Art & Perception

Farmland, 36 x 43, painted cotton

I have lived many places, and in each, I have always had a strong sense of the place itself — the trees and plants, the nature of the cultivated earth, the nature of the uncultivated earth, the sky, winds, air, light — I can describe all these with a fair amount of detail.

But I seldom had to try to recap in art what I know about a place where I no longer live. However, now I am doing so.

“Paint what’s around you,” seems to be a sound admonition, but what is around me is the opposite, environmentally speaking, of what I am painting. more… »

Funny how things come together sometimes. After casting about for a while, rejecting various topic possibilities, I finally settled on one I’d had in mind for some time, although I hadn’t prepared images or written anything. After typing the title and while I was uploading images, I noticed Doug had just posted on influence. In part, this post is about what I can do here in Montana that is as much as possible like those fabulous images of California dunes (Oceano, Death Valley) by the Westons and many others (see examples here and here). I’m not exactly striving to copy, but I am deliberately letting that influence wash over me and through me. I love the forms of those high contrast black and white images, both the three-dimensional dune forms and the two-dimensional shapes in the plane. I look at those images often.

But there is another goal with my series, although I had not quite formulated it sharply until Birgit’s recent post. In addition to the dune-like undulating fields in the foreground, most of these images have the Bridger mountains in the background. But the mountains are serving not so much as subject as to bring out the light-filled air of early morning.

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I’ve been thinking about the planes on which we work, that is, the stretched canvas, the photograph, and the quilted textile. This is partly in response to my interest in analyzing quilted textiles vis-a-vis more traditional media, say, oil paintings. But my thinking has also been triggered by some reading I’m doing; I’ll reference the readings at the end of this post.

With stretched canvas, some questions revolve around how the picture plane is used (as a window, as a flat surface, or extended out into frontal space and rounded so there’s a back side to the image.) more… »

On my way to Anasazi country recently, I stopped at Arches National Park, where I stayed the night. Next morning before dawn, I was off to an area known as the Devil’s Garden, which I had never visited. It turned out to be one of the weirdest landscapes I’ve ever seen: a few trees and other plants sprinkled among mostly bare reddish sandstone, eroded into bizarre shapes determined partly by crack systems. Although the day before I had ignored the more famous features, I immediately got to work making pictures. Almost as quickly, the metaphor of bones came to me. These rocks were like internal structural elements somehow made visible at the surface. I knew the series would have to be titled Bones of the Earth.

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I’ve just returned from my trip to Utah in pursuit of earlier denizens, the Anasazi. Like the proverbial tourist, I won’t know what it was like until I’ve seen my pictures. Not because I never took my camera from my eye — it was there less than 1% of the time — but because the trip is not over yet. I’m done exploring the canyons for now, but I’ve just begun to explore the latent content of my experiences and the images captured by my camera. That will take longer, and I know there’s plenty of discovery still to happen. Nevertheless, one idea can be identified that is not entirely a surprise.

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We have some impressive mountain ranges in Montana, but this isn’t one of them. Though reminiscent of the Bridgers that stretch north of Bozeman, this is, in fact, a dirt pile. I came across it while cruising through a future subdivision, killing time before an appointment and in a mood to photograph. As a handy subject for the 20-30 minutes I had, it was about perfect.

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Richard reminded us recently about the painter Clyfford Still, and it seems I’m still under the influence. Not of Still, but of whatever it is that makes me make pictures that look like Stills. Last Saturday in Yellowstone we hiked in to Tower Falls and I made the photograph that heads this post. I did not have Clyff in mind while on location, but I find the result strikingly similar to these:

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