Updating my first comment (#7): I had first thought of Marsden Hartley, though I don’t really know my art history that well. When I looked at the Hartleys around, they seemed quite different from June’s. But I just came across his New Mexico Landscape that has more in common with her flowing lines.

I’m sticking to my reading of your work as a bit mythic (and this is not derogatory!). The last painting with the crisp realistic tree by the fences, domestic, domesticated, familiar. The glowing, more impressionistic butte? plateau? in the distance — reachable? perhaps; desirable? definitely.

Mythic, I think, has to do with a generalization that a whole culture buys into. And places, as I use the term, are specific — they have particular attributes that at best myths tend to blend with other attributes to make narratives. That’s why I like the Gary Snyder quote: “Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience.”

So John Wayne’s west says wide open spaces, big sky, big hearts, brave souls (and Men who are Men). My west (or I should say south eastern Oregon says sun screen and sun light, wind and intensity of concentration, rattlesnake stomping and annihilation of self awareness (for an hour or so). It could be that some of that “feeling” of mine is also mythic — loss of the sense of self, for example, seems to go with the enormous skies. But even there, the enormous skies differ greatly depending upon which part of the west you are dealing with (and probably what the land under the sky is like). Kansas skies are dramatic, wild, fitful. Eastern Oregon’s skies are cerulean blue or powder gray, not dramatic like Kansas.

Anyway, there’s my answer and I’m sticking to it, today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I have to go see what snarky things have been said about Steve’s quotes.

Places can be real and mythic at one and the same time, no?

Ouch.

Birgit - did you really purchase Loran’s book on our recommendations? - I ask eye-battingly. Good for you and good for him and his memory. Back when, at the museum, Roger Fry was the go-to on the subject of Cezanne. Erle Loran was seen as a member of that dirty hands set; art historians who go out with brush and trowel to unearth the facts. He even took photos of well heads and other stuff that appeared to be parts of C’s grand motif. And his name didn’t help as it seemed a little bumpkinny compared to a serene and austere moniker like “Roger Fry”.

But I always liked Loran. I felt that he placed his attention more on the interval of Cezanne’s work when the paint was still wet on the canvas and C was wearing essence of turpentine like a cologne.

June: perhaps I would ask for a refund from any instructor who deigned to demonstrate Cezanne’s method. I don’t think that C. had a “method” as such, but rather a pointed and moving end to his universe that assumed the shape of a brush when required.

Yes, I would love to see you become involved with buildings. Burchfield comes to mind in this context, but I am sure that you are about to generate a unique perspective.