For more than a decade, we have been watching a layer of clay slowly descending a slope of the Empire Bluff. Usually, the ‘necklace’ stands out as a vegetation-free band. But on a winter day, it was nicely accentuated by snow.

I have given up walking around this aspect of the bluff out of concern that there suddenly could be a slide of clay. Two decades ago, the north-western most tip of the dunes at Glenhaven caved in after I walked there with my dog. Since then, I have grown to respect the forces of nature here.

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.

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 occasionally worry that my tendency to analyze—some might call that an understatement—could be a negative influence on my work, causing me to lose spontaneity or fall into one rut or another. But I’ve now proven to my satisfaction that any effect is both unconscious and ineffective. Here’s how it happened.

Last early Sunday morning I went wandering about the northern Gallatin Valley, which is to me what Hockney’s East Yorkshire is to him, namely the local cultivated landscape. I was well past halfway through when the idea come to me that I had been photographing with an eye to flat patterns of tone, broad swaths of dark and light, with accents here and there. Gone was the three-dimensional landscape, extending into deep space. I was succeeding in the effort commented on last week: I was thinking about the two-dimensional picture, and without even remembering to try.

2

That’s the thought I still had with me two days later as I sat down to process images at the computer. But as I worked, the realization slowly grew that I had not only not abolished projective space, I had even enhanced it beyond the usual. The bright, hazy air between the foreground and the Bridger mountains, lit from behind, produced a tremendous aerial perspective, which seemed to be strengthened further by the relative unformity of the recession in bands moving up the picture.

3

I found this light-space effect particularly interesting because it seemed to be the opposite of what I had thought of as convention that light could highlight an important foreground element, which then stands clearly forward of a darker background. Looking into that a bit, it appears that landscape masters such as Poussin and Claude Lorrain were actually more subtle, typically using light more surgically to create a receding succession of brighter areas.

4

Notice that in these photographs, the mountains are not so far away as they were for June in the desert, and I had no missing middle distance problems, although there were some hidden stretches in the first three images. Rather, it is the mountains that almost disappear, remaining just faintly there like a Cheshire grin. You don’t so much see the mountains as the air before them. (Hockney, by the way, seems to eschew aerial perspective altogether, along with other familiar methods.)

5

So much for knowing what I was doing. But that begs the question of whether my current understanding is any more accurate. Do these photographs in fact give you a sense of depth as strongly as they do me? And do you sometimes change your mind completely about how you think your artwork works?

I just visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where I saw, among other things, a couple of Rothko paintings and a Barnett Newman. Maybe that’s why this installment of the continuing Yellowstone day is more colorful than previous ones (see parts one and two).

I stopped at a favorite spot along the upper Gibbon river, where it’s really just a creek. The snowbanks through which it meandered, diminishing daily with warming temperatures, appear to be only a meter deep. But to reach them from the road would have entailed passing across much deeper snow–a serious obstacle in spring when it is too soft to support me on either snowshoes or skis. Fortunately, there were a few gaps in the trees that afforded adequate views.

The images are similar to the natural abstracts I photographed elsewhere last year. Partly for that reason, I decided to do something different. With Messrs. Rothko and Newman in mind, I converted the black-to-white scale of values to a red-to-dark-blue scale.

Below are the black and white versions of the last two.

I am guilty, perhaps, of over-compensating, of going from too weak to too strong. But what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Don’t you ever over-do it on purpose, either for effect or experiment?

The first is of Roaring Mountain. It doesn’t truly live up to its name from the nearby road, whence these images were made, but it can be pretty loud if you’re up quite close (as I happen to know from previous experience). The image below is just a detail view with a longer lens of an area contained in the image above. Because the sun was not too high, and I was facing east, the mountain appears very dark, though the sun brightens the steam rising from the many vents. If your vision of Hell is dark, perhaps this will serve.

Next stop down the road was the Norris geyser basin, which does not have any sizable and regular geysers. It was odd going ’round on the trails. Where there was boardwalk above the warm ground, it was covered in three feet of packed snow, unmelted by virtue of being held in the colder air. But most of the ground was not only clear of snow, but looked achingly hot in the sun, now higher and falling on flatter, wetter ground. Steam was around you as well as the subject, making the blasted trees all the more mysterious.

I was interested to notice that these two desolated regions, deprived of most visible life by the heat and the chemistry, came out near opposites in terms of tonality: too dark and too bright. Which is closer to your idea of devastation?

In contrast, waterfall results did not live up to last year’s at this season. In fact, I scarcely wanted to take photographs of the falls at all. But I did find another subject there…to appear in a future post.

I’m wondering: what makes you ready for a subject or not?