Many of the models are interesting characters, here is another one:

Recently, encouraged by Minerva, I stayed on for the afternoon session during which two models were interacting, a younger woman and an older one. Drawing the various poses of these two women, the younger one being protective of the older one, I felt highly emotional. Earlier that day, as I learned only afterwards, my mother had broken her leg – ESP?

This is today’s last drawing.

Title: Peace of Mind
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 101×76 cm

I took a series of photos of the sky over a period of about three months quite some time ago and I hope to return to the subject again one day.  I would love to see these printed large and on a wall for people to get lost in.

How many of us look to the sky for a message of some sort?  Happy Solstice.

This spring, I started sketching landscapes on paper rather than only photographing them. My first motif was the view from a bluff. Doing an oil painting on site would be cumbersome because it would mean dragging supplies uphill along a 20 min hike.

Hoping to get help in understanding the contours of the dunes, I started reading Philip Ball’s trilogy on ‘Nature’s Patterns: a tapestry in three parts’. In the first chapters of ‘Shapes’, Ball talks about Rene Binet’s design for the entrance gate to the World Exposition of 1900 in Paris that was inspired by the radiolarian drawings of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Apparently, Haeckel was both influenced by Art Nouveau and its German equivalent ‘Jugendstil’ and influenced it in turn. Ball continues writing about the projective geometry, physics and chemistry of soap bubbles, hexagonal honeycomb patterns and ‘ideal foam’ portrayed in the swim center for the 2008 summer Olympics.

After painting the distant ‘Bear’ Dune and the calm, glassy-looking water from my sketch, I started on the foreground. Frustration set in.

In middle May, the early morning sun had thrown deep, dramatic shadows over the smallish sand elevations which I had failed to sketch in with enough detail. By now, in June, the early morning sun illuminated yellow-green vines and blue-green grass in the foreground that were too complex to fit into my painting.

To seek inspiration, I looked at one of Cezanne’s painting with deep shadows in the foreground:

This helped me to change the foreground as seen as the first illustration in the post.

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 told Jer this morning that I should be able to “finish” these canvases in another two days. Tonight I’m not so sure. But I’m not going to show any more photos of them until I’m fairly confident that I’ve done as much as I can see to do. The panorama  does have a name, which for me means it’s close to being done. I’m calling it “Unoriented: The Amargosa Desert.”

I spent an hour this afternoon (when my eyes and brain could no longer deal with painting itself) reflecting on what I had wanted to achieve and what factors were involved in getting me to this stage of the work. I wrote these “reflections” down in my notebook, knowing that by this evening I’d be totally clueless as to what I was thinking at 2:30 PM.

It’s very nice to have a handsome notebook, even though when I read back through this month’s entries, I often haven’t a clue what I was talking about.

Recently I wrote: “The (dis/un) orientation of shadows.”  I know what that phrasing refers to. I have a large shadow advancing across the desert basin in one direction, while on the bluff that intersects it, the foliage has shadows going the other way.

One of my goals was to un-orient the landscape, to prevent it from being readily understood (hence readily dismissed). At the same time, I’m painting “representationally” so the shadows are definitely shadows, even if dis/un oriented.

But in a way, I am well oriented. A huge factor in being able to accomplish as much as I have is the set-up in which I am working.

The Red Barn, while only 4 miles from the 1000-population town of Beatty, is over the Bullfrog Hills from the hamlet. You look west and see the mountains that line Death Valley. East from the Barn you  see the Bare Mountains that terminate at Beatty, but not Beatty itself. I didn’t know how important the clear unstructured view of the Basin was until a group of vacationers set up camp across from the Barn. They were only there a few days, but suddenly my sense of space was totally disrupted. I waved them good-by this morning.

The Barn doors have been open every day I’ve worked here (I think I missed about five days in the Barn out of the 29 I’ve been in Beatty.)  This openness is miraculous:  for the most part, it adds to the comfort; the north wind doth blow, but the sun comes in the doors from the south and heats the place. But more than that, it allows me to feel myself part of the desert, yet sheltered from the worst of wind and sun and dryness. Maybe that’s cheating, but it has made painting these canvases relatively comfortable, even possible, given their sizes.

Another factor is the isolation and consistency with which I can work. I don’t drive, so Jer drops me off at 9 and picks me up at 4. We have no way to communicate, so if I’m brain-dead at 2, I still have two hours to fill (and no bed to nap in) before he’ll arrive to pick me up. My days are all pretty much the same. I have the occasional visitor, and half a mile or so away is the road to the ghost town, so I see distant vehicles going by, too far to hear unless they are a cavalcade of motorcycles. There are volunteers at the Museum building, who sometimes come by, and an occasional Beatty friend shows up. But mostly I have days like today, when the greatest excitement arrives when a crow gives me a shout-out and a big RV turns around in front of the Barn.

I am not entirely isolated, yet I have hours and hours of being insulated from other concerns, time in which to work and think. I can’t sit down without being confronted with the canvases, which stare at me as I drink my diet soda. They always draw me back to painting. Now I have my new pentatonic flute to occupy me, but it gets mucked up with spit and starts to sound dreary after a little, so back I go to the canvases. The canvases are always there, waiting, patiently, but needing more work.

One observation I hadn’t expected is that mostly all I have to work with here is color. Shape and form are simple and small. All the rest is moved and directed and oriented (or dis/un-oriented) by color. This isn’t usually the case for me, and it’s really made me see and work on color. [I still have one last big color problem to sort out -- tomorrow if possible.]

This insistence on color means that everything I look at now has specific meaning for me in its color — the lavenders, the pinks, the red ochres, the grays that are undercoated with red ochre, the rhyolites and slates; moreover, the sun imposes itself on every surface and facet that it can touch and changes the color with its rays, but those colors get shifted with the ever-present wind, bending a new facet into view and sweeping the old one away just when I think I understand it. Even the mist and haze shift with the winds and the sun and change the distant colors of mountains. The only stable element is the earth itself, the cut-out shapes of the mountains and the blank distance of the sage basin.

Even the sounds here in the barn are un-oriented, if happily familiar. The tin roof keeps up a continual jangle and chatter, and the wind blows through the holes in the roof, not whistling but whooing. Sometimes it sounds like a car driving up the tarmac; sometimes it sounds like a jeep coming down the gravel road. And sometimes the drone and ring and rattle of the roof disguises the real vehicles so I am startled when a visitor appears at the Barn doors, even though the parking space for vehicles is directly in front of them.

I am not unoriented in my space — the four walls of the barn, with its high roof and rafter structures and open doors surround me; I know intimately how far it is from the furthest canvas to the barn door where I check the shape of a mountain in the distance. The sense of time — pick-up at 4 PM, leave Beatty for Portland by December 12th — these elements also orient me, giving me a sense of goal and urgency that an unoriented reality wouldn’t have.

I began the process knowing what I was facing. I came with lots of good materials with which to do the work. I came with Jer, who structures our Beatty life. I have had help from good friends here in town, and Suzanne and Charles lent out their eyes, helping me with the insights I need to finish the work adequately. I read about the desert in W.L. Fox’s books and about “Space and Place” in Yi-Fu Tuan. I had words of wisdom from Jef Gunn and fellow critique members. I painted the Oregon high desert to practice and the Oregon Coast to practice some more. It has been a journey, which tried to suss out how not to paint a goal. I’m almost there. Another day — or two. It’s a conundrum as well as an adventure.

Here’s a view south from the Red Barn on November 14, 2009; I would guess this was taken about 10:30 AM, which I know because that’s the way things south sometimes look at  10:30 AM.

And below is a Maynard Dixon painting:

Maynard Dixon, Edge of the Amargosa Desert, 1927

There’s always company on this path we tread, deserted, unoriented as it may seem.

Reporting from The Goldwell House in Beatty Nevada, four miles and 3 hours (in today time) from the Red Barn.

Gerhard Richter, 1985, 57.4 cm x 86.4 cm, Oil on paper

The Henri Art Magazine (written, I think, by several authors) has a fascinating continuation of a discussion of color, “Color: Simulation,” published on Wednesday Nov. 4, 2009.

The author discusses how the perception of color has changed with technology, the technology that presents any color you want: directly out of the can (reducing the need to use traditional techniques to create luminescence or brilliance by direct observation and experience); and then, further “enhancing” and changing color as we know it, technology can produce a pure physics of color through light technologies (as seen on the computer screen.) This, he insists, has produced color as desire, as consumer directed, and loses color as personal and emotive.

I can’t do justice to the writer’s observations; you’ll need to read them yourself. And I’m not sure the polemic need be as strong as it is.

But I was reminded of Steve’s black and white photography, (also here, on A&P) and along with thinking that Steve’s work clearly transcends point-and-shoot photography of the digitized masses, I suddenly understood how the black and white refuses the seduction of the digitized web versions of color.

Henri says:

For Delacroix color brilliance can be found through the complimentaries and values of shadows, in the vision of experience. In our Postmodern age we find our color in the hues of commerce, through the optics of desire. The first is sloppy, fleshy, messy, natural – color found in life and in memory. The second is clear, clean, manufactured, ‘real’ – color found through a collective and through programs.  And finally, there is the surprising Platonic idea that runs beneath our electronic world of light speed and light screens - heavenly color – color unimaginable – brighter, purer, seen from above. You’ll find that sort of color on your flatscreen - pulsating and irradiating into your eyes. It is hyperactivated color, direct color, color better than that in the can, color of light and speed.

And somewhat later, his polemic:

the meaning of color, the need of color, is reduced to buying and selling – pure electronic color IS pure commerce. I recognize this as the legacy of Postmodernism and the 1960s….

I of course love the “sloppy, fleshy, messy, natural” since that’s what I think I am and do –I color from life and memory. And I have had at least one (gentle) complaint from a client who said that my (textile) art didn’t look as brilliant in person as it did on the web. Fortunately, she accepted the piece anyway (I gave her the choice of sending it back) but I was suddenly made aware that nothing I could produce would look the way the technical feat of computer light makes it look.

Henri’s further comments somewhat broke my heart:

We’ve discussed this in the examples of Richter, Heilmann, and Yuskavage. In their works we are swamped with color, but it is color that goes no further than the surface. This color is part of the critique of Modernist color, the critique of visual meaning. It does not emote or inspire – it is there to entice, to show, to consume, while it remains wholly on the surface. It doesn’t move beyond the optical, it remains a product, straight out of the can, self contained and isolated. This color is about design, customization, decoration. It is the readymade found on the color chart…. The Postmodern world is about context, about the impossibility of meaning or narrative, and so, the color remains inscrutable. It develops discontinuities rather than relationships.

The whole post, as well as past posts leading up to these observations, are well worth reading. The Henri Art Magazine is a dense historical set of posts which present a critique of post modernism, of which this post seems to me to be the center. And it is something of what I feel about a great deal of prominent painted art today. Henri differentiates between reality, by which I think he means cultural context; and the natural, which is tied to “our bodies and our physicality.” His painting dilemma, as he describes it, is to try to sort through which of what he is doing is determined by “reality” (the cultural flux) and the “natural” (physical bodily being) and to find his way “between the two.”

“Color” he says, ” is not neutral,  color can be meaningful, and for me, this is the sand in the oyster.”

Underwood, oil on linen, 4′ x 5′, 2009

I find painting the desert to be hugely about color (the forms are miniscule compared to the color, but the color is so subtle, so  quiet, one has to almost stop breathing to see it. And to paint it, one (this one, anyway) has to forget about all those brilliant sunsets and photos of mesas blazing in the sun. No, the northern Mojave basin.range deserts have such quiet color that even Photoshop gets confused trying to find contrast or to “correct” the color. It’s a great, fun challenge.

And here’s a bit of nonsense,  interactive art ,  an entirely different category of art. This is one that has little to do with color, but a lot to do with contemporary art. I can’t argue with it as “art” nor as “Art” but I find it sheer delight. It’s from Robert Genn’s The Painter’s Key newsletter, by the way, so you may have already seen it.