A Small Unsigned Painting by William Vaughn Howard

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

This painting was given to me by my painting professor William Vaughn Howard. I studied with him as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno in the early 80s. Unsigned, I imagine that it was painted not long before he died in 1986.

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

The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50

The Battle of Coon Creek Historical Marker, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on five shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames
6 x 48 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches

The historical marker for The Battle of Coon Creek is located two miles east of Kinsley, Kansas, on U.S. Highway 50. Although the sign failed to position the conflict, I am fairly certain that it didn’t happen right by the highway. The Arkansas River crossing comes up before that of Coon Creek, on the way in to town. It may have made more sense, to place the historical marker somewhere along the creek. Although where it is might be closer to the actual site, it’s not that easy to envision the battle terrain, surrounded by mounds of prairie covered sand dunes. I liked the historical maker; it was a designated place to pull over. That fondness extends to any set of trashcans cans, with or without the presence of picnic tables. The opportunity to stop and inhale a spot along the highway is a significant part of traveling. Without it, a journey can be reduced to mileage, a meaningless quest for destiny, where time steals from the spectacle of oncoming horizons.  

 

The battle involving U.S. troops and Plains Indians occurred in 1848. I’ve decided to skip most of the posted information. In two trips across Kansas, separated by a year and a half, a new sign replaced the old with a different history. That discrepancy could be due to what to cover in the limited space of couple of paragraphs. However, what each sign had in common was the description of an Indian woman clothed in silver ornaments and a scarlet dress, supervising the removal of the wounded while riding around on horseback. Based on the difference between signs, a motorist restricted to seeing just one of them, would come away with a less complicated view of the solidity of history, written about events grounded in the shifting sands of Kansas.

 

The intriguing thing about photographing a site is that I usually know how much to include. However, once a scene is moved to my computer, I no longer recall exactly what I saw, until the information is laid out for painting. When I saw the pencil rendering extend across the panels, I was delighted and surprised by the latitude of the tree’s shadow. Although I keenly remember seeing the shadow, I was unaware of how much it would influence the mood of the painting.

 

Painting a designated place to pull over is not a new arena for me. I’m smitten by any landscaping that leans into the immediacy of scenery. I find such a site a difficult invitation to skip. Although my father was not in my thoughts when I stopped to look around, when the painting begin to materialize, something about the broad shadow and the vista beyond, reminded me of traveling with him. I’ve consumed a lot of time wondering why that should be. Traversing the plains of Kansas was not an experience I had with my dad. Everything about life included something to do with mountains. When you’re raised in Utah and Nevada, there is no place to go, where you can outpace the face of geology. Anywhere out on the highway, slumbering mountains arise all the way to the coast of California. The only thing that this painting shares with the memories of traveling with my dad is the presence of a trashcan. It’s hard to believe that such a minor detail could be so meaningful. But as he drove, he seemed to fill ordinary mileage in with a sense of adventure. The highway wasn’t just about getting to an astonishing site, it also included a veneration for all the places in between.

 

I never uncovered a specific reason why this painting reminded me of traveling with my father. Perhaps, it just comes down to where I happen to be. He has been dead ten years now, and so it may be easier to fully appreciate the vision his living gave to me. With his dedication to the highway, it is not surprising that I grew to love the swell of every oncoming horizon. The clout of topography can be measured by the fact that it precedes the parameters of meaning. It is there. It is out there. And as such a place, narrative has no sway within the realm of surroundings. That’s the thing I admire about landscape painting. It is an open ended enterprise, mysterious enough to be the original Rothko. Because earth and sky defy description, painting never reveals anything about me, leaving the terrain vacant for anyone wishing to engage in a narrative free mystery.

 

Highway Altarpiece: “The Child Is Father of the Man”; from Kingston, Ontario, Canada to Holden, Utah; U.S. Highway 50

Highway Altarpiece: "The Child Is Father of the Man"; from Kingston, Ontario, Canada
to Holden, Utah; U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on a shaped ragboard and paper construction, artist-made frame
8 7/8 x 23 13/16 x 3 7/8 inches including frame

It is hard to know what kinds of things I would have painted as a child. However, I believe that the primacy of sight ultimately determined the path I would follow. Although the journey was anything but straight, I came to believe that at any given moment the world is already composed. In thinking of life, a line from William Wordsworth’s poem, “The Rainbow” comes to mind, “The Child is father of the Man.”

 

Because I am primarily a visual person, memory takes me back to a time that could precede speech. I remember the neon sputter of a sign in the night when I was two. To the surprise of my mother, I could describe our apartment over the drugstore years later. I remember my baby sister Kim coming home from the hospital when I was not quite three. I remember snowflakes that I caught in a pot, and the pleasure of digging in the dirt come summertime. A highway drive, gloomy skies, and an A & W Root Beer sign occupy early childhood memories. There was the body of a great lake long before I knew the name Ontario. I remember grandparents, the scent of tobacco, and the sound of small boats on the bay. Even now, the faint sound of a lawnmower recalls a Canadian infancy.

 

Painting became a conscious thought when I was five. I was with my father. We stopped to look at a yard sale of landscape paintings. That’s when I realized that seeing was something that could physically be described. But because what I saw was a small sampling of what a landscape could be, without knowing it, my vision ended up being restricted. The possibility of painting routine scenes from Division Street receded with seeing paintings devoted to the depiction of pristine nature. That is the problem with art. It is difficult to conceptualize painting without first seeing a canvas covered in paint. But once you know what painting is presumed to be, that information has a habit of shutting down the thought process. Knowledge can mean freedom, but it can also be a trap. Once a narrative is set, it can be extremely difficult to see beyond the plot.

 

I outgrew my Green Card long ago. If I’d had the skills of a portrait painter, I would have made a large painting based on its tattered history. However, because my knowhow was driven by the lift of earth and sky, my desire to embrace the challenge of a self-portrait remained just a fantasy. Something began to shift for me, when my brother Steve shot an image of me standing by a highway sign outside of Holden, Utah. The photograph became part of a beautiful catalog designed and compiled by Cheryl Vogel, entitled Lloyd Brown: Framing America. 

 

The bookend nature of the painting appealed to me. The two views, with a gaze back to an age when I’d already decided to become an artist, through to a time when I’d lived much of that life made the depiction less about me individually, and more about what it means to grow up seeing. Even though painting people was completely out of my domain, the double self-portrait was something I wanted to confront. In my mind’s eye, I immediately saw the shape and structure. Although, it didn’t include the rendition of a faded paper cup, a vision of a highly polished column roughly the same shape stood in its place. It is only natural that an abandoned paper cup should fill that position, a division in time separating man and child. While it might be a great framing device, the separation created by the discarded cup could also be continuum. When it comes to the joy of seeing, the things that please me now are the same things that thrilled me as a child. However, I didn’t draw or paint most of those things, because as I explained earlier, they didn’t fall within the canon of what was worthy of art. Landscaping painting was a specific kind of seeing. It didn’t include most of what the outside had to offer. I had to enjoy the rocks, the weeds, and the weathered remains of tossed off packaging by myself. But, the secret thrill of seeing beauty in the insignificant bits of travel made walking to school an extremely fun thing to do.

 

While it’s not difficult to abhor litter, and admit that the planet would be better off without it, I can’t help but see a kind of history behind each piece of degraded paper, broken glass, or tossed off plastic. They are manifestations of life choices, triumphs and decay scattered within the bunching of ever present weeds. Even under the pressure of a highly offensive wind, a rolling paper cup can become blocked by a thicket of tall grass, or become encrusted in a substance no longer bearing any resemblance to mud weathering away into a mystery cup, where a fast food logo, completely undone by the sun sustains a dying refrain, “OF THE GREAT AMERICAN BURGER.”

 

As a two year old, life remained largely undefined. Without the framework of gender, race, church or state, there was no separation between me and being. Meaning was a thing unto itself. It didn’t require God or belonging to see wonder and significance. Perhaps, remembering those early impressions led me to object to the compositional take, which eliminated so much of what I saw everyday on my way to college. However, the need for that procedure didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

 

It took me years to fully understand what the compositional problem was. The paintings we base our concepts on didn’t come from observations of the countryside. In the beginning, it was Biblical and mythical figures that took the stage. Events from literature are happenings that we can’t witness. Story sourced paintings can’t emerge without an arrangement of models and props, or without relying entirely on imagination. Either way, composition comes into play. Paint that way long enough, and the methods become rules, which begin to shape the way we see everything around us. They can even persuade us to rearrange items placed on a table, so that a salt shaker or glass can have the prominence that a Greek goddess would hold. The layout of everyday living stops being a thing we want to see. The notion of having a dominant object applied to observations of a countryside seems like a very curious thought. Why should the act of positioning, a consideration equivalent to the placement of king or prophet be a thing needed to capture the abundance of pasture? The need for focal points seems to defeat the freedom that the open spaces are supposed to offer.

Although I’ve painted landscapes without the aid of staging for more than three decades, I’m not entirely at odds with those that choose to use composition. Because the domain of observation always exceeds me, I don’t apply the needs of hierarchy to a horizon that will continue on long after I’m gone. However, since not everything I paint is a situation or place that can be observed, I must also sometimes rely on composition. This piece is a good example of that. It is impossible for me to see separate events in my life side by side. The visualization of that requires some kind of staging. While “The Child is father of the Man,” the adult rendering of me comes first in this painting, because we cannot see the future. We can dream, which I did as a child; but we can only evaluate the impact of our imaginings by looking back in time. The landscape paintings I grew into come from who I was as a child. What I could not have known, when I saw those paintings at the age of five was how long it would take to get to a place, where landscape painting could embrace the wonder I beheld in the very beginning. When I’m on the highway, the connections can be so strong, that the outlines of humanity simply begin to slip away. When you begin to feel a part of everything you see, what could be more sacred than the refrain of an open highway?

 

 

The Rainbow

 

 

My heart leaps up when I behold

   A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

   Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

 

William Wordsworth 1807

 

Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50

Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas, U.S. Highway 50
acrylic on six shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames
12 5/8 x 60 1/4 x 2 3/16 with a 2 3/4 inch spacing at the base of each frame

The view of Martin Avenue, Stafford, Kansas comes from a trip taken in 2013. I was in Dallas for the opening of The Dallas Years, a show intended to commemorate the time I spent living in the city. On the way home from Valley House Gallery to Utah, I headed north on U.S. Highway 75.

Because I went to the Dallas Museum of Art before I left, it was perhaps early afternoon, before I cleared the outer reaches of the city. The journey into Kansas, is an all day trip. In the later part of March, the days are not long enough, without an early start, to cover any distance without driving into the night. I’d been informed by a gallery staffer, that a huge snow storm blew through Kansas. Ignoring the warning, I assumed that the roads would be clear enough, by the time I reached Emporia, where I planned to spend the night.

Seeing any part of the eastern side of Kansas, happened so long ago, that I really looked forward to the excursion. An old friend of mine, who became my wife, and then ex-wife, was going to school in Lawrence at the time. The year was 1988. When I went to see her, I’d leave on a Friday just after work. Because it was late in the day, the sun always set before I got to Kansas. The countryside vanished into a line of oncoming headlights, long before crossing the bridge over the Arkansas River into downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Because it was late, beyond the Kansas border, most travelers had already retired for the night. Highway miles would slip away, with the headlights of a single car, riding a fixed position, a far-off reflection, centered in the abyss of my rear view mirror. In the dead of night, it was not hard for me to envision, something from a movie scene playing out in real life. Then I’d breathe a sigh of relief, when the headlights left the highway, headed in the direction of some late arrival, buried deep within the quiet hours of starlight.

Until I drove home on Sunday afternoons, I never got to see Kansas by daylight. Although the state is still part of the plains, the countryside seemed less stubby than either Texas or Oklahoma. Memory is a vague kind of thing, an impression of events with most of the details missing. Retracing the mileage of any highway, fills in with bits of familiar information. The succession of events, recovers all the missing details that quickly vanish chasing down whatever lies just behind a receding horizon. Every oncoming mile, becomes knowledge based anticipation. Remembering previously seen sites, is played out in a recognition that comes from the motion of momentary photographic memory. I find, that I remember all the insignificant bits of a trip that time had forgotten.

When I pulled into Emporia, the night air was as brittle as the plowed up snow that surrounded the motel. Because I was late leaving Dallas, I never got to replay the familiar sights of the Kansas countryside. In the morning, heading in a westerly direction, every mile of horizon on U.S. Highway 50 would be new, until I got to Colorado.

By the time I got to Stafford, I’d traveled nearly a 150 miles, taking pictures all along the way. Although primarily a two lane road, the current highway bypasses most of the towns of Kansas. If you hope to see anything affiliated with Main Street, you will need to leave the highway. The pull of the horizon, is punctuated every ten miles or so, by a colonnade of white silos. Travel any distance and you’re bound to witness, a freight train overtaking the fortress of a grain installation overseeing the plains.

The waning Martin Avenue, may feel like the perfect combination of clutter, a rare something that I’d come upon, that was just waiting to be painted. Standing in tracks of gravel, it is hard not to see many things that register as canisters of the past. There is the profile of silos. Piles of new and used tires, anchor the fluting of a metal shed, which intrudes into the view of a deserted service station. Behind it hide, a couple of old houses weathered nearly all the way to gray. There is a classic car, that has become such, by surviving the ravages of time. There is the back end of a pickup truck, which has become a homespun trailer. The front windows of a pink clapboard house, with a handicapped ramp and railing, are covered over in tinfoil. A blue sky of thinly veiled clouds, lends to the sensation that the place is barely hanging on, not quite ready to surrender to the shade of silence that echoes across most any horizon. I guess it could be easy to believe, that this scene was a lucky find, but a ballad of loss, can be found anywhere. I know this from walking. If you’re open to the nature of place, there is a story ready to unfold.

I happen to be fond of architectural form, whether it be the lift of a high-rise condominium, a picture frame that sharpens the breadth of a painting, or the inverted shape of a tapered paper cup, that is all about volume and circumference. Even a blank sheet of paper, feels complete to me. I see no separation between the artwork and the surface that supports it. Picture plane and paint are both significant. Within the panels of Martin Avenue, I wanted to get away from the constraint of vertical rectangles. I didn’t want the sequence to hang as pillars of 2-dimensional space. The shape of a rectangle amplifies the impression of a plane. It is difficult to experience a sensation of space within the confines of a shape so stable. The squared up framing of information, resists the influence of horizontal spin and the impact of gravity. The rectangle offers no possibility for periphery, or a chance to be distracted. Without the sweep and dive of perspective, it is hard to know where you are. Imagery becomes a flat abstraction, a postcard kind of a thing that can’t be inhabited. The perception of space is dependent on a perspective that is hard to achieve within limitations of a standard rectangle. That is why when I photograph a place, the process almost always involves more than just one picture.

The panels were designed to amplify sky. However, they happen to point in every direction. Although the shape favors the pitch of the rooftop and the angle of the left corner, the structure also leans to the right, encouraging you to repeatedly take in every direction. That bit of visual wanderlust embraces the nature of place. You no longer remain a spectator outside the picture plane. The depiction of a moment in time, begins to take on a note of recognition that hopefully extends a little beyond the limits imposed by 2-dimensional space. I hope the painting has a presence, a sense of atmosphere, close enough to provoke a feeling of kind of like being there. And if you happen to know this sort of place, the landscape, much like a song, becomes your narrative.

Downtown by the Courthouse, Union, Missouri, US Highway 50

Downtown by the Courthouse, Union, Missouri, US Highway 50, 2019
acrylic on four shaped ragboard panels, artist-made frames, 6 9/16 x 42 1/8 x 1 15/16 inches

In the fall of 2014, I hit the road to cross the continent on U.S. Highway 50. Beginning in Ocean City, Maryland, I headed west in the direction of California. Traversing the midsection of America, embraced the states of Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. I intended to photograph the towns and cities along the way. In addition to the towns and cities, the plan was to capture the topography of natural places, the rivers, plains, mountain ranges, deserts, scrublands and forests that occupy the continental expanse between the waves of opposing oceans. The direction of my journey mirrored the growth and expansion of the United States. Although I never gave it that much thought, the age of many of communities reflected that history. I just wanted to chronicle the American scene from the vantage point of a single highway.

 

Not long into the trip, I began to understand that I wouldn’t be able to account for every single town along the way. Some communities didn’t exist on the map, while others were simply missed because I failed to see that I’d driven through them. Sometimes I turned around to correct the mistake, and sometimes I didn’t. Without the abstraction of a map, it is hard to determine what is or is not a town.

  

I never fully expected to document everything along the way. A full accounting of the towns swallowed by cities would have required getting on and off freeways trying to find the heart of particular places in the middle of smog infested sprawl. That level of commitment would have added a lot of time to the trip, consuming funds that I couldn’t afford to spend. Wandering through congested intersections trying to find community cores long lost to the circumference of cities, probably would have destroyed the feeling of freedom that comes from chasing down a horizon. Union, Missouri was the first town far enough removed from the stuff of St. Louis for me to want to resume photographing the trip. On another day, mood and atmosphere may have changed everything. As I recall, I was quite a way out before I recovered the mood of solitude attuned to the rhythm of the highway.

 

As I considered my journey, I noticed that I shot very few places as a single photograph. That should not be surprising. I long ago disregarded the concept of the composed. It seldom got at the nature of place. Photographing immense concrete canisters half cast in shadow can capture a stunning array of shades in rolling forms of architecture, but it doesn’t say anything about the surrounding town, or how those lofty grain elevators relate to the rumble of moving freight trains. The proportions that shaped rectangular framing when artists routinely painted portraits of aristocratic families are poorly matched to the task of embracing the geography of travel. What oncoming town can properly be defined without the horizon? How do you fit the tree lined streets that profile an interlocking sky of protruding rooftops, power-lines, steeples, and the metallic gleam of a solitary water tower into a space designed to house a family portrait?

The history of Western art didn’t have much of anything to say about the landscape in the beginning. Painting was primarily used to depict mythology, Biblical scenes, and aristocracy. The landscape was rarely subject matter in and of itself. When it did appear, it was usually part of a larger story, like the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. Since Biblical and mythological events could not be observed, the participants and scenery had to be imagined. Models standing in for gods and heroic figures created staging. Within that space, it was natural enough to make the leading man or woman the center of attention. By trying to drive the viewer’s gaze to the main character through devices such as perspective and lighting, a focal point was born and composition became an important part of making art.

 

As my mind rummages through images from art history, what I discover are configurations of leading figures and secondary cast members. Composition was designed with people in mind. Hierarchy, the concept of thinking that some people are more important than others became a way of portraying everything around us. Flowers arrangements involving bottles, pots and saucers, shouldn’t have a need for one of the containers to stand out on the table. Dominance in a painting of fresh cut flowers has nothing to do with seeing. Being human, our egocentric thoughts consume our perspective. It doesn’t matter where we’re looking, the rules remain the same. We treat scenery as though it had human consciousness. Barn, horse and tree are crammed into a compositional huddle that resembles yet another family snapshot. A concrete silo is framed as though it would know how to pose for a portrait. What gets lost in painting a mountain range is that its granite mass sat upon the plain long before portraits were ever conceived of Jesus or a king. Earth and sky and everything in between should not be confined to the interior dimensions that were historically used for painting people. The great outdoors is defined by atmospheric space, where distance is the measurement of shades shifting to the lackluster blue of a warped horizon. For those attuned to the highway, the profile of sites resides within an overwhelming sense of atmosphere. What I am trying to say is that the subject matter of any vista is always space. The thing that makes a landscape real is the absence of a stage. The sky overrides the notion of any man-made thing being equivalent to a king. You may be thrilled by highlights on a silo, but the thing that dominants all other things is an atmospheric weight that can’t be defined by a pose or profile. How can you encompass the brilliance of sunlight or shepherd the will of the wind? Human thoughts of dominance have very little to do with the buoyancy of a blue horizon. The embrace of landscape is the manifestation of space.

 

In my time at college, there was never any history given for the origins of composition. No one tried to explain why a focal point should apply to rudiments of a horizon. It was simply understood that painting required designing. Straight up observation was never enough. The experience of everyday seeing couldn’t be conveyed through painting. The sight of turned up earth and silo was not enough to make a painting great. That kind of experience couldn’t be understood as being any good without the concept of dominance being brought into the picture. If you think scenery needs to be tweaked or rearranged for it to be compelling, I hesitate to say that’s entirely wrong. I’ve never been interested in depicting people or painting items placed on a table. The life I enjoy has been about the highway. The trill of weekend drives inspired me to take up painting when I was a child. My perspective comes from a need to embrace the depth of perception seen while gazing out at a horizon. That need could be just as flawed as the compositional thinking that I believe to be so misleading. My view could be derived from shyness. I don’t like crowds. I seem to need a lot of space to feel at ease. Because of that fact, I may not be drawn to patterns that mirror the structure of social events. Still, my human intuition is probably closer to the makeup of nature because it doesn’t require the artist to decide what part of the scenery is supremely meaningful. What I see is exactly as it should be. I can’t imagine making any of it better. In that respect, I could be religious. I feel much smaller than the things I try to describe. Sky as sky cannot be shaped into anything greater by adulations of paint.

 

I’ve taken enough photographs to know, that two consecutive shots of any place provide enough perspective to establish a sense of direction. Within that framing, you’ll probably find something that resembles a composition. That amount of space embraces something that could be called delineation. Just like when trying to draw attention to the countenance of a king, there is a pull which does the same kind of thing. The expanse of consecutive snapshots is filled with a perspective that can’t be denied, drawing the viewer into the scenery. The difference being that the viewer gets to choose what destination he or she is drawn to. Painting is based on observation. The choice to delineate or compose is a matter of perspective. A composition tries to make it plain, that a specific person or thing is the most crucial part of a painting. Delineation doesn’t comprehend individual significance. Because it knows everything is connected, its devotion of focus extends everywhere. In composition, the delivery of space happens on a stage. That might be fine for a literary production or family snapshot, but it doesn’t begin to comprehend what it means to be outside. Composition comes with the limitations of a box. It can’t hold very much. That rationing shapes what we select to see. The isolation of prominent sites is forced upon us. Snapshots taken on vacation seldom do the trick. The singularity of a mountain or tower can’t begin to tap into the essence of memory, because that isn’t what we see standing where the latitude of sight bleeds into breadth of yawning atmosphere. Compositional framing can’t fully embrace the meaning of place, because it tries to apply the standards of indoor habitat to an environment truly beyond those dimensions.

 

If two snapshots are enough to establish some kind of connection, why do so many of my paintings rely on a span of three or more photographs? I hadn’t thought about it before. But on this trip, I began to realize that what I sought for so many years was something greater than the delineation of space. Although the combination of two snapshots is similar to composition, I seem to follow the advancing camera until it has moved through enough frames to engage a visual position. That doesn’t mean that the description of a place should be thought of as fixed or definitive. Within the range of any location, there are limitless stories to tell. When the advancing camera stops, it just means that I think I’ve captured enough to justify suspension. Nothing in that says this is it. There could be more. There could be so much more. It just signifies that I hit the first frame that secures the character of place.

 

In embracing the landscape, I ended up chasing something that could be called narrative. My childhood imagination always recited a dialog of sites on the way to any horizon. That innate nature survived to thrive into adulthood. I see a parking lot with its shops and laundry mat as a place of exploration. Having that kind of reaction, every site can’t help but feel like it should be a feature piece dedicated to the thrill of living. Perhaps what I do could be described as a kind of journalism. There is a story to tell, but the facts matter. A couple of snapshots may pinpoint a place, but the word on the street calls for a broader perspective.

The two center panels depict the courthouse. Any two consecutive images taken
with a camera, will feel quite a bit like a composition. 

In my painting of Union, Missouri, the two center panels depict the courthouse. The view in and of itself could be complete. There is enough perspective to determine that the courthouse is part of a location. Without that added space, the building would be just another architectural headshot, a postcard kind of thing without the heft of gravity pulling everything together. Composition seldom has enough perspective to convey navigation and place. If those components are missing, it is difficult to see the terrain that makes up mountain, town or valley. And without terrain, can a landscape painting really be aligned with the land it was intended to describe?

 

Standing near the Oak intersection of Locust Street, I shot beyond the courthouse. That extension enables the viewer to be like a pedestrian. If you can visually move around, frozen moments begin to melt away into a tale of exploration. Exploration requires time, and with that time, painting can become a living thing. It can describe blue sky, ornamental trees, a courthouse surrounded by street lamp banners, a neon sign, fluorescent lights, a shadowed wall, a window encased display of a wedding dress, and the indication of fall where changing leaves succumb to the grip of October. Seeing is the story of being there. It’s often been said, that a picture paints a thousand words. If that’s true, and I believe it is, most of the words are going to be nouns and adjectives. Although painting can’t explain, it’s great at illustration.

 

I hesitate to say that my painting could be narrative. Because the idea behind narrative painting troubles me, I’ve got some explaining to do. The category as defined is deceptive. It leads people to think that a certain kind of painting has the capacity to explain the action of unknown events. That’s what storytelling does and stories can’t be told without language. Perhaps, narrative painting should be defined as the depiction of an incident so widely known that it wouldn’t need a picture to visualize it. A canvas of the Last Supper may make a great painting, but it doesn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already known. The story it tells was already in the head of the person seeing it. I know I’m stating the obvious, but the statement should make it plain that all painting is the same. It can depict, but it can’t carry on a conversation. A painting of an apple can say apple, because the viewer already knows what an apple is. Without prior knowledge, the Last Supper is just a painting of a dinner party. No amount of paint could ever betray the middle figure as Jesus. Just like with the example of the apple, the information was already known.

 

Now that the Last Supper has been exposed as being basically the same as the Apple, we can go on to say that although painting can’t do storytelling, it has the capacity to recite the details of sight, which words simply cannot handle. When writing about sky, the concept is so ethereal that the only the word that can really describe sky is sky. As an atmospheric noun, there are never enough adjectives to color in transitions of blue. The nouns and adjectives of routine seeing are so numerous that if they were all written down to describe a place, the ability to envision it would be consumed by chaos. Language simply cannot deliver all the details my painting provides and remain unbroken. Any attempt would require inventory lists, itemizing details and relationships which could never be arranged in a sequence that could be read from any starting point, in any direction, and be completely understood in an instant. That is the domain of paint. When depicted as imagery, nouns and adjectives are not restricted by the linear constraints of language.

 

Painting can easily relay the information of sight. In that respect, it exceeds language. But it can’t examine love, fashion a plot, or casually say, I think it’s going to rain tomorrow. So in what respect could my painting offer more than a description? A lot of it has to do with the span of perspective. By going beyond parameters of composition, the viewer gets to choose how to investigate the setting. With that choice, the viewer stops being a bystander. Because Union, Missouri is presented in rolling sequence, the navigation of place happens naturally. In the concrete details of the tree lined streets, there is a spirit of recognition. It is an inventory list of routine details, which in many cases the viewer didn’t realize had any clout. Responding to frozen moments inhibits reaction time long enough to see beyond banality. It may be a scene that the viewer wouldn’t normally like, but being anywhere comes with a collection of memories. In the depiction of a particular place, it is the act of navigation that grabs the imagination. When vision is painted as the tool that it really is, it can’t help but fuel connections. Getting anywhere is dependent upon information that painting frequently excludes. By profiling sight over the composed focus of isolation, scenery begins to tell a story. I have no idea what the story will convey. But within the rudiments of a small town intersection, there are impressions that ignite the recognition of having seen this kind of place before. Because I’ve done nothing to influence your perspective, the connections you see will be entirely your own. In my imagination, as far back as I can remember, I was a travel guide and explorer. When I realized that nearly everything I saw went well beyond the window of composition, I changed the way I painted. Openness without focus was so much closer to the navigation of getting around, that many could feel a connection to forlorn parking lots. As a kind of travel guide, I see no distinction between barnyards and national parks. I paint moments that everyone knows. By painting the routine passage of time, I capture the beauty of what it means to see. Living can be hectic. Seeing another bleached out street can feel mundane. Attending church next to an ailing shopping center probably doesn’t do much to inspire, but what does that have to do with vision? You’re alive! The sky is still the sky. Seeing is such a gift that I can’t begin to comprehend banality even in a desolate parking lot. With that enthusiasm, I tap into the bare bones of living. In going for the moment, any moment, there is a commonality we share, and it is that commonality that reads as narrative.

     

     

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.