In part, this reluctance has to do with various coming home challenges — burst pipes, unreliable contractors, relatives using the house in unexpected and unnerving ways. But in part, it’s simply because I don’t know what I did, although I am fairly certain I did not manage to un-orient, and my feeble attempts merely feel like they may be so feeble as to look feeble-minded.

Well, you see where I am. I began last February and March, 2009, living with the desert and Beatty, Nevada, painting small masonite panels, getting to know the territory and its inhabitants. This November sojourn, however, was more limited and almost entirely devoted to the Amargosa, which became more and more fascinating as I spent 6-8 hours a day, alone with the scene, for the full month of November.

So here are photos of the seven panels, plus the full panorama. These were taken as the panels were still on the wall of the Red Barn, under under limited lighting conditions. The exception is the full panorama, which was lit andphotographed by professional photographer, David Lancaster.

I am showing these in part to bolster my own sense of dignity and/or bravado.

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 1, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 2, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 3, east), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 4, central), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 5, west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 6, west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Unoriented Amargosa (panel 7,west), 4′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009

Let me assure you that I’m not looking for compliments. Sympathy maybe, but not false reassurances <snort>

What I will be working out this winter, I believe, is the nature of the horizontal. How much of it can be conveyed, how much of it needs color to work, what scale makes the power and fearful nature of the horizontal apparent? What media can be both intriguing and yet horizontal? How do verticals interrupt the horizontal and are they the only way to convey a sense of space?The problems of scale, color, and vertical interruptions are predominate in my mind as I try sussing out where I need to start.

You see, I’m already to start a new set of propositions, without having the courage to deal with the old. But only out of the old could come the new, so it’s probably OK.

And just for laughs, I’m also including the photo that David Lancaster, the professional photographer on the Goldwell Open Air Museum Board, took of me. It was taken in the waning sun hours, and David had a strobe light that allowed him to photograph me from below, directly in front of the sun. The strobe filled the front space, so I wasn’t just a silhouette. I kept hoping something similar could be done with the mountains, which required an extraordinary amount of vigilance to catch some relief, some sense of form and shape on as they were mostly just silhouettes against the desert sky. It was also David Lancaster who photographed the whole of the panorama,  pictured below:

Unoriented Amargosa Panorama, 28′ x 5′, oil on linen, 2009 (photo by David Lancaster)

JOU, December, 2009. Take that, Universe!

I just read a blog entry (dated August 17) by Jenny Bowker, who is an art colleague who works in quilted textiles. She tackled the same kind of landscape and had the same kind of hopes about what she might evoke, with some additions that the Amargosa doesn’t have: the presence of a handsome driver and some marvelous land forms. Her blog entry, which finishes with the photo of her textile work, is worth reading for sheer pleasure. But it makes me somewhat nervous about my ambitions.

Here’s the photo of Jenny’s artwork, which won a prize at the Canberra quilt exhibit and, I’m sure, will be seen often at other places around the globe.

Jenny Bowker, Sandstorm over the White Desert, about life size (see her blog entry for scale)

And here is an photo or two of what I will be facing, again

As I said, my desert has no handsome male to feature (although I might dredge one up in Beatty who would fill the bill.) But what I want to project is not so much the beautiful (although I find the Nevada desert is that) nor the humanity (found that appealing too), but the sheer power of the space, with each of its plants having a room of its own, and each fence post and road being a distinct presence:

I have the conundrum (I do love conundrums) of wanting to evoke the sense of space by using space, in this case, using a fairly tall (5 feet) and very long, horizontal canvas, filled. But filled how, with what — what will convey this space without sending the viewer into yawns of despair. (An aside: if you’ve ever driven Nevada over Highway 50, the loneliest highway in the US so-called, you know about yawns of despair).

I would like the painting to require the viewer to walk past it slowly, never quite being able to hold it in her vision all at once. I wouldn’t even mind a taller version, but fear I can’t handle anything over 5 feet tall. For one thing, we have to get back to Portland after a month, so the canvases will have to roll and fit into the Honda. But beyond that, I’m not sure I have the strength to carry off anything much bigger.

A textile piece that I’m envisioning would be smaller, I think, more like 1 foot by 5 feet. Still the 1 to 5 ratio, which I think may be about right. It would still require some movement on the part of the viewer’s head, if not the body, to take in the whole.

And of course, I will be thinking about Rackstraw Downes and various questions of perspective as I work up the painting and textile piece, trying to do work that is fresh to the eye and true to my seeing. There are human artifacts on the Amargosa, including a large talus pile and pond, roads and tracks, and fence posts and telephone poles, many no longer in use. So the vastness of the space has some human presence, but mostly marked by what was there but is no longer. Even the gold mine that made the talus slope is long gone.

What is there that is thrilling is the light that changes from minute to minute, changing what the eye can make out as well as the colors of land forms and hunks of bushes (the red car in the photo above is our Honda, coming toward the Barn studio, with the talus slope in the background.)

I’m hoping the conundrums will sort themselves out when I’m on site. Maybe they will — or maybe I’ll change my puzzles.

Have you faced difficulties of wanting to evoke something that might not be in your power to manage, but refusing to give in to the easier ways? I’m always fighting my stubborn ambition which can come up against unflinching reality. In which case, I give way. But not without a great fuss.

So here’s an update.

After a long struggle with health and painting, I’ve finally revived and have been painting the landscapes of the Willamette Valley in western Oregon. The change of venue from the wild and awesome desert to the gentle scenery of the Valley was fairly traumatic and also the cause (I think; I hope) of some really bad paintings, now discarded. But I’ve kept a few and think I may be able to tolerate the pretty landscapes and conventional views to which I’ve been subjected. (I’m engaged with a group of plein air artists who always choose not to paint the snarky or sardonic.)

The paintings imaged below have been done since the end of June. The first four (through the Storm) were attempts to provide a sense of expansion outward rather than focusing into the painting. This outward away from the center is what I feel the desert does, and I thought painting sky and/or water might keep me in touch with that expansion of space so essential to desert painting.

Morning Fog in the Gorge, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Sailboat on the Mighty Columbia, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Oak Island on Sauvies Island, 18 x 24″, Oil on board, 2009

Storm over Sauvies Island, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

Then, I spent four days last week in Vancouver, BC (Canada) and chanced upon an exhibit of Emily Carr drawings at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

I’ve long been a fan of Carr, although she was very poor andpainted on brown paper with oils thinned with gasoline. The original paintings are almost always a disappointment because they have deteriorated over the years.

However, the Vancouver exhibit was of her drawings, and frankly I was stunned by them. (I had gone to the Gallery to see an exhibit of 17th century Dutch paintings, which were quite exquisite, but none of them stunned me). I returned to Portland to the centennial celebration of a pleasant park on an extinct volcano in my neighborhood. It’s fairly large, almost entirely treed, with some very distant vistas and three reservoirs. Before I went to Vancouver, I thought painting Mt. Tabor was a challenge I was likely to fail to meet. I was reduced, prior to last week, to painting gates:

Salmon Street Gate, Mt Tabor, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

And pictures of the “mountain” from a distance, with lots of city flotsam:

Mt Tabor from Hawthorne and 28th, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

(There’s another, larger, version of this which I think is better, but haven’t photographed yet)

However, after seeing the Carr drawings, on Saturday I tackled the forest that is Mt. Tabor’s proudest achievement:

In honor of the Mt Tabor Centennial 1, Oil on board, 12 x 16″, 2009 (draft1)

In Honor of the Mt Tabor Centennial 2, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

And among the gentle conventional landscapes, I managed a few Underwood whacks:

Bonneville Artifacts, Columbia Gorge, 12 x 15″, Oil on board, 2009

And before I took on the gentility, I did some plein air city work, which seems more like my old self:

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, North Side, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, West Side, 12 x 16″, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, South Side, 18 x 24″, Oil on board, 2009

The East Branch, Portland Public Library, East Side, 18 x 24″, 2009

I did another painting of the front (the north side) of this building from a photograph, mostly so I could paint (and hence capture in my brain) the front of the building minus the trees. The East Branch of the Portland Public Library was built in 1911 by a locally prominent architect who also built the central library, which is still in use and still quite magnificent. The east branch has fallen onto lesser times, having its large open central hall (a requirement of all Carnegie funded libraries) divided into two floors. Only the rear rotunda, truncated to make a very strange room, was left intact.  The paintings were done from awkward spaces — the last from the edge of a parking lot that bordered on a plaid pantry; the first in a parking lot next to a cement block commercial building. The south side shows the rear of the library behind the Coffee Systems company, also in a cement block building. Two major streets, 11th and Morrison, border the block on which the library stands and to its east is the Rimskykorseykoffee House, which resembles a haunted bordello.

All this is to say that while I was placed by my group in gentle breezes and loving landscapes, when I could I escaped to my natural milieu, the snarky somewhat sardonic city in which I really live. I even am thinking of doing one of my wild studio composites with that wonderful ironic ex-library.

And how are you spending your summer creativities? Snarky or genteel? Admiring the river as it rolls by or watching the semi’s, rolling toward the center city?

Jer and I are, god willin’ and the crick don’t rise, returning to the desert, to Beatty Nevada, in November, for another go at the Amargosa Playa. I have notions that have nothing to do with comfort and pleasing vistas. Although the vistas of the desert are, in my perception if not my art, very pleasing.

After having spent 6 weeks in the desert, perceiving and painting, mostly plein air, I am now back in Portland reading about desert perception in William L. Fox’s The Void, the Grid, and the Sign.

Fox has spent most of his life in and around a variety of deserts and back-of-nowhere lands, but in The Void he’s primarily concerned with the Great Basin, that large space between the Rockies and the Sierras, where water flows in, but never out, where there is no river coursing to the sea.  He says that outside of Afghanistan, this area contains the most mountain ranges (316) in the world, but there are also 90 basins, places where what little water exists is captured between ranges and sinks or evaporates. The best known of these basins is perhaps Death Valley, although that lies outside Fox’s attention. The place I was painting, the Amargosa Plain, is also just outside his wide-ranging travels. However, much of what he says is apropos of the Amargosa and Death Valley.

Death Valley at the Beatty Cut-off, March, 2009

Fox’s interest is in the intersection of geography (and some geology), cartography, personal experience, human perception (of land voids such as the basin and range) and art. He’s a poet, and the first third of The Void, the Grid, and the Sign revolves around Michael Heizer’s City, the enormous earthwork begun in about 1970 and premised to be finished by about 2010.

Fox’s description, found on his website, of the basin and range area is better than any I could create: “The Great Basin, my home desert, encourages … recursive thoughts. Covering almost all of Nevada and western Utah, it is a deeply repetitive landscape of arid basins and high ranges that betrays the cycles of earth, fire, and water underlying it. The entire region continues to swell, uplifted from underneath and pushing apart Reno and Salt Lake City at opposite ends of the Basin. Nevada alone carries three hundred and sixteen mountain ranges, some of them more than thirteen thousand feet in elevation, all separated from each other by valleys that can run a hundred miles long by twenty wide. The basins and ranges tend roughly north by south, massive wrinkles reflecting how the North American plate overrides the Pacific one. The bones of the land are naked here, and so is the syntax of the poetry.

“No water runs out of the Great Basin, all of it falling inward either to sink beneath the ground or to evaporate. Forming its western rim is the two-mile-high Sierra Nevada, an escarpment of granite that casts a deep rain shadow over almost the entire Basin. This is the largest, highest, and coldest desert in the contiguous United States. Because the air is so devoid of humidity there is little blurring of ridges thirty and forty miles away, confounding our sense of distance. Because the spectrum of color in the vegetation is so narrow, our expectations of atmospheric perspective, of a shift in color from a warm foreground to cool background, are distorted likewise.

“The ground at our feet and the distant mountains are all that we see. Nowhere is there a familiar tree or building against which we can measure ourselves. The cognitive dissonance is severe. We don’t know where we are. Traditional wisdom about being lost in the wilderness—follow water downstream until you reach civilization—does not often work here. Follow convention and you are likely to end up stranded in the middle of an alkali flat.

“The only way to understand the enormous space of the Great Basin is to invest time in your experience of it. Slowly your eyes will adjust to the extended reach of vision, and your ears become accustomed to hearing only the wind and your heartbeat. You will learn to read your way around, cutting across the grain of the land instead of following it in order to find your bearings.”

Prior to going to Nevada, I had a vague notion of the basin and range country from having traversed it on route 50, perhaps 40 years before, being astonished at its desolation and at the highway, cutting across basin after basin, rising slowly to the top of inclines, where it would slop wildly down steep backsides, to cross the next basin.

This is a view of a small California basin, the Panamint. The photo was taken from a small unnamed range that we had been traversing in the car; it looks back toward the big Panamint Range (the west wall of Death Valley), which is beyond the top of the photo. The photo has been enhanced a bit to show the road we had just traveled, moving from right center, reappearing to go off center left after crossing the saline flats. The photo may give some indication of the kind of territory that Fox describes and that I tried to paint.

Fox is interested in cartography, how people perceive and map land, and more particularly, how they map apparent voids. Americans, starting with Jefferson and taking cues from much earlier civilizations, map in grids, so John Fremont mapped the Great Basin, disregarding its natural formations and placing it with the rest of the grid that the US was forming. (Other cultures, such as the Australian Aborigines, map in very different ways, through stories and spiritual places, and even city slickers in 21st century America will map the distance from here to the nearest Peets Coffee Shop by time ( 25 minutes) rather than gridded space (15 blocks directly north),

Grids can be comforting, but strangely at odds with what one attempts to paint in the desert. Painting without much middle ground, and without much to focus on, can have strange effects on the painter’s psyche.

This is one view of the ghost town, Rhyolite, from a point south of the Red Barn, where I had my studio for those six weeks. The dots here and there in the center of the photo below the hills are what remains of the town. In its heyday, it had gridded streets, the tracks of which still can be found, as well as three railroad lines, and the usual array of post office, banks, a two-story school, saloons, and whorehouses, all placed on a grid. Just southwest of the ghost town is the sculpture area known as the Goldwell Open Air Museum, about which I wrote earlier. And southeast of Rhyolite is Ladd Mountain, now sculpted on its southern flank by a vat leach mine.

When I painted this scene (plein air) the first time, I was flummoxed by its randomness. Even when looking with my own eyes rather than through the flattening and distortion caused by the camera, the scene had no focus, no way to get hold of it. Here’s one discarded attempt at a plein air work of the subject:

It tooka number of weeks before I found the only spot around where the scene could make sense:

Rhyolite and Sculptures Panorama, 18 x 36″, oil on board

Only on a curve in the paved road going to the ghost town (marked by a big asphalt patch on the right side), can you see that the mountains, Ladd on the right, Busch Peak behind, and Sutherland (and Bonanza Hill) to the left formed a 3-sided wall. The town sat within these hills and looked out over the Amargosa Plain (alternatively called the Amargosa Desert), where that “wretched trickle” known as the Amargosa River sinks. [Digression alert: the Amargosa Plain is not legitimately a "playa", because its water does not totally sink in its depression. A slight decline leads the existing water  down to the end of the Funeral Mountains where it finds further slight declines around the end of the mountain and into a further declination that leads it to below sea level to Death Valley].

One of my earlierst paintings of the Amargosa Plain didn’t capture the void. It’s not a bad painting, but it isn’t the desert that I was confronted with, even though I was painting plein air. My brain simply couldn’t see the void in front of me:

Amargosa Playa 1, 12 x 16″ , oil on board

I painted that desert straight on at least 3 times and obliquely, a large number of other times. The oblique approach was definitely easier, because the mountains gave a place to go with the brush:

Funeral Mountains, Early Morning, 18 x 24″, oil on board

The middle ground is still lacking, so the mountains, which are perhaps 15 miles away to the west, look much closer, but at least they are there; and there’s a road, a sign, that leads one to know what is being depicted.

Perhaps the most successful painting of the void I’ve managed thus far was very late in my stay in Nevada. It is directly down the Amargosa Plain (desert/playa) in front of the Red Barn. It was painted in late afternoon, when the slight haze that the unseen river causes to rise over the ground surfaces gets played with by the sunlight:

The Amargosa Playa 3, 18 x 34, oil on board

The Plain isn’t fully empty at its southern end. A “pinch” allows the Amargosa to work its way between two mountain ranges before it turns west.  So in some lights (like this one at 3 PM in mid-March) there is some edge to the void of the desert.

I have a canvas painting that presents the perspective in a  different way;  In Aereality Fox describes a variation of this form from an earlier painting The painting was found  on an excavated wall at Catalhoyuk, Anatolia (Turkey): “This ‘volcano painting’ a panoramic view done around 6200 BC, shows the town in planimetric (a plan view, as if seen from straight above) and the then active Hasan Dag volcano, its twin summits sixty miles away reaching 10,672 feet, in elevation (in profile, as if seen from a horizontal view)…. there are no hills nearby Catalhoyuk, and athough the residents apparently climbed up the volcano to obtain obsidian, the town was effectively invisible from that distance… why make this composite image in plan and profile…. this is more than a map, but a highly mediated and thus expressive aerial view of the world.”

It is this “highly mediated and … expressive view” of the Amargosa plain, with a plan (aerial view) as well as a horizontal one from the Red Barn Studio,  which I am still reworking. In other paintings, I managed to capture the grids with telephone poles and desert tracks, and even the signs, with speed limits on metallic boards and billboards. The rocks of the mountains have bold layers of folds and geologic structures and chemicals that made them explicable in paint. But the void is harder. And (therefore?) somewhat more interesting. And I swear, I read Fox’s description of the somewhat older art work after I painted the unfinished but blocked out plab/horizon version I’m now working on. I’m hoping to somehow do other versions of that Amargosa void, working the question of perspectives.

I would also say that Fox himself finds it difficult to discuss the void — mostly he discusses its edges, either by driving, hiking, climbing, or flying above them. Rocks and mountains make stops and points of reference; only artists working on the ocean, or someone like Michael Heizer, can make the void fully expressive.

Incidentally, Fox’s discussion of Heizer’s City, in The Void, the Grid and the Sign, is the best I’ve seen anywhere about this reclusive artist’s work. I’m hoping that when City opens (Dia: Beacon says 2010; right now it’s totally closed to the public) that I can spend some time there. Heizer seems particularly aware of the void he faces; he says City is not “in a place; it is place.” From Fox’s description, I can believe it.

Robert Zakanitch, Red Watercolor, 34 x 36, 2007

Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 –1985 is the printed catalogue of an exhibit held at the Hudson River Museum in 2007 -2008. The catalogue has excellent essays by Anne Swartz, Arthur Danto, Temma Balducci, and John Perreault, as well as including short biographies of the artists and plates of the exhibited art. Most of the words which follow come from the catalogue.

The P&D catalogue gives a textual underpinning to formats and surfaces that we enjoy but have come to think of as “mere” decoration. Arthur Danto, for example, says that decoration fell somewhere between figuration and abstraction and “encompassed almost the entire visual culture of many non-Western traditions…. The impulse to decorate was the impulse to humanize.”

Miriam Schapiro, The Kimono, 1976, 60 x 50, acrylic and collage on canvas

According to Danto,  the P&D artists were already using decoration before the movement was created, and what naming it did was to “enable its members to recognize what they had in common.”

Joyce Kozloff, Tile Mural for Harvard Square Subway, 1985 -86

Danto is the eternal optimist, claiming that P&D is easily a third mode of art making, and that “formalism ought easily to apply across the boundaries to all three categories of art, had it not been weighted down with prejudices that had little to do with its essential practice….. It is not difficult to suppose that there are three modes of embodiment:” i.e. figuration, abstraction, and decoration.

The P&D movement is obscure, but the impulse, to make pattern, to decorate the environment with beauty,  seems universal, perhaps too common to be seen as on a par with the usual high-art suspects in western art history. Moreover, P&D often lacks irony, a form of expression that dominates almost all art these days. [I'm thinking of D. and the whole LA scene right now....]

Tony Robbin, Coll: the Artist, 2007–4, 56 x 70″

Critics of P&D had to come up with convoluted reasons for rejecting it, although some of the rejections (too pretty, too feminine, too serious) weren’t too hard to come by. But Donald Kuspit in a 1979 article “Betraying the Feminist Intention: the Case Against Feminist Decorative Art” in Arts Magazine felt that “art based on decoration betrayed the critical potential and intention of feminist art.” It apparently was too close to formalism in its theory and therefore, “too authoritarian.” But what is most fascinating is Kuspit’s later “confession:” He felt, he said, that he needed to “rationalize my enjoyment of Rober Kushner’s art  … compelled to apologize intellectually for the deep pleasure I take in it…”

Robert Kushner, Night Garden, Acrylic,Oil,glitter, gold and silver leaf, 60 x 60, 2000

Anne Swartz, the chief contributor to the essays in the catalogue as well as the curator of the exhibit, says “I suspect that until recently, a certain Puritanism surrounded the view of feminist art that prevented it from being seen as acceptable when it was sexually exciting and provocative. So when P&D art utilized some of the mechanisms of feminist art (provocation, pleasure, softness, etc) it challenged the intellectual systems that were supposed to be uppermost in the viewer’s mind, prompting a critic like Kuspit to repudiate the intentions of P&D as not supporting the utopian notion of feminist art as a sterile ideology.”

Swartz also speaks of the “bombastic approach of the new-expressionists…. It [P&D] wasn’t self-referential…and [had] an overall treatment of the surface.” Kim MacConnel said to Swartz, “P&D is nonhierarchical in the sense that it is not refining itself to an end point and time…. It is much more chaotic. It is open to different voices, it accepts different voices, it’s making different voices.”

Kim MacConnel,Tri-Rotating, Acrylic on canvas, 95 x 126, 1980

I’m fascinated by the theoretical underpinnings of this artistic movment,especially the constructs of “non-self-referential” and “non-hierarchical.” aAlthough I’ve moved far away from Pattern and Decoration in my own work, I still love it and so, perhaps, am looking for the verbal language which would allow me to speak more “authoritatively” about it.  But reading and looking at these materials also makes me think I could incorporate P&D into my own vision. One artist, Leslie Gabrielese, serves me as an example:

Leslie Gabrielse, Dancing on Top of the Mountain, 60 x 130, 2001, fabric and acrylic paint

I am a bit bemused at how enthralling I found the textual materials in this catalogue. There’s nothing like having one’s prejudices confirmed, I guess. Aside from the art and perception in this post, when you examine your work history, have you found at one time or another  some verbal explanation that seemed to capture something about a visual that you had but couldn’t explain? Something that enabled you to recognize what you had in common with other workers in the same modes?

The catalogue, by the way, is Pattern and Decoration, and is online as a Google book. The Google pdf version cannot be printed, but you can order a hard copy from the Hudson River Museum, Elizabeth A. Sol, Manager of Administration & Visitor Services, The Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Ave. Yonkers, NY 10701 Phone – (914) 963-4550, ext. 239 Fax – (914) 963-8558. The museum doesn’t seem to have a secure online server, so I ordered my copy by phone. A good slide show of the works (many of which couldn’t be included in the Google online version) can be seen in the NY Times .  Here is the accompanying Times review.

I apologize for the slightly formal tone of this blog entry — I’m still assimilating the language appropriate to P&D and so find myself less easy about explaining it. But here’s one last image that I found, all on my own, to continue the dialogue:

Yinka Shonibare, Here

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Pine Creek Gorge, photo from Wikipedia Commons,  Commons licensing

I have been violating one of my basic principles. I have, gasp, been painting from photographs.

Pine Creek Gorge 2, 12 x 16″ Oil on board, 2008

I have all kinds of reasons to do so: the paintings are for a good charitable cause and are specifically tailored for an audience that will like the subject. I can’t get to the landscapes in the photos to paint them on-site (and besides, it’s cold outside). The subject matter of the photographs is of a place I grew up in, camped in, swam, hiked, and made love in -  it’s a place I know intimately.

The area is in north central Pennsylvania, where the ice age shaved off the land, after which streams cut deep notches, through shale and tumbled rocks, to make cobblestone creeks. The specific subject is the Pine Creek Valley, with emphasis on the Pine Creek Gorge, above which my mother’s family farmed (and boarded loggers) and at the end of which (just below Cedar Run) my parents ensconced themselves in their later years. Pine Creek, always called Pine Crick by us locals, runs into the West Branch of the Susquehanna about 100 miles above Harrisburg, near Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania; it is the Jersey Shore High School class of 1960, raising scholarship funds for students, for whom I am doing the paintings.

So doing the work has me somewhat ambivalent: the cause is good; the available photos quite satisfactory, and the subject matter entirely visceral, even from someone else’s photos. But it’s still painting from photos.

Little Pine Creek Dam, Photo by Charlie Bierly, used by permission

LIttle Pine Creek in Snow, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2008.

There were other elements, also, that keep me going. At first I was enticed by the greens, which I remember almost viscerally. These greens are specific to this district, or so it seems to me, having compared them to greens in the Alleghenies proper, the Virgina blue mountains, the Rockies near Laramie and Denver, and western Oregon, where green can smother you. These Pine Creek greens are a different blend of hard-and-soft wood, of limes and lemon greens, avocado and olive hues, sap and davys and veridian paints.

I did some palette studies of greens and then painted (and repainted, and reworked, and painted again) four 12 x 16″ paintings of the Gorge itself.

Pine Creek Gorge 3, 12 x 16″ Oil on board, 2009.

I grew a bit bored with green (although I found other variations on the hue as I worked elsewhere) and for a while, consoled myself with tumbling water – rather like painting hair, in fact.

Turkey Track Trail Waterfall, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2008

But in my head, I could always hear that inner critic of my imagined, yet quite imaginable critic. I name him my Brother-in-law, but he is, really, just the voice in one’s head.
Painting from photos means painting from real places, places that other people have grown up in and camped, canoed, swam, and even, perhaps made love in. They not only know what it looks like, but many of those who will be seeing and judging the paintings will know the Gorge better than I can know it. They will never have left the area, whereas I haven’t lived there for forty years. So I can hear, in my head, my BIL saying, “That mountain over there is really further away. And where’s the cut for Bear Run? What kind of tree is that, anyway?”

I suspect, although I have no evidence to back this up, that the primary audience for these paintings will be people who may not have had much visual art training (I certainly didn’t while I lived there) but will know the land because they’ve hunted deer and bear and turkey and hiked and camped and biked it for 40 more years than I did.

It’s hard to know if this audience will see my brush strokes or lovely variations in color. Maybe they will only see where I’ve messed up some specific feature.

A further complication is the photos themselves. They were taken by a classmate in the last few years; he rode a rail-to-trails bike path up Pine Creek; the rails-to-trails path runs on the old railroad line, which was on the other side of the creek, the east side, from where I spent most of my growing up. It also ran up the Gorge rather than across the tops of the west rim of the mountains where the logging and CCC fire roads were that we drove around on. So the views in the photos are ever so slightly askew from the views that I remember – not enough to make me refuse them, but just enough to make me uneasy with what I’m depicting. The unknown memories lie there, kicking at me, when I see the Crick bend the wrong way.

Tree and Crick 1, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2008

Photos also don’t quite have the detail that I want – they have detail, of course, and more than I’m willing to paint, for the most part, but they don’t have the detail I want to paint. And that’s because in general, my eyes see differently than cameras do. I’m not much interested in the monocular, totally stable viewpoint (what I called, to Jay’s dismay) the “postcard view,” of scenes. Multi-ocular, multi-stance, on the fly, just at the moment of movement – that’s what I see and what I like to try to capture in my ‘scapes.

Duck in Flight, 12 x 16″, Oil on board, 2008

So ambivalent I remain. To be “true” to my style, I could easily dismiss the concerns of my audience, who then might not spend money on the paintings — which would nullify the entire reason for doing the work. On the other hand, to be totally true to my audience might, for me, be impossible.

I now have something like 12 paintings of the Pine Creek Valley. I have a couple more realistic ones to do. But I think then, I’m going to head out for something that will come out of the paintings (I’m thinking green, or maybe layers of hillocks) but which will be abstracted and seriously weird, so weird no one will mistake it for anything but intentional. Maybe arbitrary color will be my first attempt. And I know I want to do those hills like Grant Wood’s landscapes or foliage like Charles Burchfield.

So I’m compromising, seriously, and in matters about which I normally don’t compromise. I said, almost seriously, that I would never paint exclusively from a photo and in fact turned down a lucrative commission (from a quite drunken fellow, I’ll admit) to do so.

But here I am, compromising to the tune of many paintings, for the sake of – of what? A good cause, of course. And reconnecting with fellow classmates. And making something of a brag about where I’ve been since 1960. And finally, perhaps, I’m painting from photos simply because doing these paintings was a challenge, issued in a rather slow time of art-making for me, a time when painting from photos was a release from the guilt of not braving the almost tolerable Portland weather.

Shale Shelf, Pine Creek Valley, 12 x 16, OIl on Board, 2008

Have you, are you, making compromises? Or under what circumstances would you do do? Would you compromise, for example, your desire for a particular composition in order to explore a particular color, like “green.” And how uneasy to you have to feel before you draw the line?

I managed to remember to photograph the first painting twice — once as it emerged from the garage session, and then again after I had been through the critique and had tweaked it in the studio. I didn’t do a lot to this  painting in my second go-round, but when I finished I was concerned about the loss of some of the “naive” quality of the red building. Here are images of the two versions:

Library Parking Garage, View South (first draft) 12 x 16, oil on board

Library Parking Garage, South View (draft 2), etc.

The differences between the two are slight, but the concern expressed by one member of the crit group was about the wonky perspective on the red building. I later mucked about with that building (as well as darkening the edge of the roofline the takes up much of the bottom of the painting  and which will get more work). I’m not sure the red building, as it now stands, is what I want. Another person suggested perhaps making all the buildings more wonky, which I didn’t have time for, but would still consider.

This series of decisions (as well as a rather funny comment by a fellow critiquer)  is what made my ears perk up when I read the Schiller quote. Is the first wonky take more “naive” in Schiller’s sense, than the second, somewhat less wonky, version? The comment from my fellow painter (who actually defended the wonky perspective) was something like “I’d like to be behind your eyes, seeing what you see when you drive down the street.”

The second painting references the Morandi/edge discussion and is a continuation of my visual wandering around the constructs of edges. I don’t have a photograph of the original post-garage painting, but the photo below is of the painting after I worked it a bit prior to the critique session. My hasty working was to try to eliminate the edge that runs down the slab of building in the center of the painting. My intent was to push that building out of the way of the steeple and crane, both of which were central to what I was seeing.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 1) 12 x 16, oil on board

After the critique, I modified the edge treatment of the slab, as well as pushing back, through losing the edges, the church roof and the foreground building edging. I also added shadows and changed hues a bit — the result is shown in the image below.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 2)

This last version, below, now sits in my studio, awaiting further revelations; I have made the slab more colorful and attempted to mirror somewhat the big block of sky on the other side. I also modified some of the color in the bottom righthand building.

The Library Parking Garage, West view (draft 4)

So to recap: In the first version, which is close to what the original looked like,  I tried losing the edge of the big building on the right. Then I went to the critique meeting, where the lost edges were seen as too lost but also some of the other edges as too defined; so I added the lighter strip down the side of the big frontal slab and muckled about with the edges of the other buildings. Further emendations included changing some of the color, sharpening the steeple and church elements, and attempts at making the slab wall on the right echo something of the sky on the left.

I’m still debating about reinforcing that edge and wondering what it is that losing or finding or almost finding an edge means to the painting as a whole. What I was thinking of while I was painting was the sharpness of the steeple and the crane and the losing any impact of the slab, in spite of its size on the canvas (and in my view). That’s what happens in cities — people no longer see the altered, mangled buildings that sometimes inject themselves into photographs. But why did Morandi lose his edges as he does — is it the sense of oneness of all things, the lack of object individuality that he’s concentrating on? And then he delineates a very strong contour line on the opposite side of his lost edge, so he not only finds the other edges but thrusts it at us. Somewhat like that crane thrusts itself…..

OK, I’m through meandering. Please comment willy-nilly as you will. And I’m interested in why one loses or finds or sharpens or softens edges — not as a matter of aesthetics or realism, if you will, but as a matter of intent and philosophy.