Thoughts on Dallas and Landscape Painting: An All Day Excursion of Richardson Heights Shopping Center



End of the Day at the North End of the Richardson Heights Shopping Center...
Left panel detail
mixed media diorama
11 7/8 x 63 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches
1987

 One of the joys of not having to rely on composition is that the entire world is open to you.  The world abounds in the local.  The exhilaration of travel can be had by riding a bike or strolling down an alleyway.  A walk across a parking lot can fill with a sense wonder. The peeling paint of a rusted dumpster may be a bit of a kick, a heart rising skip, the arrested freshness that comes with every new encounter.  With this state of mind, every day, every time of day, every atmospheric condition is splendid.  Life is even bright in stormy weather when design no longer denies a child eye view of everything as treasure.  A vacant lot becomes a place of nature.  Even blacktop and shiny metal cars beam radiantly.  Stepping towards the theatre, life happens in the wind.  Trees and shrubs throw off pollen dust to the flutter and buss of flying insects.  Car doors open and close in moments of lowly grandeur.

End of the Day... full two panel view

 

I once spent an entire day observing the habits of Richardson Heights Shopping Center.  I arrived before dawn, and left just after dusk.  It was Sunday.  There wasn’t much going on.  The Texas Blue Laws were still enforced.  Given the current political conditions of the state, the past could easily seem like a golden age of liberalism.  Anyway, the idea was to do an entire exhibition based on a single day in a parking lot.  I know that’s taking the idea of local to the extreme, but I was confident there was more than enough to see to make for a very exciting show.  Although I didn’t go that route, I easily could have, and some very nice dioramas came from the all-day excursion around the grounds of the shopping center.

The tools of the trade didn’t include pencils, sketch pads, canvas or paint.  The engagement with any particular place is too enjoyable to be distracted by the practice of painting.  I came to see and feel the life of a specific place in my neighborhood.  To help with that endeavor, I had a camera and a notebook.  I brought a folding chair to sit in and a tape recorder to capture sound.  Most of the noise was traffic.  The ebb and flow was the aggravated ease of a lazy summer Sunday.  The recorder also captured a chirping scurry of birds as dawn gave way to shape and shadow.  Early in the morning, a Corvette pulled into the north end of the shopping center.  The car door opened and a policeman stepped out.  Within no time at all, I understood what was happening.  The shopping center filled in with cars.   He was a crossing guard for those going to church.  There is no way to explain this if you have not lived in Dallas.  Although most people don’t seem that pious during the week, when Sunday comes around church overtakes state, and traffic patterns are managed to meet the needs of church going people.  When church was over, the parking lot quickly emptied out.  I wandered around taking pictures.  I noted business names, inspected litter and paid some attention to the activity of ants.  When you have all day, you have all kinds of time for long drawn out yawns and internal bouts of fascination.  Both modes of being seem to be completely compatible.  I noticed meandering cracks.  I stumbled on bits of scattered gravel no longer the embedded compression of blacktop conglomerate.  Faded paint, an exquisitely eroded layer of cap rock divided gray from gray.  The powerful glare of an ever present sun was everywhere.  In pale gray heat, little puffy clouds followed a shadowy path of quiet annihilation.

Around noon, cars crowded in around Wyatt’s cafeteria.  Dining out on Sundays also seemed to be an eventful part of going to church.  Dallas was the churchiest place I’d ever seen, and I grew up in Utah.  Perhaps, when religion is practiced that casually, there isn’t any cost to looking handsome or pretty.  You simply change clothes and persona.  Anyway, the one thing parking lots seem to have in common is an inability to encourage walking.  I once worked a couple of doors down from a fitness center.  Women drove around and around looking for the perfect spot.  God forbid if hips should have to walk.  I wonder if any of them stopped to consider how ridiculous it was to labor that hard to avoid exercise while trying to exercise.  Steps don’t seem to count for much unless they include dues, mirrors, and a cold interior of fitness machines.

Over the years, I’ve heard people say that people are the hardest things to paint.  Naturally as a landscape painter, I don’t much care for the idea.  The statement insinuates that trees are not as hard to paint as faces, and further proclaims that an apple, napkin and hat, and a cold beer stand in lower tiers of difficulty.  I am certain that is not in fact a fact.  Almost any mountain slope is far more varied than any variation in the human face.  The noted difficulty comes from a consciousness that places the human race as the crown of creation.  We spend all our time thinking of ourselves.  Even in societies where a reverence for nature was more prevalent, that reverence was still centered on the inhabitants of man.  With that mindset, nothing else has ever received equal time or consideration.  The standard for mountains has never even matched that of kitchen utensils.  Anyone can paint a mountain.  It’s not hard to see why we would have environmental problems.  We only see ourselves.  As a result, landscape painting has never received true scrutiny.  It is perfectly fine for a mountain to be nothing more than a few gray lines on a horizon.  Very few deeply care about nature.  You can tell that just by the way they drive.  A highway is nothing more than a forgettable stretch between destinations.   Since a person is not a tree, a cloud, or a sage covered bluff, there is no need to heed the particularity of how cloud movements continuously reconfigure cloud formations.  Many painters simply make the stuff up and never really seem notice that the grey underbelly of a cloud isn’t really any darker than the blue sky that surrounds it.  The same kind of laxness won’t fly when considering the profile and tone of a human face.  Try making one up.  You won’t get away with it.  That’s why I have a bit of a problem with the outdoor crowd.  They just paint to feel artistically free.  Painting outside has nothing to do with understanding the subtlety of light.  I think it’s time to put the people thing in perspective.  John Singer Sargent would never have had the success he had if he had plein aired the privileged faces of the Gilded Age.



End of the Day... left panel view

 

As evening began to settle in, my day of observation came to a close.  Although short lived, the pastel atmosphere began to relinquish heat.  After initial cooling, the air seemed to warm up again.  I know that’s probably not the case.  The sensation was most likely tied to increased humidity.  The sun had set.  It was safe for trees to begin to release some of the moisture that had been stored during the heat of the day.  The sound of crickets could not yet compete with cicadas, the noisy creatures of heat that pass the day away in marked intervals of intensity.  Deciduous trees leaned more and more toward evergreen.  Lavender meandered twilight across the sky.  Street lamps intensified the weight of darkness.  Starlight was nothing more than a glimmer of major constellations and possibly a passing satellite.   I snapped a few finals shots as evening settled in.  I loaded my stuff into the truck glad to call it a day, and drove home to my apartment on the other side of Central Expressway.




End of the Day... right panel view

Charcoal, Paint, Plaster and Collage: Listening to The Fixx and Trying to Find a New that Doesn’t Include Abstraction

Downtown
mixed media
29 1/8 x 37 1/8 inches
1985

In the mid-1980s’ the FIXX was a large part of my consciousness.  Their sound represented something new as I was trying to find something new myself.  The sound sounded urban, and confined to an apartment building, Richardson, Texas was the most urban lifestyle I had ever lived.

I worked in charcoal.  For me the medium was not about sketching.  I took it seriously and saw the drawings as painting.  Some of the paintings wound up being very large.  At 40 x 60 inches, I’d pretty much reached the upper limits of paper.  To go any further, I needed a path that didn’t include paper or glass.  I am not sure why I thought charcoal on plastered canvas would work.  Although it had to be sealed, the combination of charcoal, plaster, canvas and paint had a physical grit that was fitting for a vision of the city.

Downtown near DMA
charcoal and acrylic
40 x 56 inches
1985

Although not on plaster, previous experience had included stretched fabric, so I began to think of black and white paint.  Most of the time, I didn’t use paint out of a tube, but chose to mix charcoal powder in with matte medium.  I liked the fact that it lacked consistency.  It was like a gritty black pancake batter that sometimes cracked as it dried.  The painting didn’t happen as a single phase or endeavor.  Although always urban, it was a while before it acquired the edge I was looking for.  When I started, it may not have been about Less Cities, More Moving People.  However, I frequently listen to the FIXX.  I didn’t use it as background music.  I never cared to listen passively.  Which means, I listened to a lot of silence.  I hated places where people automatically turned the music on as soon as they got to work, and then played it the entire day as a way of escaping.  I’m all for music as another realm, but continuous sound only confirms a drowning reality of an inability to break away for even a moment.  I don’t know if this is the case, but it seemed to me that people who needed television or radio as a constant companion were afraid of being alone, that an empty mind might hold the mangled sounds of desperation.  It is not that I was free from pain, it’s just that I enjoyed thought even when it hurt.  There was a part of me that didn’t want to hide.  Instead of trying to dull my senses with drugs or alcohol, the weekend was all about seeing.  Life often happened within the cracks of a morning stroll.  I didn’t need a hot cup of coffee to get me started.  There was never any need to start a day of observation.  Sights and sounds simply invited life in.  It was easy to love the discarded cigarette butts and fallen leaves of my surroundings.

Moving from black and white to color included elements of collage and spray paint.  I guess I didn’t want definite edges, or maybe the spray can was just sitting around and I grabbed it to see what would happen.  Painting often goes no deeper than that.  Meaning comes from action.  An idea is just an idea until it becomes a physical presence.  For example, I decided to write about this painting.  However, I never really know what I want to say, so I start typing.  Most of the time the sentences are a mess, and vision is a collision of unexpected thoughts.  For some odd reason, writing is sharper than the mind behind it.  If there happens to be an eloquence of sound, it is a compound of labor, a sorting out of sorts, a routine of shaking out shapes from within the instigation.  Inspiration is not that useful.  It is highly unreliable.  It seldom shows up until most of the work is done.  Inspiration is greedy and should never really be trusted.  When the writing finally comes to a conclusion, it feels like taking all the credit, sounding like a pie in the sky job creator.

Although I don’t know anything about music, it was something I always wanted to do.  I like the way it makes me feel.  I guess I am not alone, it does the same for many others.  When I listened to the FIXX, I thought I heard the familiar sounded out in the new.  Often, sudden jarring stiffs seemed to fit.  The music reminded me of collage. The ripping of guitar and the edginess of torn paper seemed to be related.  Listening back on the music now, a lot has changed.  The Cold War is over.  However social isolation remains in check even with the added connections of social media.  With ever present connectedness, the new becomes old in a flash.  Eloquence can quickly be trivialized by a piling on of posts, and I suspect revolution can sound like a round of passive advertising.  Oh my, I’m a Liberal got 37 Likes. 

I liked the music because it wasn’t about sex, drugs or rock and roll.  It was about things like fear and taking a stand.  I often wonder how the young can be so smart.  I don’t really know the lyrics, although I hear them in the sound that moves through my mind.  Less cities, more moving people lyrically stated the pace of industrialization.  What a great chorus line.  Farming became so productive, that smaller communities were no longer self-sufficient.  Less cities meant bigger cities as more and more people moved away from the countryside.  Employment can be a kind of isolation.  Without control, creativity can easily be spent just working to survive.  With no ties to the environment, consumption can tend to become a measure; I spend therefore I am.  However, it provides no connection to the ballad of playground swing.  One legal dose of environment can never compare to being tied to a land of blue skies where crops are dependent upon water.  Unfortunately, many no longer have those connections and live in world where weather was never intended to rain on anyone’s parade.  Because water is always on tap or bottled in plastic, a sense of security is based on a notion of control.  I think that in fact leads to more isolation.  In a world where devices equal connection, what happens when the power goes out or a friend doesn’t respond immediately to a text?  The ability to connect has always come from knowing the power of isolation.  With that, I will let the FIXX close with the song Outside.

One legal dose of environment and The ballad of a playground swing are lines written by Cy Curnin of the FIXX for the song Camphor.

 

Dusk and Construction
charcoal, acrylic, collage, plaster and canvas
33 x 47 1/4 inches
1985

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.