   Before the time of the diorama, I never realized that most of the drama I saw as evening settled in was not the result of stunning contrasts, but rather the coming together of light and shadow.  Trees on a horizon only ignite because colors like orange, purple and pink are on the verge of merging into obscurity.  We never think of contrast as noonday concrete and dark stunted shadows.  But if contrast actually had anything to do with drama, Caravaggio would have painted sun baked parking lots.  Another misconception I had was the idea that contrast created space.  Try to imagine painting the depth of shadows on grass or capturing the weight of a stellar sky after a cold front has blown all the tiny clouds away.  Subtlety is the thing that is needed, otherwise a painting of a soccer ball ends up looking like the moon, flat in any of its phases.  There is no replacement for observation.

 

The making of dioramas and paintings can be best understood if you think watercolor.  I took a watercolor course in college.  As a medium it never served my purposes, but the methodology of laying things out ahead of time became vital to describing the world around me.  The dioramas changed the way I painted.  What I wanted to do required drafting.  There was still plenty of freehand things to do.  In fact success depended upon them, but in the long drawn out world of freeways and parking lots, mathematics kept everything together.  The very structure required forethought and planning.  Without realizing it, art had become a kind of architecture.  The photograph also became central to painting because the details mattered.  There was no other way to capture the nature of place.  I saw acrylic and pastel as flawed mediums.  Acrylic was dull and pastel was just too vibrant.  An acrylic base coat close to the pastel colors on top solved that problem.  In watercolor, detail is achieve by going over what is already painted with what is called a dry brush.  The brush has just enough pigment to catch the tooth of the paper, leaving the lower areas unscathed by the new layer of paint.  I applied the same idea to the diorama.  The pastel and the glued on bits of paper and fabric functioned as dry brush on washes of acrylic paint.  With something like pastel, it is important to know where the light areas are ahead of time, otherwise you end up with a dusty pile of mush that resembles no concrete street ever seen before.  Even with something like oil, once the white canvas is gone, there is no getting back to such a light and airy place.  As transient as clouds seem to be, they often need the permanence of a set aside blocked out from the very beginning.  Otherwise, you may never capture the anvil rise of water vapor in the sky.

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
center panel

 

The abstract painting reminded me of a splash.  I immediately thought of the photographs from Super Bowl Saturday.  Snowmelt flew into the air as momentum divided standing water.  The phenomenon was easy to catch, it happened over and over again as traffic passed through poorly drained intersections.  I made a little painting of a shining intersection and placed inside the abstraction.  In drawing and painting, I’d been playing with black and white and sepia toned imagery.  I included both as a part of the design.  Although the abstraction was based in white, the right side of it leaned sepia, while the left end leaned more towards a black and white spectrum.  The paintings of the woman and the splash extended that pattern.  I wanted both ends to be in color and painted them on slanted panels.  I didn’t want any sections to be the same.  It is an odd thing to say, but I was looking for irregular symmetry.  

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
2 right panels

 

As I hit McKinney Avenue, I began to see people out and about.  Some were even walking.  A woman walked ahead of me for a couple of blocks until she reached her destination.  I don’t hesitate to photograph people if they happen to be a part of the landscape, but I never set out capture them anymore than I seek out cars or utility poles.  I am not searching for specific things, but rather all the information that a moment can hold.  Having said that, it is always more difficult for me to photograph people.  I require a lot of personal space to feel comfortable, so when I photograph others, I feel like I am violating privacy.  The nice thing about painting the woman is that it dealt with a fallacy I’ve heard my entire life.  The idea that people are harder to paint is never questioned.  It is easy to see why the idea thrives.  It is simply a matter of focus.  We are people, not mountains or trees and we want to see ourselves portrayed accurately.  We’re not nearly as concerned about our surroundings.  In some sense, this was obvious to me even as a child.  I remember seeing kids at the park pounding out mountains of sand that resembled loaves of dough.  Obviously, they had never really looked at mountains or sand.  The forces of erosion are the same on any scale.   I have to say that the woman was the easiest thing for me to paint.  The slush of melting snow was much more trouble.  Without a people bias, that should not be surprising.  Our environmental surroundings are more varied than we will ever be.

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
inner right panel

 

I saved the splash for last because I thought it would be the most difficult panel to paint.  What concerned me was the waves of water droplets raining up and down a randomness that is never random.  There are always patterns, so it was a matter of capturing those patterns while maintaining the sense of energy that had created the splash.  I wasn’t sure I had it in me.  But once I had the basic structures established, my hand began to catch the kind of brushstrokes that evoked the joyous rage of water droplets in flight.  Thankfully, it was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. 

 

Uptown Splash, Dallas, Texas
2 left panels

 

I became aware of Gerhard Richter sometime in the mid-80s’.  Flipping through a magazine, I saw representational and abstract paintings made by the same painter.  Finally, someone did what should have done from the very beginning.  The divide between figurative and nonfigurative painting created a kind of schizophrenia.  Art world factions couldn’t seem to see that all painting was related.   Art talk can be a bit misleading.  Although action painting as a phrase is descriptive, it veils the fact that it is also all about inaction.  What makes a De Kooning great is all the brushstrokes that never happened.  A lot of inaction allowed the movements that mattered to remain.  In this way, a De Kooning has a restraint that something painted outdoors simply cannot afford.  Plein air painting can’t escape chasing the sun.  The imitation of nature as an idea completely misses the point.  It implies that rendering the visual world around us is less thoughtful, that it isn’t that sophisticated to replicate what already is.  The problem with that attitude is that a painted cloud is no copy.  There are no readymade brushstrokes that symbolize sky.  Painting is always a form of abstraction.  There is the idea that a painting that does not try transcribe the visual world around us is somehow newer than a painting that depicts an old neighborhood.  There was a time when that would have been true.  But such occasions are rare and never last very long.  Once painters like Rothko and Pollock painted the unnamable, all the hard work was already done.  At great risk to themselves, they pushed the limits of what paint could be to where it currently stands.  Many of the brushstrokes and splatters we now use are the ones they made acceptable.  So contrary to popular belief, an abstract painting is not any further from the idea of imitation than a painting of an ominous cloud.  A cloud must always be invented.  Although abstract painting may not be about the predetermined, it does imitate the language of paint.  That is what gives it credibility.  That is not to say that abstract painting is no longer relevant.  Not having an objective can be extremely dangerous and requires a tightrope kind of focus that doesn’t happen painting puddles of slush.  Slush has its own challenges.  As a surface it is hard to quantify, and it really pushes your ability to see color.  The two disciplines enhance one another.  Although art is all about ideas, it has no capacity for language.  Whether it is a graphite grid on canvas or field of sunflowers this side of a railroad crossing, the question that always remains is an abstract one.  Is it beautiful?  As old fashioned as that may be, that highly subjective question is the only one that really matters.