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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imitation of Nature, Impaled Leaves, Photorealism, and a Plausibility of Scale

Imitation of Nature Number 21: An Impaled
Drawing of an Autumn Leaf
mixed media
11 1/2 x 11 11/16 x 1 1/2 inches

Made in the late 1990’s, these drawings grew from a harvest of leaves.  Gathered from many walks in the bottom of the canyon, the collection matured in diversity.  The search was for different types and sizes.  I was interested in color variation and patterns of damage.  I wanted the not so pretty along with specimens of perfection.  Perfection was sought in a range of life inhabited by leaves.  The sampling was similar to science.  I was invested in an aesthetic that was democratic in its representation; I thought quotas were an appropriate way to view the abundant nature of leaves.  



I’ve always liked leaves.  However, having a degree in painting caused me to examine patterns in ways that I may not have done as a child.  Painting is what I do.  Not that many years ago, I was entirely devoted to abstraction.  It was hard not notice how well nature did what I strived for in paint.  Every leaf was unique.  Yet, there was no struggle.  Autumn knew exactly how to blot spots of pink in fields of yellow, burgundy and brown.  I liked how miniscule holes broke the cellulose weave of fibrous treads, a brittle screen as delicate as tobacco.





Imitation of Nature Number 32: An Impaled Drawing
of an Autumn Leaf
12 7/8 x 12 3/16 x 1 1/2 inches

 



For quite a while I thought of enlarging the specimens I collected.  I imagined them as large painted shapes, plywood cutouts covered in canvas.  They were to be hung far enough from the wall to cast shadows.  The presentation I imagined was fairly standard.  Contemporary thought seldom thinks outside the box.  The very phrase as a matter of fact verifies mass entrapment.  Anyone I mentioned the leaves to, saw or imagined them hung in the same manner.  The fact that it was easily seen, was for me a strike against the concept.



I finally decided that the thing I really wanted to do was draw them to scale.  This gave me an opportunity to play with the plausibility factor.  Normally, it doesn’t matter how masterfully a thing is rendered, the truth gives it away.  There is no way a painting of a mountain or house can be seen as real.  The inaccuracy of scale clearly gives it away.  While a painting may remind viewers of Mount Catherine, or the wilds of childhood, no one is fooled by the representational illusion of paint.  The best that can ever be achieved, is to fool some initially into believing that paint is photographic, as in photorealism.  There again, it’s a matter of scale.  Although larger than snapshots, the paintings of Chuck Close and Richard Estes could possibly be large photographic prints.

It was then a matter of presentation.  I decided the drawn should be cutout.  I thought of hinging them to a background like you would with any drawing or print, but decided to mount them on tacks.  This gave them a physical presence.  The extension added sculptural weight to paper.  Now paper had the power to cast shadow.  No longer two-dimensional, paper became an object to display in a specimen box.



When thinking about titles, I considered possible objections to the leaves.  One was the fact that they might be seen as leaves. Being that literal leaves no luscious brushstrokes to grab onto, and in an environment where paint is paint for its own sake, there’s a straight up fear of imitating nature.  Although sometimes considered a lowly act, it may be wise to consider that painting in not language.  There are no existing symbols that can be strung together to form even a simple rendition of a banana.  Imitating nature as a concept comes from a place of not understanding paint.  All painting is abstract.  The formation of imagery out of lines, dots and scribbles is nothing but invention.  No one is imitating anything.  A brushstroke that’s more than a brushstroke could be the highest form of abstraction.  I incorporated the possibility of derision as a badge of honor.  Because the mounting was unusual, I labeled punctured paper as impaled.  I wanted the drawings of leaves to be a celebration of nature, and that coincidentally can only be achieved through observation.





Imitation of Nature Number 28: An Impaled Drawing
of an Autumn Leaf
mixed media
14 3/8 x 13 x 1 1/2 inches

 



Thrashing Birds and a Notion of Ownership

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

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

My sister's home in rural Utah

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

One end of the feedlot.

House in the bottom of one of the fields.



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

Topaz Japanese Internment Camp hospital foundation.

A Ragtag Rendition of Topography, Something from the Early 1980's

A Ragtag Rendition of Topography
mixed media
12 x 15 3/4 inches

Sometimes half the fun is finding a name for a painting.  I am not sure it ever had a title.  Yesterday, while walking in the woods it came to me.  I already knew I wanted to use topography.  Looking at snow hidden within the thicket of sticks and branches, I heard the word ragtag.  It seemed to fit in a literal kind of way.  The painting was in part old paint rags.  The random arrangement was left mostly untouched.  I liked the unsaturated nature of the paint.  The fabric was still free to breath.

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