The show is composed of interleaved groups of my photographs and Kerry’s prints. My contributions came from the Sourdough Trail project, the Cottonwoods series, and the Meeting Sky series, together with a newer set, unimaginatively called Windy Day. The latter consisted of the image above in a constellation with the following six, which are actually details of the same scene photographed at different moments.

These were strung out in a wavy line against the color-contrasting, warm brick. The large picture is 22″×13″, while the smaller ones are 9″×9″.

Windy Day set

Some of Kerry’s prints are quite large, and certainly dominate my photographs in terms of size. However, I don’t think the viewer’s experience is quite so lop-sided. What’s your impression?

Windy Day next to Anam Cara and Wilderness

Along Sourdough Trail (3 of 5) next to Tilt series

One of Kerry’s sets consisted of three grids of 9″×12″ prints sandwiched between layers of plexiglas, each depicting the same tree in front of a friend’s house, but (loosely) in morning, midday and evening light.

Composite prints by Kerry Corcoran

For this show I experimented with papers. My Windy Day and Meeting Sky sets were printed on tones (“white” and “cream”, the latter actually closer to pale peach) of a watercolor/printing paper (Stonehenge). This took some experimentation with inking profiles, and yielded less sharpness and contrast than normal photo printing paper, but that seemed appropriate. I also chose not to use glass in the rather minimalist frames, and even exposed the rough edges of the paper on two sides.

Framing with exposed deckle edge

The absence of glass not only made the paper more present, but avoided reflections, which I always find quite annoying. Hopefully the paper will stand up well, without warping significantly. It’s not so much of a risk with photographs—I can print a new one if need be.

Reflections on glass, not on paper

As I’m writing this, Birgit has posted a comment on our earlier discussions of dissolving boundaries in Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. Though not quite explicit, that idea was certainly in my head with the later work in this show. The complexity of the tree/sky boundary in Meeting Sky, with the densely ramified twigs, and the softness of it in Windy Day, with the motion blur, are two ways this idea can be approached in photography.

Rackstraw Downes  Mixed Use Field on Texas Coast, 1987, oil on canvas on board, 11 x 58 inches

As someone soon to be facing how to paint a large desert sky spread across a large desert panorama, I’m circling the question of the possibilities available.* The Goldwell Foundation, where I’ll be painting,locates itself physically near Beatty, Nevada, on the northwest region of the Basin and Range country, 8 miles and one mountain range from Death Valley. I’ve done lots of small studies there. Now I’m contemplating the Big One. Desultorily contemplating…..

I have no theories, only pictures.

Turner  Landscape with Distant River and Bay
c. 1840-50; Oil on canvas, 94 x 124 cm

Richard Wilson, On Hounslow Heath,  14 . 5″ x 18″,  circa 1770

Turner Sun Setting over a Lake
c. 1840,  Oil on canvas, 91 x 122.5 cm

John Constable, The  Stour Valley from Highham, c. 1804, Oil on canvas

A.Y. Jackson Terre Sauvage, 1913, oil on canvas, 50 x 60″

Lawren Harris, From the North Shore, Lake Superior,1923 or 1927 Oil on Canvas

Emily Carr (cropped by Underwood) Vanquished, 1931, original: 92 x 129 cnm

And then there are the photographers. I got waylaid, distracted, stopped and muddled by the plethora, so I only include two. A number so small as to be silly. I suspect that Steve could provide me with innumerable sky photos just by turning on his computer –

Roland Lee, Yucca Skies Chosen for its desert reference.

Ian Parker, Light Beam (Iceland), chosen for its stylized photography — the illusion of a painting.

“Morgan” from a student work, on a London Educational web site, chosen because it’s so eccentric.

There are thousands, possibly millions, more paintings and photographs of skies, ranging from the most subtle to the most outlandish, from the dabs of the impressionists through the stylish swerves of the Candians to the symbols of students. Photographers love skies; ordinary people love skies. Everyone has opinions about skies. Even the desert has skies, skies that can be far more interesting than the skies that I love in Portland Oregon. (Well, sometimes I love them; sometimes they are just gray).

I think the sky I’m envisioning will have to both blend and change, across the 25 or so feet of the panorama. I think it will have to signify different things — time of day, weather, potentials. I think it will have to be interesting, but void-like. It will have to signify “sky” but be one with the desert below.  It will have to be interesting. It will have to say distance and potential and sublimity. Small challenges.

It’s less than a month before I get to work on this itch, this desert panorama, and and so this is one way to spend the intervening weeks.

*For those not following my obsessions, I will return to the Red Barn at the Goldwell Foundation, at the head of the Amargosa Plain, to work on three to five (?) 4 x 5′ vertically oriented canvases, arranged in a panorama, in November and early December. I will be keeping a journal of that time on another blog. Stay tuned.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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?

Jerry Rankin is a Montana artist who seems able to come up with completely new ideas in every project he undertakes. Only a few of these from his career are available on his web site. Recently he created two sculptures, variants of a theme, that have no precedent in anything he’s done before. Of thin, flat, black steel, they are very simple in design, being straight-edged boomerang-like shapes with one or two slots, respectively, cut into them. Yet they are intriguingly rich in perceptual surprises. I had the opportunity to borrow the cardboard maquettes, thinking I might try to illustrate these effects. Instead, I discovered an unforeseen aspect of how these objects relate to their surroundings.

I mounted one of the maquettes in my study, and took down the pictures from the wall behind to remove distractions. I set about trying to capture what happens when you look edge-on at the piece, seeing both sides at once, one with each eye (and only with that eye). Each side is a horizontally flipped version of the other, so the brain can’t fuse the two images into a consistent representation.

I never succeeded in that effort, but I soon became aware of the captivating shadows cast on the wall. The window opposite was actually a rather complex light source, due to the distribution of bright and dark areas outside. I also had a tungsten lamp in the room which cast a warmer light on the sculpture and on the warm-colored walls. The result was a shadow with multiple overlapping penumbras whose darkness and color depended on the various angles and the distance of the maquette from the wall. Fascinated, I played with a number of arrangements, as you can see below. Note that in these images I have exaggerated the color variation, though it was already quite distinct to the eye. I should add that my impression of the colors seen on two different computers varies significantly, so I’m not sure how it will appear to you. Ideally, the warm color is more that of a lemon than a peach.

As you can guess from the title page in the set above, I went so far as to mock up a bi-fold card, which has the two triptychs printed back-to-back. If you have strong powers of spatial imagination, perhaps you can visualize that after opening the front title page, you see (on the left) the left image of the upper panel facing (on the right) the left image of the bottom panel. Other images appear as the second fold is opened.

A great strength of these sculptures seems to be in their stark, hard-edged minimalism, so I felt a bit odd with my softening, complicating, and adding color. But I really enjoyed the lively interaction of sculpture and shadow, which brings out some of their quirkiness. Though in several ways similar to a more monumental, severe, elegant, and conceptual Ellsworth Kelly I saw a few weeks ago in Minneapolis, they possess a friendlier personality, and, perhaps, a more engaging depth. I’d definitely choose the Rankin over the Kelly for my garden, if both were to be had at appropriate size.

Ellsworth Kelly: Double Curve, 1988

My questions are about the status of the photographs in relation to the sculpture itself. Whether or not of interest in its own right, is such a study useful in appreciating the sculpture? Are the photographs distracting from the subject? As audience, would you rather experience the sculpture directly before viewing any such photographic interpretations? As the sculptor, would you prefer, for publicity purposes, a simpler, more direct image?

My day in Yellowstone last month was a long and varied one (see previous posts one, two, three). As I was leaving the park along the Madison river (almost the longest in the U.S.), I stopped occasionally to photograph the line of mountains on the opposite side of the valley.

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As I was doing this, I had in mind the images from the month before of the landscape by Tepee Creek (post here). I was hoping to catch some of the rhythm, perhaps even musicality, that I found in both places. I’ve nurtured such a poetic and mostly unrealized hope since I read about photographer Michael Smith’s epiphany with sonograms, like the one below of a hermit thrush. Smith was inspired by the beauty of such sonograms in creating some of his wide landscapes. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Smith’s wife, Paula Chamlee, in her own way, succeeded as well or better.)

That wide panoramic format is not only reminiscent of a musical score or narrative progression, but also fit well with the actual manner in which the line of mountains scrolled past me as I travelled. So I tried cropping a few of my images to half their original height, which makes them three times wider than they are tall. It was fun trying to decide what slice to take; sometimes more than one seemed to work.

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For comparison, below are the non-panoramic versions. I’m not sure I like these less, but there is a different feeling with them. The viewer wanders around more in the landscape, rather than taking a journey along a designated path.

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The same approach seems to work as well for a vertical orientation.

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As usual, I like to see how other artists have dealt with similar issues or used similar approaches. Lately, l’ve been looking at Bruce Marsh‘s landscape paintings, which are frequently in a panoramic format. Here are just a few from his Recent and Utah galleries (click to see larger versions):

Calf Creek II

Waterpocket Fold I

Mira Bay Hill

The experience of viewing a panoramic depends on size and viewing distance. If it’s large enough that you need to physically walk along it, that tends to enforce a linear trajectory, like reading a Chinese scroll. On the other hand, at that size there is also plenty to see via local roving about of the eye. Wandering with a drift.

One thing I noticed is that my panoramics here seem to be more about repeated patterns and major division lines, like the skyline. Especially images 2-4. Bruce’s paintings have more of a shape, a development or story to them, which I find very satisfying. Waterpocket Fold I and Mira Bay Hill even have evident chapters. My vertical does have more of a storyline, though I can’t decide whether it runs up or down.

Which direction seems more natural to you? In the case of the horizontal panoramics, do you read left-to-right, right-to-left, or start at some eye-catching point in the middle and work both ways? How about the vertical?

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?

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The image above gives an idea of the view across from my lookout. But the scene really came alive for me after I narrowed the field of view to just a patch of the wall. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I slipped into a mode where I was fascinated by the scene that could be viewed as both an allover abstract texture and a wealth of realistic detail of rocks, trees, avalanche tracks, etc.

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That may be too many examples, but they have variety in the proportions of different tones. The general composition of the scene, with its line of trees at the rim, reminded me of a Larry Poons drip painting entitled Old Dominion:

However, I find the drip texture in the lower half of the painting rather predictable and boring, whereas the canyonside pattern never loses its interesting mix of structure and randomness. The texture of Poons’ recent work (e.g. the 2007 painting Duetto shown below) makes a better match.

But just now, as I write, what I am really reminded of are the patterns generated by cellular automata, mathematical algorithms that can create both repetitive and unpredictable patterns, depending on the rules chosen to govern them.

These patterns evolve according to their rules in a downwards direction. No doubt analogies could be found to the evolution of the canyon wall, driven by the algorithms of erosion. To do so might, for some, detract from the natural beauty of the place. To me, it can only add to its mysteriously compelling power. It illuminates, in yet another way, how past time is present in what we see today.