January Sky, the Painting

My most recently completed studio painting:

January Sky, approximately 30 x 36″ (I haven’t measured it yet), acrylic on canvas, 2011.

This is not a plein air painting. It was inspired by a walk up SE Salmon Street, late one afternoon a few weeks ago. The clouds were gray, but somehow a light was pouring through them, straight down the street in front of me. It was, as Jan puts it, an ethereal moment. I had to paint it, back in the studio, with only my visual memory as reference.

I was also inspired by the pentatonic flute, which requires repetition to be really effective. The almost monochromatic palette echoes the six notes of the flute, and the houses, lined up along the geometries of linear perspective, make me think of the notes of the flute, carefully calibrated to make pleasing sounds, repeating the sounds with variations, and then swelling with under and overtones.

Well, the conceit sounded good in my head <snort>

I have switched to my winter, stuck-in-the-studio acrylic-painting mode, trying to keep the worst of oil toxicity out of the space. Acrylics blend differently, pigment somewhat differently, and are just plain ornery in my hands. But they dry fast and don’t cause my body to protest. So I keep working, hoping to learn to use them well.

–June

PEFO Paintings, Mostly Finished.

I promised to provide updates to this blog as I worked in my Portland, Oregon, studio on the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Paintings. The following paintings are mostly finished. At the moment I seem to have 17 acceptable paintings which I am moving around into various groupings to see what works best. Here are the 17, in alphabetical order.

Agate House, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010.

This is one of the two structures in the park made from the petrified wood that litters the landscape (most of the Puebloan buildings are constructed out of sandstone, not petrified wood). It was “restored” in the 1930′s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and is not considered an authentic artifact. The original dated to the 1250′s and was built by Puebloan peoples, part of the language group that Mesa Verdi and Chaco Canyon National Parks feature. I was fascinated by the grasses, the petrified logs along the path, and the structure, high on the hill.

The Bidahochi and Chinle Formations, 24″ x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010. This is the big geological unconformity in the park, where the volcanic Bidahochi, 10 million years old, meets the Chinle, 225 million years old.

Blue Mesa Hoodoo, 16 x 12″, Oil on masonite, 2010.

The hoodoos are weird wind-and-water eroded features. In the Petrified Forest, they are often blue-gray, but when the waning sun hits them, they turn golden. The Blue Mesa trail is one of the best in the Park. This painting is an unconformity all its own, having a style very unlike most of the work I did at PEFO. It resembles most closely paintings I made in Death Valley, up some of the side canyons, where the features are sculpted and golden.

Lacey Point, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010.

One of the pull-out points where the Painted Desert is the predominate item of interest. Here the clouds caught me in their spell; the badlands faded beneath the skies. This view was recommended to me by a park service staff member, but the time of day she recommended painting it surprised me with its colors.

Long Logs Trail, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010.

The Long Logs Trail was once a macadam road, although that doesn’t show here (I have photos and think sometimes of painting that unconformity). I suspect the road was turned into a walking trail not long ago because as a roadside attraction, the innumerable petrified logs were tempting for poachers. Vehicle passage near them made poaching easier. This is just a guess. But the trail is a delight because it is not close to the current highway. And the lushness of the area around the littering logs was fun to paint.

Petrified Logs in the Visitor Center Plaza, 24 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010.

Sometimes the visitors don’t really want a drive through the park. The main visitor’s center is just off Interstate 40 and can be entered without going into the park.The plaza that the Center and a gift shop/café that surround it have charming bits of petrified wood, including one 20-some foot log. The Visitor’s Center Building, across the Plaza from the log still life, is pictured below.

The Neutra Plaza, Main Visitor Center, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

The Visitor’s Center’s main doors are at the end of a long wall, facing the parking lot. Beyond the doors is the open entrance to the Plaza, and the petrified wood displays face the incoming traffic. At the far end, the plaza has a pond and artworks and is open to an artificial but pleasant desert hillock that hides the employees quarters. The café and gift shop run along the other edge, stopping short of the welcoming entrance. This view looks at the windows of the Center which face the Plaza, opening up the small interior to give it a sense of the Arizona sky and foliage. I painted it just as dusk was coming on.

Painted Desert Inn, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

The PDI, as everyone referred to it, is a historic structure, built over an older structure by the CCC guys and decorated by a well-known designer of Spanish Revival style Park buildings. These spanish revival buildings and decor can be seen in many places around the southwest. The PDI was almost torn down in the 1970′s but was saved.

Painted Desert Inn, North Side, 12 x 16″, Oil on masonite, 2010

The PDI sits on a bluff overlooking the badlands of the Chinle Formation. I got fascinated with the challenge  of painting adobe (or in this case, faux adobe.) The building has, I think, at least 10 levels of roof, each of which is a subtly different color of rose-pink.

Storm from the Painted Desert Inn Patio, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

Inside the PDI is a covered porch that protects a bit against the wind and rain that can gust through the park. Through its adobe openings, the Chinle and Bidahochi formations are presented, against a wide wide sky. Painting within the protected porch while gazing outward was magical.

Pintado Point 1, 12 x 16″, Oil on masonite, 2010,

The badlands of the Chinle formation.

Pintado Point 2, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010.

Another view of the badlands, with the washes, which were important as roads, depicted. In both these paintings, Pilot Rock stands, as it stood for explorers, as a way to take one’s bearings.

Puerco River Meadow, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

We were at the Petrified Forest in an exceptionally lush year for foliage. This scene was painted right next to the Puerco Ruins, which sit on a hill above the Puerco River. We saw water running in the river several times during our stay.

Puerco Ruins, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010.

The ruins here date to about 1250 AD, and like those elsewhere in the southwest such as Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon are from a Puebloan people who left the area for reasons that are unclear. Current Pueblo people say these are ancient habitations of their ancestors. The Navajo who are now more prevalent in the area arrived some hundreds of years later and spoke a different language than the Puebloans.

Route 66, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

The Petrified Forest Park is full of unconformities, but the one that stands out, both in the painting and at the park is this reconstructed old car, placed prominently on a pull-out where Interstate 40 roars by.

The Painted Desert Inn from Tawa Point, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010.

PDI takes on its proper place in the area when viewed Tawa Point. It blends into the landscape and reveals the true small nature of its historic status.

The Teepee, 24 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

The Teepee painting has a couple of funny stories attached, but for my purposes here, it’s another of the badland features of the park, less complex than the Painted Desert, but fascinating in its stature.

These paintings will be grouped for exhibit. That’s the process I am currently working on in the studio — that and painting the 1/8 inch edges of each, as well as planning for their mounting, floated, so they can be readily hung. — June

Petrified Forest Residency: A concluding remark or two, in Context

I have been shilly-shallying about writing this conclusion for close to a month now. And it’s not because I don’t know what I want to say. I think it’s because I can summarize or I can expostulate, and while the first is almost too brief, the latter is too turgid.

So here are some silly opening thoughts:

1. I could never live for long in the desert. Hat- qua- Desert Hair is a serious problem.

June, in desert hat, in Portland Oregon. Note she is not displaying what happens to her hair after she wears the hat.

2. The artist-in-the-park is considered picturesque and scenic, even while grimacing over her inability to get the reds just right. Tourists will take photos, openly and surreptitiously. Some pretend they are photographing elsewhere, but the artist knows. Many will ask permission, and then the standard answer is  “my best side is from behind.” Which is merely the truth.

3. The Petrified Forest views, indeed most “landscape” views, are not what they appear, even when one reads the Park Service signs. The unconformities, depriving one of easy impressions, are everywhere.

(Note the now-closed outhouse at the left end of the old Puebloan walls: the Park Service changed its mind about this building’s use. This is a painting that will be revised slightly but the outhouse will remain. This view is Draft 1 of the Puerco Pueblo Ruins, Oil on masonite, 12 x 16, 2010

3. Places are seldom without human presence, although that presence may have gone away long ago:

Route 66 and Interstate 40, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010. The Park Service pull-over where this car is located is just over the hill from the Puerco Puebloan ruins. They date to about 1100 AD.

4. Parks are full of people who want something, but it’s a bit unclear what they want — mostly to get back into their cars and see if what they want is over the hill.

The last remark is unfair to most of the folks I met in the park. Mostly they seem to want to know and to see, and they do their best, given the limits that time, energy, life, and travel by motor vehicle provide.

But it’s that thought, that people want more but don’t know what “more” might consist of, that leads me to what I came to realize about my own approach to land-and-urban-scapes.  To summarize: what excites me most about the painting I do is knowing — physically and mentally — the context of what I’m painting. And then trying to find ways to incorporate that “context” into the painting — or, barring that, into the presentation of the painting.

This isn’t a new approach for me — it’s just a new recognition of my own desires (like the tourist who wants more, I want more than just an oil rendition of an astonishing geological/geographical/city scene spectacle). To prove that I have been working on what I will call “context” for some years, here are a few old paintings from the files:

Mine Shaft, Basin, Montana, 7 x 9″, oil on masonite, 2007

Circling, SE Alder and 6th, 30 x 40″, Oil on canvas, 2008

Bloomtime, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2008

Gold Point Playa, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2009

But most of Context, even the immediate sort, is impossible in the strictly visual arts. Even more so in a single painting. I can’t figure out how to get the smell of dusty sagebrush and blooming rabbitbush into my paintings no matter how often the wind blows bits into the oils. The sounds might be recovered by a tape recorder — and I’m seriously thinking about investigating digital tape recorders for my future efforts. Taping the sounds of a seemingly pure landscape might be one context worth considering — truck traffic,  valley-girl gossip of the nearby viewers, the ravens scolding and begging, the crunch of gravelled paths.

So that’s one context consideration — perhaps a tape of the entire painting time — boring but only needing to be encountered in segments by the viewer might add the context and enrich the experience of the viewer.

But the larger context — historical, geological — unconformities, pit houses, the Colorado Plateau Uplift — these are somewhat larger and harder to convey. And yet, and yet, I want to convey them.

So that’s what I learned at the Petrified Forest — that while I am painting, I am considering not just the scene in front of me but all the context around it that I can take in: that the area is at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, features three basic areas (low grass prairie, Painted Desert badlands, and petrified wood), has had the feet of humans crossing it and possibly living in it since 2000 years before Christ (BCE), has public displays of ruins of structures that date from 1100 AD, has a wash that was used as a trail by surveyors in 1853 and acted as a trail for many thereafter, features Route 66 memorabilia, has Interstate 40 running through it, has two petrified wood structures (one built by Puebloan Peoples in 1100, one built by a local hotelier in the 1920′s), both modified in the 1930′s by CCC guys who were from Philadelphia which is in my home state), and so on and on.

The Painted Desert from Pintado Point, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

The difference between walking through a gorgeous landscape, sitting and looking at a marvelous view, and applying paint to canvas to simulate the gorgeous, marvelous landscape in order to make a plein air “landscape” is monumental. Sitting and walking have certain similarities. Sitting and painting have other similarities. But actually, each is a different experience. And then one adds in all the hours and years and millenia that that landscape has experienced, and one might very well simply throw in the towel.

But egoist that I am, I believe that my art is worth doing only if I try to incorporate even the teeniest bit of my experience and knowledge into it, giving it a different context from what the tourist next to me experienced. I do this for myself, and then I hope that it becomes part of others’ “landscape” and allows them to linger a bit longer than they might otherwise.

Pintado Point, above, is not only the landscape I saw often, driving north along the Petrified Forest’s highway, where you come around a corner and over a bit of a hill and Bam! there it is. It is also the tail end of a large set of badlands called The Painted Desert in this area of Arizona, most of which is outside the park. It also contains fossils that are 225 million years old — “Triassic Park” as Jer and others like to call it because an early dinosaur fossil  has been found in these formations. The badlands are also the last remains of geological features,  about 215 million years of them, which have disappeared. This is the Park’s great unconformity, where the dark basaltic area in the forefront is about 10 million years old and the drop-off goes immediately to the 225 million-year-old territory.

I could go on and on about the Painted Desert, and this painting (as yet I haven’t mentioned the raven, nor the Park Service employees, nor the way the wind blew nor the cold that was starting to creep into these early morning escapades). Most of what I could go on about, as well as what I just mentioned, can’t be seen in the painting.

But I’m hoping that when taken together with other paintings from the Petrified Forest, if presented carefully and with nuances made available, that this single painting will take on something other than mere bright oil on canvas.

This is perhaps heretical and certainly hubristic — that a small bit of painted masonite could ever be other than just that. It’s only something I want, not something I think other painters should want to do or try to do or even be interested in doing. Yet I continue to want to share what I know of the place and the space and the time, insofar as it is possible, however limited that possibility might be.

That’s what I learned at the Petrified Forest (as well as the history of Route 66, the 1930′s CCC rules, and the ravens’ disgust when the artist has no treats for them.) And that’s why I am playing around with ways to present the paintings that I did there, so as to expand and enrich the way each means and is seen.

[A possible plan for presentation of PEFO paintings, Oct 3, 2010. Laid on the back patio of our apartment because there was no way to check it out in an upright position.] As I continue to work on the paintings I did at the Petrified Forest in my Portland studio, I will update this blog, both with finished and decently photographed work and with the presentation(s) that I am ruminating on. So this conclusion is only the idea of a conclusion: the real conclusion, in Context, is yet to come.

Petrified Forest Residency, Almost Finished: Oct. 16, 2010

October 16, 2010: Last painting finished in the Petrified Forest.

Yesterday we toured Holbrook, where we “did” Jim Gray’s Rock Shop, a serious classic of its kind, checked out the Museum Courthouse, walked through and photographed the Centennial Historic Register District, and got home by 1 PM. Oh and we had a Dairy Queen.

Then I laid out my paintings to see if the scheme I had come up with earlier had been fulfilled:

These are by no means all the paintings, nor is this the final arrangement. I was just checking to see if I had filled in the gaps. Which I had.

A bit closer look at the top and bottom of the set. There are some paintings that I’m fond of that aren’t here, so the final grouping will probably be different. And I might just decide to frame and exhibit them in a nice measured row so that the 30-second lookers can have a bit of time with each painting.

Anyway, this putative presentation is something about context, and something about time, both of which have occupied me (along with the dratted question of perception) for some years. More about that in my final summary, which I haven’t tackled yet.

However, this morning I went out to do one last painting, in order to make  21 pieces for the 21 days we have had access to the Park. I didn’t paint on some of those days, but on some I painted twice. And I’m not counting the three bad paintings that have been discarded, turned back to the wall until they can be sanded to oblivion.

I thought for the last painting I would do the Neutra Plaza (in the Visitor’s Center), but when I woke up I knew I wanted to do the Painted Desert, the best view of it, from Pintado Point. It wasn’t the right time of day, but I had a choice between painting in the AM and having dinner with friends in the PM, or skipping dinner. I have my priorities, so at 7:30 AM there I was.

The colors of the area are much different in the morning.  When we would drive home from the south part of the Park, just before dusk, sun in the west, we would come over a little rise and there it would be — the desert blazing with color. In the morning, the colors are cooler and drabber. So I painted the shapes and forms I saw, but ignored the color, put every red I had on my palette, and used most of them on the board. The smooth, less colorful areas of the painting are the “washes” (which might be big muddy rivers sometimes.) The big one is Lithodendron Wash, which was the way most surveyors, trackers, Native Americans, and early pioneers came through.

The colors appear all wrong on this monitor, but hopefully, back in  Portland, I can control the light and check the colors against the painting, which is now packed away in the Honda, waiting transport. The next blog will be the last, and may have some conclusions.

Which will undoubtedly be revised as I consider this experience over the next few months. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day Whatever, Oct. 14, 2010

I have lost track of time. A bit of disorientation in space as well, but  mostly of time.

After returning from the Lightning Field, I had to sleep a lot, and I had to re-orient my head to painting. We found a hardworking crew, putting up a fence around our back “patio” space. They start work at 7 AM.  So at 8 this morning, I was at the far south end of the Park, working one last small painting of the employee compound (Park Service Rustic sort of buildings) on a hill which overlooks the entire Visitor’s Center, the road into and away from it, the compound, and the desert and bluff behind.

The south Visitor’s Center is secondary to the big Neutra-designed northern one (which is off I-40). The south center is call the Rainbow Forest and, along with its indoor triassic museum exhibits, features (outside) a lot of petrified logs, big, small, and always colorful. The paths go up one of the eroding cones of badlands, and wind around among them in order to show the logs working their way out of the earth itself. It’s fairly wonderful, but not exactly what I painted.

Rainbow Forest Employees’ Compound, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

As I said, I am interested as much in the human artifacts as the natural ones, and I needed, for the set of paintings that make up the rectangle I’m envisioning, a small square human artifact painting. I have to think about this compound painting for a while — it’s neither here nor there, it seems to me. And it needs, as usual, tweaking. Perhaps it will fit in with the others when I get them all together.

Then, because I wanted to add another long board to my collection, I did a horizontal which is primarily a color study but which also includes some human artifacts. It’s pretty abstract (which I like) but needs more work. As I was painting it, with the swirls and liquid-like movements, I realized that this landscape was shaped by water. So the quality of water moving about, in the sand, ignoring the human definitions and shoving them aside, seemed appropriate.

From the Rainbow Forest Overlook, 12 x 24″ Oil on masonite, 2010

As of today, I have painted 20 paintings, not counting the 3 that got discarded. I think I want to do one more, of the Neutra Plaza from a different point of view, just to round out my 3 week (21 day) stay.

I have not yet decided which painting the Park will retain — I can take these all home and send one back after I’ve worked on it a bit, although I might have to negotiate the process a bit. But I think every painting I did needs a bit more work, so I’m inclined to play with them through the winter.

I am burned out on painting for the nonce. It was like pulling teeth to get to work this morning, and tomorrow we think we’ll go to Holbrook and visit the Courthouse Museum and Jim Gray’s Rock Shop. And get a Dairy Queen, as a reward.  And perhaps I will have to start the last painting, of the Neutra Plaza. I think I’m on a crusade to make the Neutra design loveable.

Reporting from the Petrified Forest, Apt 14 –June

Petrified Forest Residency: The Lightning Field by Walter de Maria

The Lightning Field experience is as far removed from Drive-by Tourism as it’s possible to get. Well, that’s not true — a two-month Park residency is perhaps a bit further along that continuum.

But to go to the Lightning Field takes some effort, and money. Reservations are made far in advance, as the cabin in which you are housed can hold only 6 people. The cost is reasonable, but not cheap; it includes a night’s lodging, dinner, and breakfast, as well as the hour’s travel from the village of Quemado, New Mexico, out to the Field in a “company” van. You aren’t blindfolded, but the trip to the Field wouldn’t be easy for me to recapitulate, although I do know that it’s 11 miles from the Continental Divide.

Once at the Lightning Field, we (Jer, myself, and 3 others) were introduced to the comfortable log cabin facilities (all mod cons like heat and stove and mouse proof containers included) and left to fend for ourselves. We spent a total of about 19 hours at a (actually gorgeous authentic) log cabin, placed at the center north end of 400 stainless steel poles, topped with precisely tooled and welded tips. The poles are organized in a grid,   one mile by one kilometer, and their tops are aligned within (I believe) 1/25  of one another, so a (theoretical) plate of glass could be placed on top of the 400 poles with each tip touching it.

I decided to set off diagonally across the field, dodging large ant hills, moving around sage and desert sticky plants, moving from pole to pole, which I could see lined up from my starting point. However, once I got between two poles, I found it difficult to figure out which diagonal alignment I was working toward. It was disorienting to be in such a precisely oriented space (and I could always see the cabin, so I was never lost) and yet not to know exactly which pole to chase to maintain my goal.

There was not a cloud in the sky (and none appeared while we were there) and when we arrived, the poles were barely visible. As the sun started to decline, the poles started to appear, in a rhythm I can’t quite describe (I’d have to watch it over and over to get it in my head), until first they were all visible and all silver and then, ever so gradually, they turned faintly and then more radically golden and then rosy gold.

The alignment of the poles from the porch of the cabin (which deserves a whole paragraph in itself) was such that the golden aisle of poles beckoned one, like the emperor’s road. At the same time, the poles seemed to be advancing in a slightly golden menacing military motion.

And then, zip — it was gone. Darkness descended. We ate the prepared enchilada dinner, with flan dessert, and a ginger chocolate offered by one of the other guests. We went out to an absolutely dark sky, no light pollution, and I saw the milky way, the first time I’d seen it since we were at French Glen, near Steen’s Mountain, in southeast Oregon, in the early 1990′s.

Jer and I got up before the sun rose and stood in the field to watch what happened when the sun came over the horizon. It was a lovely gentle sunrise, long across the furthest space and slow in lighting the sky. The amazing moment came when we realized that the sun was starting to touch the far western mountains, and then ran along the base of them on the plain, a tiny bit higher than we were, and then, the Un-Shadow, the sunlight, came toward us, perhaps down an imperceptible declivity, over a matter of maybe a minute, before it reached us, just at the bottom of the bowl, and the lit up all the poles. The poles came into view gradually, all silvered, but we were almost more fascinated to see the light moving in a miles-long line, closer and closer, as far north and south as our peripheral vision could see.

We are told that the poles turned golden later in the sunrise process, but shortly after the sun had actually crested the eastern hills, we shivered our way back to bed and didn’t get up until about nine. I made another march straight south from one pole to the next, tooting the pentatonic flute at each pole, and then turned around at number 6 or 7 or 8 (out of 16) to be ready for the van when it returned at 11.

We took no photographs, per instruction. We were there, present, most of the time, although I’ll admit to having read myself to sleep with a bit of Tony Hillerman. We had charming conversations with the other guests at dinner, but mostly wandered off by ourselves except for that early morning moment, when Jer and I leaned back to front, keeping warm enough to stick around for the sunrise.

Walter de Maria wrote an article for Art Forum in 1980, in which he cites the facts about the Lightning Field — number of poles,  the number of months it took to make it, the precise distances between poles — a whole host of facts. And he interspersed the facts with, well, I could call them “dictations” or “truths” or “observations.” I will simply drop them off here and you can decide what they are. Remember, each statement is followed by perhaps 25 facts about the poles and their making.

1. Facts are not the art.

2. Isolation is essential to the art.

3. The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its aesthetics.

4. Part of the essential content is the ratio of people to space — small number of people, large space.

5. The land is not the setting for the work but is a part of the work.

6. Light is as important as lightning.

7. The invisible is the real.

8. Isolation is the essence of land art.

I numbered these;  de Maria did not. They may not be in the order that he wrote them. I think I have copied down all the statements and copied them fairly correctly, but it’s also possible I missed one or more and/or mis-wrote one or more. For any errors, I apologize. The man who set out the poles would not have missed one nor mis-wrote one. The geometries and precisions are awesome. But not as awesome as the experience itself. –June

Here’s another blog with other information on the experience.

And here’s Blake Gopnik’s review in the Washington Post

Petrified Forest Residency, Day15, Oct. 10, 2010

A raven flies across the rock face at Canyon de Chelly.

My residency contract ended yesterday, but we talked the Petrified Forest into giving me another week. However, we had already made arrangement to go to Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field Land Art, in west-central New Mexico, so we are on the road for a couple of days.

Various changes of plans happen once one is engaged in a project. We had not expected that the PF internet service would be readily available, so I set up motel reservations in Gallup, New Mexico for the night before we were due at the Lightning Field and the night after. It’s  70 miles from the Petrified Forest to Gallup, but we figured we would need as much time on a proper high-speed server as possible.

This morning, we realized that was an unnecessary precaution, so we decided to become tourists ourselves, heading north from Interstate 40 to the little town of Ganado, where the Hubble Trading Post is located.

The Trading Post is a National Historical Site and has a Visitor’s Center (in Park Service Rustic style), where I bought a book about  Maynard Dixon, a painter of the area who also painted in the Amargosa Valley in Nevada. We also saw a video that had some things about the Hubble Trading Post, but contained a great deal of gorgeous footage of Canyon de Chelly.

So we checked out the Trading Post, composed of a combination of old and newer buildings, many lived in by those who work the cash registers and farm the gardens.

The Hubble Visitor’s Center.

The side entrance to the Trading Post.

The Post has a host of Indian tourist goods — rugs, jewelry, baskets, pots — but is also the local grocer to area residents. Its floors creak like a host of squeaky violins and the collection of goods for sale is mingled with the collections of beautiful items collected by the Hubble family over the years. It’s charming and eccentric and well worth the stop.

But, having seen the video with the Canyon de Chelly photos, and being very close to the Park (albeit getting further and further from Gallop), we decided we had to visit Canyon de Chelly.

I won’t do a travelogue — there far better photos online than any I got  on –  the Park Service’s  gallery of photos is a good place to begin .  But walking on the rim overlooking the canyon was weird, because the surface is a flat scored hard rock, which suddenly ends and the canyon is upon one. Luckily the Park Service has put up stone walls and iron railings for the knock-kneed among us.

The canyon bottom is farmed by Navajo, and the Park is unique in that it is owned entirely by the Navajo Nation, which lives, farms, grazes various animals including goats, both on the mesas above the Canyon and within the Canyon itself. So it’s a living landscape, mingling tourists and residents. Very unlike the usual vacant spaces within National Parks where human are seen only on the prescribed walkways.

That said, the Park and the Navajo Nation carefully control where and how the tourists have access to the Canyon bottom, particularly as it contains priceless ruins and petroglyphs, both from the Anasazi, who were there close  to 1000 years, until around 1400 and the Navajo, who appeared about 1700. The two groups are not related; the Anasazi were Puebloan, like the Hopi, and lived in communal villages. The Navajo live in independent quarters and were more nomadic in the earlier years.

I decided to include this Park excursion in the Residency Journal because of the curious mingling in this park of habitants and tourists. It’s a continuation of my thinking about what “landscape’ is and what landscape painting might be. All fodder.

There will be no Journal tomorrow, because the Lightning Field does not allow electronics or photos. And the next day is a blank in our schedule. So perhaps something, perhaps nothing. Regardless, I’ll be back Wednesday, when I can return renewed for the last days of painting at the Petrified. Forest.

Writing from a motel room in Gallup, New Mexico –-June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 14, Oct 9, 2010

Blue Mesa Badlands, Petrified National Forest, 2010.

Having survived the demos, I am taking the day off from painting. Which didn’t exactly mean sleeping in. We got up at our usual time, but this morning, instead of pulling myself up and pulling things together and pulling myself to the car to get to the painting place before the light changed, I made a cup of coffee and meandered around the deserted, cool complex of Visitor Center, Science Center, visiting VIP apartments and some real living quarters.

The tourists who climbed out of their cars all looked a bit grim at 7:43. I sympathized, silently. No one wanted a cheery greeting.

The birds were noisy enough to drown out the noise of the freeway, and far more pleasant too. I stood on a human-made hillock  hill that separates the Visitor’s Plaza from the living quarters until my ankles started to itch (ants? desert stick-to-ums?) and then meandered through the Plaza, around the parking lot (eyeing the few cars that grumpily were entering) and back to the back of the maintenance area, where the birds were carrying on and no one at all was in sight.

I am fascinated by human activity within spaces, although I know nothing about the science or research of such. But artists are observers, and I find myself observing what happens when humans are observing or partaking  in “nature” — although what we think of as natural is often just over grown human artifacts. I think I may have to start painting “real” landscapes, not just wacky cityscapes, where people are impossible to avoid, but landscapes that include people and their artifacts.

It would be easy to be caustic about the tourists (I have been so, even as I am one myself). But that’s not what I want. What I want is to examine, with paint, what people do faced with the Painted Desert or Petrified Wood. Or Mt Tabor or Colonel Summers Park. How they use the natural stuff around them, what they avoid, where they make paths, when they flee it and when they embrace it. “Landscapes” that include telephone poles and signs and humans as well as the natural elements that normally define the genre.

[Deserted Park building, possibly an old outhouse.]

All this maundering has been engendered by a thoroughly academic article that I only understand about a quarter of that I am reading on my Kindle,  a panel discussion, led by James Elkins, that included a host of folks from all kinds of disciplines. I shall include the name of it later (Jer wants to go get some ice cream right now).

This photo, taken from the Blue Mesa Trail, includes, if you look closely, a train crossing the short prairie grass of the upper Bidahochi mesa as well as a couple of trucks (sorry, you can’t see them at this resolution) beyond the trains, traveling down I-40. We were standing on a steep asphalt trail (obviously made in part by machine) in the midst of wicked badlands (see the first photo). Below us were braided dry washes and conglomerate stuck in bentonite clay as well as steep washes filled with petrified wood. In the far distance is my own personal landmark, painted as an icon of natural landscape, Pilot Rock. But it too takes on human meaning, as a way of defining where the surveyor/explorer/pioneer/gold seeker was in the undifferentiated Colorado Plateau area.

So following are a number of human/natural interface photos, ones I took this morning, while thinking about what we landscape painters ignore as we imitate the Impressionists. My memory of the Impressionists is, of course, that they included the human as well as the natural, but to us, now, those scenes seem fairly romantic, a time passed for which we can wax nostalgic. They are “landscape” to us, as telephone poles are not.

[The Puerco Kiva with sign and folks]

This last photo reminds me of scenes from western movies, all fake, of course, of horsemen riding across ridges (sitting ducks for attacking Native Americans, methinks). These folks are more benign and in little danger of anything but sunburn. You might also notice that everyone has cameras.

Tomorrow we are on the road, to Gallup, on the way to de Maria’s Lightning Field. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 13, October 8, 2010

Another day, another demo. Weather favorable. Painted the Bidahochi outcrop on the rim behind the Painted Desert Inn. The vertical, devoid of human artifacts, has now been completed. This afternoon, I did the demo, also behind the PDI, trying to improve my skill at painting adobe. It hasn’t improved.

Bidahochi Rim from Painted Desert Inn, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

Painted Desert Inn, Rim Side (draft 1), 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

I also had my paintings set up in a small porch-like alcove where I could see them from my painting spot for the painting above:

Perhaps tomorrow, when I am compos mentis, I will have a thought. But for the nonce, I have recorded this day. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 12, Oct 7, 2010

I painted, (on masonite, not on stuccoed walls) the Painted Desert Inn this morning, and I demoed painting at the Painted Desert Inn this afternoon. Turns out demoing is a bit easier than painting, although in both cases the wind played havoc with the work at hand.

No boards danced off into the badlands, but this morning, my heavy bottle of medium was no match for the wind — the bottle was pushed nose down into the palette at least four times, smearing me, my clean-up rags, and my normally good temper — I can attest that the wind pays no attention to words from the artist.

Painting the adobe building proved to be an eye opener, particularly as I’ve been reading about Richard Neutra’s ideas for the main compound and visitor’s center. Although Neutra was into the hard-edged, steel and undecorated design of Modernism, he also was fascinated by the non-box like structures of Japanese architecture, asymmetry that balances.

Well, the Painted Desert Inn, designed by Lyle Bennett in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style and constructed over an older, petrified wood hotel and café by CCC guys in the 1930′s, is a marvel of asymmetrical but balanced lines. It maintains a horizontal feel, but its flat roofs have levels upon levels of edges, all in soft shades of pink and iron oxide, shades that the eye can discern but the painter is doomed to merely attempt to recreate. The inn’s  rounded edges (which are definitely not Neutrian) capture the sunlight so the eye understands the different levels. The hand-troweling of the cement stucco also makes for subtle shadings within the “flats” of the walls, so the whole undulates softly as the sun plays across it.

The Painted Desert Inn looks and feels solid, unlike my painting board, which chattered wildly at times, trying to fly away. Once I found that the wind was so strong it was blowing my brush sideways, so that a line I was attempting to draw kept moving sideways with the wind.

I couldn’t finish this painting, but in keeping with the good/bad/ugly spirit of this journal, I present Draft 1. The forefront, in front of the wall, will have the typical desert foliage, sage and rabbitbrush and a couple of junipers. The colors need more work, with the distinct levels made more distinct. But the basic lines are there. This is one of those drafts which require me to go back to the site and paint — I could not do it in the studio, without being on site.

The Painted Desert Inn (Draft 1), 12″ x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

Then I took a short lunch break and went back to the PDI (as everyone around here calls it), going inside where I thought the wind would be lessened. Alas, between the two open sides of the upper porch, where I was painting and the various interior doors that open to the outside, the wind played more havoc with my work.  I didn’t realize how strong it was at first, as I was sitting down at my easel. But when I stood up and could see more than sky out the open porch windows, there were dust clouds erasing all the views on the basin floor. Pilot Rock sort of stood above the dust roiling about, but the rest of the cones and mounds were quite lost.

However, I had started a painting yesterday, so I could continue with it, mostly working on the cement stucco of the left side, a stucco window that framed the scene.

From the Porch at the Painted Desert Inn (Draft 1), 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

You may note that this too is a draft — I want to make the space more strongly emphasized. But the wind and dust was making my eyes water, so I put this painting against the wall with others that I had brought along to exhibit and sat down, where I was a bit more protected from the wind. I picked up one of the earlier paintings I had done that needed tweaked. All this time, I was hearing slams and bangs from inside the building, with far fewer visitors coming through to spend time chatting. But I paid no attention until, blam, the painting above got caught in a wild draft from the interior and fell over on its nose. The porch has a dusty (duh) cement floor, a good bit of which (the dust, I mean) ending up on the front of the wet oil.

I cleaned it off as best I could, laid it flat, went back to my easel,  and Blam, another painting beside it got knocked over by another gust from some unseen but opened door inside. It blew a bunch more dust onto the wet oils of the painting I had just cleaned. I decided to lay all the paintings leaning against that inside wall flat on the floor, face up. That way, I assumed they wouldn’t suffer more damage. Then I once again cleaned the dust off the painting.

I also laid the painting I had worked on this morning flat on the floor and then went back to tweaking the one on the easel. About that time a visitor came along and mentioned that while she liked the painting, it was getting awfully dusty and maybe I should clean it off. She was looking at the one I had cleaned up twice. I tried to ignore the comment, but she persisted. When I resigned myself to  looking at the painting, it was once more covered with dust, this time dust that evidently came out of the air. Likewise, the PDI painting had grains embedded in its wet surface. And even the painting on the easel, while less effected, had dust grains on it. The others were less effected because the oil was dry.

One visitor remarked that I should just call them sand paintings and give up. Well, one of the two ideas seemed right.

It was 3:30, time to clean up each wet painting, insert them into the carrier out of the wind, and get out of Dodge. It took me until Jer got there to get them cleaned up and put away.

Tomorrow, I’m painting and demoing on the lower patio/porch, which seemed, at least late this afternoon, to be better protected from the wind. Tomorrow morning, I hope to do a 12 x 24″ vertical from that patio, rather than attempting to drag my gear down and  paint the vertical from the Wilderness trail. Weather permitting, Jer is going to hike down;  I’m going to stay up top. We hope to get there early, before the wind picks up.

Here’s a photo of the Wilderness Trail spot (center right, on the path) from which I thought I might try painting — before the wind persuaded me otherwise.

Oh and a bit of good news: the Park has consented to allow us to have an extra week in the lodgings. We both felt we needed some more time here, and now we have it. I can stop hyperventilating about getting the last few paintings finished for the putative presentation. We will be going off for a few days for a visit to the Lightning Field (Walter de Maria’s land art piece in New Mexico). But then we’ll return for another five days of painting and photographing and drinking in the landscape. And maybe I’ll just plaster a canvas with some medium and let the dust do the rest of the painting; that should please some critic or other.

Reported from Apt K, Petrified National Forest Park, October 7, 2010 –June