A bit of background: when I was working textiles, I regularly engaged in a “discussion” with quilters (some traditional, some contemporary) about whether the stitching work done on my textiles ( specifically in construction and quilting) should strive for perfection. I always maintained that my goal was “competence.” My attention was entirely on the image and impact (on, I maintained, the art).  The craft was there only to hold it together and/or to add to the art. Hence my seams were not necessarily straight and the back of the art was decent but not flawless (I didn’t bury my threads, for example, simply tidied them). I used the quilting stitches as part of the design, which meant that they were generally not even in length and that they were heavy in places and light in others; this can make the quilted art hang wonkily, requiring heroic measures to make it perform well.

This is an example of a old piece of mine that I claim has “competent” craft:

Sophie, Emerging, 84 x 73″, 2002, Materials: hand-painted cotton, canvas, silk, stretch-polyester, felt. Methods: hand- painted-and-dyed, airbrushed and commercial fabrics. Machine stitched.

Sophie Emerging, Detail

I violated all kinds of quilting craft standards here — you can probably see that the center has been lightly stitched while around it the stitching is quite heavy. I mixed materials so wildly that my friends burst into laughter when they heard that I hoped the canvas, silk, light-weight cotton, and stretch fabrics  would hang flat on exhibit. I did exhibit it, with aluminum rods inserted top and bottom, one of which got lost so the piece buckled badly (the uneven stitching, not to mention the range of fabrics, will do that).   At one point I almost took it out of an exhibit because it showed up so badly next to the much finer craft that it hung beside. We replaced the rod, which helped a little, although it always did look like sloppy craft (albeit not “sloppy craft.”)

I didn’t reform much in the following years, although I did throw away the stretch fabrics in my collection. But I continued to have discussions about how “fine”  the craft which gets put into art should be — how much it should conform to finely crafted quilts, for example, that regularly win large awards at national quilt shows. Is competence sufficient in quilted/stitched textile art?

Which brings me to the panel discussion “Sloppy Craft”. “Sloppy craft” is described by craft theorist Glenn Adamson as the “unkempt” product of a “post-disciplinary craft education.” The panel here in Portland featured The Art Institute of Chicago’s  Professor Anne Wilson (Fibers and Materiality), Wilson’s former student Josh Faught (now teaching Fibers at the University of Oregon), Nan Curtis (professor and head of many departments at the Pacific Northwest College of Art), local artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Namita Gupta Wiggers, the head curator of the Contemporary Crafts Museum. The discussion was held in the Commons at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which in itself startled me — it seemed an unlikely venue for the old Contemporary Crafts Museum. While the CCM has recently moved downtown to the heart of Portland’s art scene and has had some staff shake-ups and financial troubles, they were traditionally a quiet force for High Craft in Portland. Whereas, the College of Art (PNCA) has a highly contemporary, conceptually-based, post-modern orientation.

All the panelists have had wide exposure in exhibits and reviews and writing about their respective areas and seem clear about their own artistic journeys.

Josh Faught, according to his instructor at Chicago Anne Wilson, knows his craft (fibers — weaving, crochet, knitting)  inside and out, and is currently working in sculptural mode:

Josh Faught, Untitled, 2008 crocheted hemp and garden trellis

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, the youngest panel member, also does sculptural work.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins Convivium, 2008, table, linen, paper maché and ceramic, 52.75 x 56.75 x 53.75 inches

Nan Curtis is an installation artist (she did 52 “street signs” along 12th Ave, two blocks away from my house, signs which were posted on telephone poles, like rock band flyers, but having official government looking typeface and material). She has installed complete versions of her home (“Homebody,” Manuel Izquierdo gallery, 1998), and many other conceptual installations of that sort.

Nan Curtis, Role Model #1: She has always served him well 2005
digital photograph on gator board 22.25″ x 29.75″

Anne Wilson too works in installation mode, although her imagery seems less rough to me:

Anne Wilson, Topologies*, 2002

Namita Wiggers continues to make her imprint on the Contemporary Crafts Museum (she oversaw its transition to its highly visible downtown location) and has become a force on the Portland Art Scene. She writes and interviews extensively, is a regular participant in the national crafts scene, and brings exhibits of the highest quality to the CCM.

So, what did this diverse group of artists, three who have roots in traditional fine crafts, have to say about craft and art.

Anne Wilson was perhaps the most interesting interlocutor: she said that “sloppy” was really a sound bite, irresistible once uttered aloud. “Sloppy” indicates intentionality, which she didn’t think was the case with the art she was describing. She would favor terms like “informal” “casual” or “raw” rather than “sloppy” to describe contemporary art that has some base in traditional crafts. Most interestingly, she observed that artists now seem to “take on” crafting only when they need it.

Traditionally, a craftsperson would spend years polishing her craft, working at the highest level until she was so good she could let it go; she would have behind her all the knowledge needed to return to “fineness” if the art required it. To some extent Josh Faught fits that mold. He self-identified as a Fibers Major at Chicago, while his fellow students in fibers always made clear they were “Fibers-and-…” “…and performance,” “…and installation,” “…and assemblage,” “…and collage.” But at some point Faught let go of the fine work of Fiber Craft and turned to rawer work.

Another example of the fine craftsperson turning to raw work after years of exquisitely fine craft is Peter Voulkos.

Peter Voulkos died in 2002 but a look at his biography shows a continuing movement through the highest worlds of craft, then into the fine art world. His craft won him honors over and over again. And his art gained him access to the most formidable museums of high art.

That model, learning the craft inside and out and then letting yourself go, however, has changed to “learning on need” which means that you might teach yourself how to sew a straight seam but can put off learning to sew curves (not to mention French seams).  And you might marry stretch/polyester to silk, which violates a lot of traditional sewing standards, for a number of reasons.

Beyond the Need to Know response of current students were a couple of other aspects of “sloppy craft.” One was the recycling of materials — trash art, one might call it. It’s everywhere these days, at least in Portland, and no one bats an eye at exhibits with “wedding dresses” made from plastic bags picked up on the streets. The other aspect of this kind of casual crafting is that it appears most often in assemblages and collage. Assemblages and collage have clear ancestors, dating back to Picasso, through Rauschenberg and arte povera and  are seen and made by thousands of people who may not even think of themselves as artists.

Two exhibits, Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York and From Trash to Spectacle: Materiality in Contemporary Art Production were specifically referenced as examples of what has happened in the national scene  when informal craft became firmly entrenched in the world of art. These kinds of works — ready-mades, gritty street junk, messy — are contrasted to the highly commercial and polished art of say, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog or Takashi Murakami’s Vuitton bags, which are “finely crafted brands” (the phrase used by Kathryn Hixson at the School of the art Institute of Chicago in her discussion of Trash to Spectacle).

Anne Wilson made another comment at the panel discussion that stuck with me: she said that so-called sloppy art required the highest level of attention to detail — everything counted, because the meaning of the art is  so central. No lapses into mumbling or side-trips into irrelevant detail could be allowed to interfere with the meaning of the piece. Her example was of a student working with clay and fabric, who wanted to indicate the spilling out of fluid materials from the hardness of the clay. But the student closed the ends of her fabric spillages with stitching  and that attention to a “craft” detail stopped the sense of things spilling and in some sense stopped the art from succeeding.

One audience member at the panel noted that because we are now mostly knowledge workers, with few workers in the general public who craft anything besides digital artifacts, fine craft may be accessible only to aficionados of specific fine crafts. In my experience, people are piqued by color and image and like to see stitching, but really can’t see or don’t care if the stitches are tiny or big. They are aware only the overall  force of the wall-hung or sculptural material.

In fine craft, attention must be paid to every detail of the crafting — stitches must be buried into the interior of the quilt; wood grains must enhance the flow of the entire piece and be carved and sanded to perfection. That’s the “need” of fine craft, focusing attention on the material itself. But the “need” of contemporary fine art, according to Arthur Danto, philosopher of aesthetics, is to pay full and whole attention to the meaning of the work; every detail must express the meaning of the whole.

I would add another difference between high art and high craft which is that art tends to be individually identified: Anne Wilson is the artist, even though she may work with a large crew. But much of fine craft is community-identified: the Gees Bend quilts, the totems of the Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples; African masks. The craft may be formed by a single individual, but it arises from the standards of a community. Sometimes at the highest level, the two overlap, so we may know Bill Reid’s name as one who sculpts items such as were crafted by Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples. But much of finely crafted work is anonymous, perhaps done communally. And the standards by which it is judged are set by a community of craftpersons, those who know exactly how many stitches there are in that particular inch, just by looking at it.

As Kathryn Hixson comments, trashy and fine art and craft may represent continuums rather than opposites (so I’m in the running with my middling concept of “competent”.) I am fond of Bill Reid’s sculpture, finely crafted of course, which seems to exemplify in its imagery some of the difficulties this kind of discussion is always running in to:

Bill Reid, Raven and the First Men, 1980

Reid’s humans, working to escape the clam shell, may exemplify the struggle to understand as well as produce, and to produce out of understanding, that forms the most singular element of our current state of art.

As a kind of PS, I would venture to say that Jay’s work fits perfectly into the informal craft mode, while Hanneke’s seems to harken back to the traditional crafting of fine art. And I just heard about a class in figure drawing at a local university, which runs for 3 quarters. The first quarter features only the bones of the human figure; measuring and drawing bones is all that students do. The second quarter moves on to muscles (with more measuring); the third allows for some flesh — always measured. The mind boggles, but there are at least 15 students in the class who are opting for this model of traditional high art crafting.

And this just in: in today’s NY Times,  Denis Dutton,a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.” takes on the whole question of permanency in crafting and art.

* And as a further PS, I thought it might be worthwhile to present some official textual presentation that accompanied Anne Wilson’s Topologies exhibit, as a sample of the kind of thinking brought forth by her work in “informal” crafting.

project statement from Anne Wilson’s Topologies

While our society faces a growing fragmentation and specialization that seems at times to alienate us all, we have also started to view our world as a series of integrated, even entangled networks. One way we can begin to understand this contradictory state is as a matrix of field phenomena – repetitive patterns of texture, growth, turbulence, sound, light, etc., within a given system or space.

– Douglas Garofalo, architect

Textiles, in their expandable and accumulative structure, can be seen as metaphors for such a matrix. In this new project, the webs and networks of found black lace are deconstructed to create large horizontal topographies, ‘physical drawings’ that are both complicated and delicate. This work is a constantly unfolding process of close observation, dissection, and recreation. The structural characteristics of lace are understood by unraveling threads; following the impetus to remake, mesh structures are also reconstructed through crochet and netting. The computer affords another means of close observation: lace fragments are scanned, filtered, and printed out as paper images. These computer-mediated digital prints are then re-materialized by hand stitching and are placed in relationship to the found and re-made lace in the topography.

The logic of organization within the project is based on the concept of like kinds. Never exactly repeating, areas of proximity are formed on the basis of the structural and visual characteristics of likeness. There is both unity and formlessness as parts coalesce, separate, and collide.

As a physical material, black lace has diverse cultural implications in relation to sexuality, death, and gender. These aspects of material context are embedded in the work, yet are not the dominant voice. This project references many things simultaneously: relationships between systems of materiality (textile networks) and systems of immateriality (Internet and the web); microscopic, specimen-like images of biology and the internal body; and macro views of urban sprawl – systems of organization of city structures, interdependent and/or parasitic, processes of expansion. No single theme or position is privileged over another.

This project is large in scale, but the specific configuration of installation is flexible, the size determined by the space at each venue as the project travels. The horizontal architectural support is created on site — a white painted wood platform.

exhibition history

Topologies (3-5.02), 2002
Installation, “2002 Biennial Exhibition,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7 – May 26, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 18 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (9-12.02), 2002

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, MassArt, Boston, September 4 – December 7, 2002
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (4-5.03), 2003

Installation, “Anne Wilson: Unfoldings,” University Art Gallery,San Diego State University, April 7 – May 7, 2003
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (1-4.04), 2004

Installation, “Perspectives 140: Anne Wilson,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, January 16 – April 4, 2004
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 36 feet long (overall dimension) Topologies (11.07 – 2.08), 2007

Installation, “Out of the Ordinary,” Victoria & Albert Museum, London, November 13, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Lace, thread, cloth, pins, painted wood support, 31 inches high x 74 inches wide x 20 feet long (overall dimension)

A provocative phrase, that — “sloppy craft” sends craftspeople ballistic — and some collectors, too.

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.

Emily Carr, Cedar Sanctuary, 38 x 26″, Oil on paper, 1942

I’ve learned a lot through this exercise [ including the rule that I must paint-over or otherwise destroy the copies I've made before someone comes into the studio and exclaims with pleasure over them. Such an exclamation forces me to admit that what the complimenter is seeing is a copy, causing embarassment all round.] Carr’s finding of shapes in the complexity, of making color within the shapes, and of “draping” her branches are all valuable for my own art-making thoughts.

However, during this process, I had other kinds of questions occur.

I claim to be a painter of places. These are very specific places, although I can lump them into categories: wonky city-and-hamlet scapes, tree-scapes, desert-scapes, genteel fields-and-tree landscapes. But I really think of them as moments in time, when a particular place at a particular time catches me at a particular place and particular time and we interact.

My painting is not about the picture plane of the canvas, although it obviously deals with that. It’s not about technique although I’m studying hard Carr’s technique. It’s not about color or shape or concept. It’s not even about me, although I occupy some corner of its being. It’s about place/space and my sense of the place/space interlaced with one single moment in time. What I hope to evoke for others is a sense of a particular place, time, and vision.

Underwood, The High Note, Basin, Montana, Oil on canvas, about 20 x 20, 2008

The question that this brings up is fairly fundamental. It has to do with a notion about style or “voice” — the idea that a mature artist has evolved a particular style that is recognizable over a range of subjects. An artist’s voice is what collectors look for, what curators need for exhibits. It’s part and parcel of an American sense of self, individualized, particularized, not like anyone else but instantly identifiable. In that sense, finding one’s voice is all about “me.”

Of course, the general construct of style turns out to be flexible. You only have to think about the changes in styles of dress or changes in ways of behavior when you move from place to place, even in the homogenous USA. When I was in Kansas, I almost never wore blue jeans. In Wyoming and Oregon, I almost never wear anything else. The time you arrive for dinner is highly dependent upon whether you were in New York City, Laramie Wyoming, Slate Run, Pennsylvania, or Portland Oregon. And if you have friends from different places, sometimes it’s best to spell out what “casual” means on the invites.

So is it likely that an artist interested in place would have the same style when addressing the gentle breezes and pleasant sunniness of the Willamette Valley as when painting the February space of the Nevada desert?

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

Underwood, Amargosa Playa 3, Oil on board, 18 x 24″, 2009

Or when the remnants of the once rain forest loom overhead on an unprecedentedly hot day in an urban park:

Underwood, Cedars, Mt. Tabor Park, 18 x 24, Oil on board, 2009

Or in the studio, painting a composite of experiences garnered while painting plein air on downtown streets?

Underwood, Circling Traffic, Oil on canvas, about 30 x 36″ 2008

I’m not sure there is an answer to the question of whether an artist’s style should (or will) override or absolutely inform her sense of place, particularly if a sense of immediate place, time, and self is her primary concern. I’m aware that certain elements of the way I paint may appear regardless of the place and time. I’m also aware that while I may be a mature woman, it might be said that I am not a mature painter. Or even that our notions of “maturity” in painting is determined by the ways paintings are given to us — edited to make particular points in books and exhibits,  so the art appears consistent throughout when, in actuality, in the painter’s studio, it was far more varied and chaotic. So perhaps the question is a moot one.

But it was brought to me in an immediate way when I moved from  copying Emily Carr (brought on by a week of painting trees in an a very “treed” urban park) to a painting I’ve been working on since March, when I was in the Nevada desert. Here’s the desert painting as it appeared prior to copying Carr:

Underwood, The Amargosa Playa 2, draft 2, oil on canvas, about 48 x 50, oil on canvas, 2009

And here it is after Carr:

Underwood, The Amargosa Playa 2, draft 5, still unfinished, about 48 x 50, oil on canvas, 2009

And here’s a Carr painting with some of the technical aspects that this desert Amargosa Playa 2 is playing with:

Emily Carr Rushing Sea of Undergrowth, 1932-’35, Oil on canvas, 44 x 27″

I originally thought this post was to be about the Sublime, that concept that A&P gave me insights into a few years back, when it was the topic of some excellent posts (I couldn’t find the posts to refer back to those posts but I remember being impressed by them). I think that Carr’s forests — and my sense of the forest and the desert — is close to Edmund Burke’s:

Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is “dark, uncertain, and confused.” While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.

(quoted from Wikipedia, The Sublime)

So I am transferring something of Carr’s techniques to my painting of the desert, but I’m timid about that sense of light and darkness as Burke describes it.

I’m not sure Carr’s technique and vision works with a desert painting. I’m not sure it should work. The Amargosa painting may now (or finally) work fine as a vision on the wall, but not as an evocation of time/place/me. And that’s what led me to my current question about style and voice: is it possible to evoke a sense of place and time with techniques from another place and time? Can a person channeling Emily Carr make any headway painting the desert? Anyone want to take a crack at this?

PS: More about the Sublime from Wikipedia:

In his Critique of Judgment (1790) , Kant investigates the sublime, stating “We call that sublime which is absolutely great”. He distinguishes between the “remarkable differences” of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty “is connected with the form of the object”, having “boundaries”, while the sublime “is to be found in a formless object”, represented by a “boundlessness”

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation,

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

• • Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
  • Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
  • Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
  • Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
  • Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
  • Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe’s extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer’s nothingness and oneness with Nature). All indented quotes from Wikipedia, “The Sublime.”

Gilbert’s main point is that we have been afflicted, since the Renaissance, with an individualistic conception of the “genius” of creativity, which replaced the Greek and Roman notion of “genius” as something of the place or subject—at any rate, outside the artist—that spoke through the artist. The modern idea lays a heavy psychological burden on the artist, who is deemed solely responsible for whatever art he or she produces, or fails to produce. Gilbert would like to rehabilitate the older view.

Though generally a skeptic in such things, I have sympathy for Gilbert’s position. Many, scientists as well as artists, have attested to the varied and mysterious apparent sources of what is felt as inspiration. I personally suspect that the presence we might call the Muse owes much to our own unconscious, workings unknown, but which must impinge on our actions and conscious thoughts. However, I won’t follow that line of argument here, because I think there’s an alternate understanding that goes beyond the individual.

I believe our cognition is not only embodied–intimately dependent on our physical selves–but in equal measure entangled with the world. Our minds develop in interaction with what’s out there; if the world were different, so would be our thinking, our very ways of thinking. To me this means that even the most conscious and intentional creation is actually a collaboration between the artist and the world as experienced by the artist. For example, on a superficial yet practical level, photographers know that the position of the sun, say, or the fleeting composition of a street scene, can make a great difference in a picture. Those who persevere, who are there and aware when the moment comes, deserve real credit. But full credit, when much remains out of their control? Other artists may be less dependent on detailed cooperation of the elements, yet a similar argument applies. That part we can’t take credit for: perhaps that is what we should call the Muse, the genius of that time and place.

When I’m out photographing, it’s not rare for me to get ideas of what to picture that I find exciting. Typically, I’m much less impressed on seeing the results later. Mostly what I think may be good turns out mediocre. On occasion, the perfunctory images are seen to have a spark after all.

What is your experience of inspiration, or lack of inspiration, and how do you account for it?

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 am discovering that one of the most fulfilling aspects of painting is having the casual onlooker weigh in, discuss the weather, make silly comments or just say “hi.” I didn’t realize until the Basin experience how much having a bit of interaction with the community could mean to me. The Portland pleine aire work that I’ve been doing verifies that social contact enhances the pleasures for me of slapping color on board, smooshing substances around until they come to mean something, and personal ruminations about the view.

A recent article in the Oregonian’s In Portland section featured artist Benjamin Alexander Clark, “guerilla painter’ who seems also to thrive on community.
Clark, 37 years old, lives in a house jammed with art, including a framed hole in the ceiling. He’s a carpenter by day and a mosly portrait painter by night; each painting, he says, has a story. He has worked as guest artist at P:ear, a nonprofit for 15 -to 23 year old lost souls. He paints the clients and when a painting sells, he pays the subjects a modeling fee. He also donates paintings to the Cascade Aids Project, Children’s Heart Foundation and Project Quest. He paints in oils and acrylics on reclaimed objects like doors and tabletops. His work is often sentimental, but at its best, the reviewer said, he grasps essentials about his subjects.

“‘When I’m painting, the art is totally between me and God,’ he says (rolling a cigarette), ‘As soon as its done, it’s a commodity . It’s for sale or I give it away. The art is over for me.’” When the house gets to full, he distributes the art — giving it to friend, donating it, or installing what’s left around the city.. He puts his art on power poles, on a wall plastered with fliers, and hands it over to homeless people. Sometimes he rubber stamps his paintings: “this is not art.” He’s willing to sell his art, but also shows in off-beat galleries. Sometimes the art gets beat up by the weather; more often it disappears, along with the folks who have received it. Sometimes Clark re-paints the weather beaten pieces and re-establishes them

Along the way, it’s clear that Clark takes possession of the city by giving it his work. He establishes contacts, jives with the locals, chats up the dear old ones, and simply engages whatever drifts into his path. He’s a psychogeographer whose work and placement are linked to the geography by chance, by the accident of his finding and the incidents of his painting.

This sounds to me like my kind of fun. Today I met the owner of a house that I’ve loved since about 1995. It’s a pink and green cottage on a commercial boulevard, holding out against the city’s desire to buy the property and build a community center.

I knew it when it had doll houses in its storefront, which now is the studio of its videophotographer owner (his wife did the doll houses). I’ve painted it twice and I’ll paint it again until I catch its stubborn whimsicality in the context of Morrison Street, a heavily traveled primary boulevard through the residential Buckman district.

I also painted the bar diagonally across the street from the pink house. I was told by a voyeur that my painting of the bar was “sweet.” That makes me need to go back and capture something of its archeaological grittiness, its past when it was the Morrison Street Tavern and reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke and left its doors open so I could look in at 10 AM and see the drinkers, nursing their hangovers. Now, the bar is called “Crush” and is a yuppified lesbian hangout, very much a power place, if not a power point. But I still smell the old ciggies when I walk by.

I’ve been congratulated on painting in the streets, observed sideways by the workers at the local soup kitchen and emergency services center, and laughed at for tryng to make the residential “traffic calmers” (roundabouts) into objects of aesthetic interest. I froze my fingers, greeted any number of down-and-outers, am learning the subtle differences in neighborhood denizens, and in short, am becoming, because I’m plunked down for a couple of hours in front of an easel on a sidewalk or piece of grass, a psychogeographer.

I also found Mary Scriver’s comments about Power Points on Steve’s recent Art Walk post intriguing: Power points as Mary describes them — “the basic set: the highest, the lowest, the entrance, the crossing, the edge of water or a change in vegetation or terrain, transition points, fork in a path.”

I think I’m stubbornly ignoring “power places.” I want the place to be “chosen” by “drift,” by whether I’m too tired to walk further or the scene is blocked by a car or today a skyscraper feels like it would be fun to paint or the dog walks in front of my studio window. I don’t choose my elements by the composition they make — I choose them because of some chance, yet felt, interaction between the scene and myself. Then I have to find a composition that matches the interaction, however awkward or unpretty. In that sense, I suppose that I am trying to make visible the interaction between the scene and myself, rather than making an object that qua object.

Which then brings up the perennial question: for what audience or purpose does the psychogeographer engage — herself? –the neighborhood? –the world that needs to see that artists don’t necessarily have to travel in metal containers to wide vistas to make art? –Some conception of what art should be? –Or just for the heck of it, drifting along until a brush (or camera) appears in one’s hand and a vista opens up and a fine interesting face calls out for recording? Clark paints for himself — and then discharges his duty to the universe by giving it up. I paint to understand what I am confronted with — and I haven’t yet decided on how to discharge my duty to the universe. But I did put a painting outside where it could be snatched up by a local burglar. Thus far no one has taken me up on my offering.

The Archie Bray is a ceramics workshop, foundation, and clay business, started by a brick manufacturer who was fascinated by art ceramics. According the website, the Archie Bray was founded “in 1951 by brickmaker Archie Bray, who intended it to be ‘a place to make available, for all who are seriously and sincerely interested in any of the branches of the ceramic arts, a fine place to work.’ Its primary mission is to provide an environment that stimulates creative work in ceramics.”

The Foundation consists of a compound containing the old brick works, a large house, various outbuildings and offices, the clay business, classroom buildings, a gallery building-in-progress, and new buildings and kilns for resident artists. And large grounds full of ceramic work.

But this isn’t about the Archie Bray, but about my thoughts in visiting there. If I were a ceramic artist, the wildly varied, fascinating, and accomplished ceramic works placed about the grounds would have been enormously intimidating. I have no trouble imagining myself turning and running away if faced with this evidence of the skill of those who came before me.

Luckily, I am working in an environment, the Montana Artists Refuge, where the keepers of the flame conscientiously remove any evidence of prior artists’ work. Even the line drawing of a Tibetan Buddhist Tanka that faced me when I first entered the studio was whisked away to the bathroom behind the bank vault so it wouldn’t interfere with my artistic insights.

I know that I am susceptible to feeling inadequate when faced with the fine work of others. This is particularly true in the area of stitching and quilting, where eons of workers have so perfected the craft that one can’t hope to imitate, let alone achieve, what the fine sewers accomplish. I am not intimidated by the art that is done by the fine stitchers (or not much, anyway) nor do I feel my enthusiasms quelled by seeing Rembrandts and Van Goghs.

I’m not sure why I find the craft side of stitching so intimidating (except that I started late and always was a bit awkward with my hands). But I can only imagine that ceramic workers, faced with the Archie Bray compound, might flee in despair before they even began.

So I’m wondering if any of you all feel some areas you tend to avoid because of the feeling of inadequacy that overwhelms you. If the photographers here were to be working in the darkroom with gelatin printing techniques, would that be almost unbearable, given the work of previous photographers? Is there an area of sculpture that Jay stays away from because he’s intimidated by his predecessors? Does McFawn find she can’t read some authors because of le mot juste? Does Sunil shy away from watercolor because the whites are too scary? Or are there other kinds of areas,not just the craft of your art, that you try to avoid because they might stop your art in its tracks.

A couple of other observations: I have a new appreciation of the effort that goes into photographing under adverse conditions (i.e. Steve’s frozen waterfalls, also photographed in frigid Montana). I don’t think i got frost bit.

And I heartily recommend, provided you are not a timid wannabe ceramicist, visiting the Archie Bray Foundation, although you might want to choose a less windy day with a somewhat higher temperature for your visit. The grounds of the compound are worth a day’s stroll and the artists’ studios look to be heaven for those that work in clay.