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 rather than only photographing them. My first motif was the view from a bluff. Painting on site would be cumbersome because it would mean dragging supplies 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, 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. All I could do now was to capture the general geometry which I did for six mornings in a row. But it did not help much with my painting. The yellow-green vines and blue-green grass were beautiful but too complex to fit into my painting. Thus, I decided that the foreground had to remain unfinished, perhaps until next year when the sun had the right position in the sky for the lovely deep shadows to happen. – From this experience I learned to always have my camera with me to take note of details.

Musing about my difficulty with foreground what comes to my mind is my early training in looking over long distances across a bay of the North Sea while walking along the dikes with my dog. Another difficulty with foreground may be my recent photography. To capture the long distance views, I used long focal lens photography.

Perhaps, more sketching over the summer of the combination of foregrounds and long distance views will help train my mind to be more comfortable combining those two. But there still will be the issue of detail. I cannot see myself drawing the intricate shapes of luscious green vines in the foreground.

After comment 14, see below, I painted over the foreground with muted colors.
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Nina, seeing the actual picture, commented that normally one paints the foreground with stronger colors and more detail to effect a 3-D view. I remembered being struck by Cezanne’s foregrounds and I downloaded this painting of his.

Seeing how black Cezanne painted some of the shapes in the foreground, I tried the same electronically by painted very dark green on the foreground of my picture using Adobe photoshop. I did not like the result. I will live with the painting for a while. Perhaps, I will make the foreground more striking. Perhaps my style will be to leave the foreground vague.

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!

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.

Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience says:

It is not possible to look at a scene in general; our eyes keep searching for points of rest. p. 161

If time is conceived of as flow or movement, the place is pause. p 198

Distance is a meaningless spatial concept apart from the idea of goal or place. p. 136

Dancing, which is always accompanied by music or a beat of some kind, dramatically abrogates historical time and oriented space. When people dance, they move forward, sideways, and even backward with ease. Music and dance free people from the demands of purposeful goals and directed life, allowing them to live briefly in what Erwin Straus calls “presentic” unoriented space. p. 128-129

Is it possible to paint unpaused place, without  goal and multidirectional (hence undirectional) to paint the dance, to put on canvas with brush, pigment and medium — “unoriented” space?

We are back in the desert. The paintings above are as close as I came last February and March to painting unoriented space. I’m giving it another try.

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.”