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, although the site and a relatively well-preserved ruin did exist before the CCC restored the building. The original dated to the 1250′s and was built by Puebloan peoples (also called the Anasazi), part of the southwestern peoples that the 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 beyond.
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 eroding sandstone 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 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, still bearing a yellow striped down its center. The road doesn’t show here (I have photos and think sometimes of painting that as yet another unconformity) but I suspect it was turned into a walking trail because, as a roadside attraction, the innumerable petrified logs were convenient for poachers in vehicles. This is just a guess.The trail, however, is a delight both because it was easy to pull the cart of painting supplies up, and because it is not close to the current highway. 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, designed by Richard Neutra in 1963, 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; 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 cafe 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; more water than usual had made the grasses more prominent. 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. Old Route 66, long abandoned, is marked by the telephone poles.
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 badlands 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
Day 0, before it all begins: Residency at the Petrified National Forest
We are in Holbrook, Arizona. No art will be displayed in this post. No art has been produced for this post, nor for any other in recent days, although we’ve passed through seriously artistic scenery. Which might be the problem, along with the problem of just driving and driving and driving and eating road food and sleeping in strange beds and visiting national parks which were terrifyingly full of other people visiting them.
All that said, we took a quick gander at the southern edge of the Park this evening (the gate was closed, so we couldn’t get in). Now I’m petrified.
All was horizontal. All was blank blue sky. All was without focus. A gorgeous sunset lasted 2 minutes. In short, painting in this landscape could turn out to be a real challenge.
[Actually after I took this photo, I decided the running fence and distant glow was beautifully paintable, except that the glow disappeared in about 3 seconds. The fence will remain and perhaps I will go back on site an hour earlier and actually finish painting the glow, just before it disappears. This note was added Monday Sept 27; no painting has appeared as of January 2011].
I assume, however, that there will be colorful rocks. And the place is located inside the Painted Desert, which must mean something. But for a Saturday evening’s mediation on what Sunday will bring, this evening’s drive was a bit unsettling.
Challenges will appear. Life will go on. Paintings will be made. Two weeks will pass quickly. No one will ever need to see what I’ve splattered on the canvases during this time. Perhaps I’ll find something in Portland that I can pass off to the Park as a painting I did in response to their generosity.
Panic time, anyone?
Reporting from the Arizonian Motel, on the far outskirts of Holbrook, AZ, just off I-40, in northeastern Arizona, where it’s flat.
Day 1, Sept. 26, 2010
The terror I felt last night was mostly for naught – perhaps just a way of ensuring that I don’t get too uppity. However, the entrance to the Park was as intimidating this morning as it was last evening – or perhaps more so in the blank light of day, with the inevitable commercial nonsense just outside the gates (see that fake teepee to the left and imagine the 75 mile per hour spring winds that the local indigenous peoples lived with) .
We drove from the south end of the Park to the north section – the Petrified Forest National Park is a long, narrow strip of land inside the larger geographical region called the Painted Desert. The advent of the railroad in the late 1800′s brought in tourists and made materials that had lain untouched for hundreds of years ripe pickings for entrepreneurs and rock hounds, who carted it away by the wagon loads. The petrified wood of the area had been so vandalized by tourists and commercial enterprises that by 1906 Teddy Roosevelt made it into a National Park in an attempt to protect the materials.
Even today, rangers check vehicles carefully for purloined rocks and in controlled studies have found that signs and warnings are insufficient to keep people from carrying away the beautiful minerals.
The southern part of the Park is where most of the petrified wood accessible to tourists can be found. Some alterations done by earlier Park employees are inadvertently informative. The formation called the “Agate Bridge”, a large petrified log that spanned a gully, was reinforced with concrete supports because it was bound to fall as the rocks that held it up weathered. However, the Park Service notes on its signage that even the supports that well-meaning earlier rangers had installed would meet their demise over time. Time alters all.
Speaking of which – other kinds of changes have occurred within the park over time; near the Puerco River (and Interstate 40 and the BNSF Railroad) are the remains of the Puerco Pueblo, with its peak habitation in the 12th century. And from the overlook at the Pueblo one can see the cell phone towers, the highest vertical elements around.
In the living area for employees, Richard Neutra, a well-known architect of the 1950′s and 60′s, thought he was imitating the pueblo styles of the Indian ruins he saw around the region, but in truth, he did what he did best – designed in the style known as high modernism, with flat roofs, plain exteriors, windows flush to the walls, and sunk unobtrusively into the landscape.
Nothing of his modernism clashes with the spare pueblo style, although nothing Neutra designed is as beautiful as the walls that remain from the Old Ones [also known as Puebloan or Anasazi], the peoples who lived here and near here in around 1200 –1300. Their dwellings had the advantage of using the local sandstones which fracture in specific ways, and, at least in some of the remains seen in the Rainbow Forest, it’s clear that the builders embedded different colored stones to enhance the beauty of the edifice. The “found” remains don’t show the builders using petrified wood, except in the case of the Agate House, a reconstructed ruin at the south end of the Park. Presumably petrified wood was harder, more dense, and didn’t fracture into convenient building blocks.
At the end of our initial drive through the entire park, stopping at some but not all of the overlooks, we arrived at the main visitor center, in the northern section, just off I-40. We obtained a key to our apartment (all mod cons), unpacked, made up our beds, and after a light lunch at the restaurant on the premises, Jer went back to Holbrook (25 miles to the west) to buy grocs.
He returned at 4 PM and by about 6 PM I had decided I needed to go painting – I was getting obsessed with not wasting time, and more specifically, not spending another night worrying about whether I could paint this landscape. So off we went, to Tiponi Point, located about 1/8 mile up the road. Already the sun was setting (Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time), and before I got my things out, the sun had disappeared, although some of the higher points of the red hills were still glowing. I stared hard, squeezed out paint rapidly, remembered to take a quick photo, and finished the fastest painting I’ve ever done – I think I painted about 10 minutes, altogether. It was exciting and fun and frustrating. It was a good beginning.
Tiponi Point, September Dusk. (Petrified National Forest) ,12″ x 12″, Oil on masonite, 2010
Normally I would have far more photos in an introductory travelogue like I’ve just given. I would also add links for more information about factual items. However, the hinky nature of the internet here at the Park means uploading photos is an iffy process and getting to web sites equally difficult. Just getting onto the internet is arduous.
And of course, the problem of value and hue in the web-processed painting is problematic because I’m using a laptop, where those elements are highly dependent upon the angle of the screen. So unless/ until we find the optimal place to do the blogs, I will probably be writing more text than showing photos. I am saving other photos, hoping to complete the posts at a later date.
Reported from Apt K, Petrified Forest National Park, uploaded Monday September 27, 2010. –June
Day 2, Sept 27, 2010
Morning Moans:
Jer and I woke at 5:50 and were at Tiponi Point by 6:08. The gate just beyond the pullout was closed, so I decided to paint there, again. Shortly after I had all my gear set up, the ranger appeared and opened the gate. However, later we discovered we had a key to the gate, so we can enter and leave at will.
This morning’s painting is more successful, at least in hue, because I found my transparent iron oxide.
Tiponi Point, Sunrise (Petrified Forest), 12 x 16″, Oil on masonite, 2010
We got back about 9:30, had coffee and breakfast, looked at our photos, and I went back to bed. Later we checked in at the main office, where we met Todd, the liaison person for the artists, and found Sarah and Matt, who were at the [Oregon] John Day Fossil Beds National Monument when we were there four years ago. Sarah said she saw our car and, without realizing it was us, had a moment of homesickness for Oregon. They have a two-year old boy, Issac, but sounded just like their old selves.
Amy Chan, our fellow artist, who came by in despair last evening about her digs, has been issued better quarters, rooming by herself instead of with two roommates. She was waiting at the closed gate before we got there this morning – another obsessed artist.
After the Nap and visiting with folks:
We took a short trip to the painted Desert Inn National Historic Landmark (at Kachina Point). Originally constructed of petrified wood in the 1800s as a place for travelers to the Painted Desert, it was renovated by the CCC guys in the 1930s, run by the Fred Harvey company in the 50s and 60s, and re-renovated by the Park Service in the 1970s, after they were convinced it had historic value and shouldn’t be torn down. The structure has been overlaid with pink adobe (more likely pink concrete, shaped to look like adobe) the petrified wood still exists under the plastered surface. The interior has many of the original 1930s Southwest Revival furnishings . It also has fine murals, painted [by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie]; well worth examining more closely.
My great interest in the Painted Desert Inn is that it has two wonderful patios for painting, useful in the mid-day sun. So one of these days we won’t have to rise at 5 AM, a time of day that I am not generally sentient in.
The staff member at the Painted Desert Inn was very helpful, and it will be fun to go back there and work. And the staff member at the main office also helped us think about where we might go next. She suggested Lacy Point, the most southerly viewing place in the northern Painted Desert section of the park, and said that 4 PM was the perfect time to see it. So off we went at 4 PM. This time, I was faced with the westering sun, silhouetted buttes and mesas, along with a sunken plain highlighted by the sun. An interesting problem. I’m not sure I solved it. I wanted the buttes to float a bit, and even looking at the real painting, I don’t think I achieved that effect.
As you can see, the colors are very different from this morning’s. The Park has various geological formations, some of which are richer in iron and magnesium than others; those are the red red rocks. Here, the rocks are more varied in color and of course, the western sun caused the shadows to shine differently. The big plain in the center is a special feature [Lithodendron Wash] of this area, about which I read but can provide only visual info about. It was glowing in the sun, while the buttes were dark and fierce.
I have an inkling of a plan about how to deal with the park, which sprawls and has a variety of foci. I think I want to do a series of paintings at various “historical” (ie geological and human history) points, and then work them into something larger, perhaps time-line like or overlaid, as with collage. I’ve never done a successful collage, so that might be beyond my abilities. I have a lot of time to do this, of course — about 12 more days [which actually turned into more like 16 as we got an extension on our time here].
I have begun by collecting pamphlets and of course, we are both buying books as if we weren’t having to drive home in a loaded Honda. I shall try absorbing the information and make a more formal plan.
Tomorrow, we plan to arise at 5 AM and go to Blue Mesa, a loop drive and hike in the southern part of the Park. We had to inform the Park law enforcement troops that we would be there before the gates opened, so they didn’t arrest us for stealing petrified wood. I could tell them that we will have no room in the car for wood — too many books!
Report from Apartment K, Petrified Forest National Park, September 27, 2010. –June
Petrified Forest: Day 3, Sept 28, 2010
Day 3, Sept 28, 2010
6 AM:
I did my early morning painting at Blue Mesa, a 3 mile loop road in the center of the park with a short hiking trail attached. Jer walked the whole trail. I walked a short way, until I spied a hoodoo, one of those rock formations that are balanced weirdly, with various harder and sometimes larger rocks sitting on top of softer, screed and eroding materials below. The process is called “differential erosion” and the rocks often look as if they are leaning, just about to fall. In fact they will fall; for example, the petrified trees have mineralized into harder rock than the ubiquitous sandstone of the Chinle Formation, and they can be found lying like bridges (“Agate Bridge” is the name of one such formation in the park) across hummocks of softer rock. Eventually the underlayment erodes away and the stone tree falls.
The hoodoo rock at Blue Mesa did not have a stone tree, but was eroding in such a way as to unbalance it.
Photo of Blue Mesa Hoodoo, 5:50 PM, September 27, 2010. Below is how it looked at 6 AM:
Photo of Blue Mesa Hoodoo, 6 AM, Sept 28, 2010
The colors change radically around here and are often wildly at odds with what one expects. The surface features, both the softer rocks as well as the hard petrified trees, can have wonderful, and wonderfully variable colorings. The desert sky, the time of day, the presence of clouds, as well as the nearby rocks and degree of erosion account for the various colors. When I saw Blue Mesa at 6 AM (when I had expected dramatic shadows and color), I had some second thoughts about rising at 5:30 to see the washed out hoodoo. Nevertheless, it was there — and so was I. And so I painted it.
I used more titanium white than I have ever done, basically covering the entire board with a light layer of white and then adding color. The hoodoo was particularly white, with some banding of soft ochre or gold in some of its strata. It was also off-balance, with scree underneath indicating an eroding base.
Blue Mesa Hoodoo #1, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
This is one of those paintings that I knew before I stopped would need more work under better conditions. I had my back to the sun, which meant a great glare on the board. And the amount of white paint on the board prevented much value change — titanium white oil paint is a great leveler of light and dark.
By 10 AM, when we left, the area was far more colorful, albeit still muted. I would have expected the opposite, as a higher sun generally washes out color. I can’t account for the difference in perception. The hoodoo gained a bit more color, although not a lot; but the hills behind it, taller, banded, and eroding, had more color to them at 10 than at 7 AM.
Today the concept of layering (various colors are caused by different minerals as well as different conditions under which the soil-turned-rock was laid down) has caught me (like “collaging” got me thinking yesterday). Most of the rock, however banded and colored, was laid down in the same period and seems to be mostly sandstone, of varying consistency, and conglomerates, both of which erode readily, albeit differently, depending upon conditions and kind of sandstone and conglomerates. (The stone “trees” have a different composition, much harder and heavier than the sandstone/conglomerate materials). So layers are uncovered in different ways, depending upon the overlying level of rock and the nature of erosive weathering agents.
Later Periods, the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and the early Cenozoic Era seem to have been washed away (or disappeared in some fashion), although some late Cenozoic Period material is left as cap rock in a few places. The late stuff is mostly lava and ash, and sometimes holds the sandstone in place, capping it.
This break in the geologic record is known as an “unconformity,” a great word, which could be used in other contexts besides the geologic. For example, evidence of early peoples has been found, beginning about 10,000 years ago, with records extending through about 1300 AD. Then a human unconformity within the park appears until some early white travelers — Spanish explorers, mountain men, and surveyors from the east – hundreds of years later, leave written records.
[I must add that the human unconformity is not seen as such by the indigenous peoples, such as the Hopi, who say that their ancestors lived here, but moved on to other places when new needs arose. Scientists now more or less agree with the Hopi understanding.]
Hence an oxymoron: layering provides a time-line, oldest on the bottom, younger on the top. But unconformities muck up the time line, leaving great blanks. The blanks remind me of the Arizona skies, which are great washes, fading into altered colors so gradually as to be imperceptible, until Bang, a black table-shaped form asserts itself against the washed out void. An unconformity, a transition that doesn’t happen.
Another metaphor appears in Pages in Stone, by Halka and Lucy Chronic: “Single layers in the Chinle Formation are not extensive and are in many places replaced horizontally by strata of different color, grain size, or bentonite content.” (Italics mine)
Human layers likewise seem sometimes to be replaced, horizontally – trails replaced by rails replaced by primitive roads, replaced by Route 66 (much touted within and without the park), replaced by the utilitarian Interstate 40, underlain by Park Service roads which replace older NPS roads which replaced tourist and commercial rock gleaners roads.
Layers, Replacements, Unconformities. Aren’t words wonderful. They seem at times to be extremely efficient in making concepts clear?.
But painting is at least as much fun, even if somewhat more challenging to make work conceptually. The “utility” in painting is in its visual attributes, pulled from internal visions and abilities, and, if you are working plein air, from having the external scene always in your face. Replacement of Davy’s Gray with Terra Verte happens as the light changes, and then there are the blanknesses that occur when nothing can be painted. And of course, the layers of colors within the rock are echoed by the layers of understanding of the colors in the artist’s brain which is also layered by comfort and discomfort, water or thirst, heat and cold, and so each painting contains layers, and later paintings play off against earlier ones, creating layers of meaning.
In other words, I find myself working personal layers on layers, replacing hues as the colors change before my eyes, and seeing great unconformities, blankness where there should be something placed on the canvas. These are today’s maunderings amongst the hoodoos of Blue Mesa.
We returned to Blue Mesa about 4 PM. Jer read Tony Hillerman in the sun shelter while I found a different set Hoodoo rocks on other side of trail. I did close-up view, and the shadows were a bit deeper and the colors more vivid. I feel better about this painting than I do about the one I did this morning.
Blue Mesa #2, Evening, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
As we have been told again and again, the colors change here — and change rapidly. I had just finished putting away my gear when suddenly a golden sunset light struck. It stayed around less than 15 minutes and I had no energy nor equipment ready to work with it. To capture that light in paint would be amazing. And amazingly difficult if one didn’t work from photographs, which I’m reluctant to do. But necessity is the mother of more than invention, so I’m told. We’ll see.
Above is the photo I took of my painting scene at about 6 PM, just as the sun was about to set.
I have set Sunday aside as the day to work on the paintings here at the apartment (we have a nice outside patio that will serve as a studio). Tomorrow, it’s off to Tawa Point.
Reported from Apt K, Petrified Forest National Park, written and photographed on Sept 28, 2010. –June
Day 4, Sept 29, 2010
I painted at Tawa Point, near the apartment this morning, again rising at 5:30 to catch the early sun and avoid the later heat. Jer has access to a good internet connection, so he returned to the Park compound to work while I painted.
From Tawa Point, across a deep ravine, the historic Painted Desert Inn is visible. I painted it embedded in the desert, with a distant mountain range to offset it. The painting felt fine but banal. Paintings of adobe buildings abound, and even the landscape didn’t quite save this one from conventionality. But it was fun, and the light was right, neither washing out nor glaring.
The Painted Desert Inn from Tawa Point, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010
Jer was to return at 10:30, but it was only 8:30 when I finished (I was using a smaller board, 12 x 12 rather than 12 x 16″), so I decided to impress my impressions of the landscape at Tawa Point. I found a way to focus the scene, or at least make a triangular sense of the landscape, using the foreground foliage and the background reds of the Chinle Formation in a couple of triangular shapes. I wanted to reinforce the sense of the vertical foliage, very close to my painting spot, against the horizontals of the distant eroded landscape.
Landscape from Tawa Point, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010
Again I was using a slightly smaller board and so also slightly less detail, so I finished by 9:55.
At that point, I was getting hot and thirsty and tired and felt like playing rather than being serious. So I did a quick and dirty background with heavy mineral spirited color (it dries quickly in the desert) and on top of that painted the silver sage branches, dead and without foliage, that adorned the desert beside me. Jer arrived just at 10:30 when I was ready to quit.
Sage branches, Tawa Point, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
Today’s profound observation: about 80% of tourists spend about the same amount of time looking at million year old landscapes as they do looking at 100-year-old art in museums — i.e. — 30 seconds. A few others take the short hikes when they are available; a few others take serious photographs, using good cameras and tripods and working at getting the precise location and viewpoint for optimal results. And some can be seen looking at research materials and speaking of the ages of the earth in front of them or the birds and foliage they see with knowledge and insight. And then there are the charming ones who photograph the artist at work, preferably from her best side — the back. Ah humanity.
We have been invited to have dinner with Sherry, a volunteer whom we have run into a number of times since coming to the Park. She lives in a tiny trailer, just down the road from us. Having done 3 paintings today, I’m taking the rest of the day off. And as you may have noticed, we’ve found a decent internet connection, so this may be a more regular posting:-)
Cheers, from our favorite internet spot in the Petrified Forest National Park–June
Day 5, Sept 30, 2010
6 AM:
This (early) morning we went to the southern entrance of the Park, where a stabilized petrified-wood building, dated around 1250 AD, is located. It’s about a mile up an easy walking trail and represents something of the Puebloan culture that inhabited this area. Officially called Agate House, the structure has been stabilized and re-stabilized over the years. The petrified wood pieces have been mortared, originally with local soils, but later remortared, probably at times with Portland cement, in the 20th century.
It is unclear how authentic the construction is; the ranger said it was stabilized, not reconstructed, after being excavated in the 1930′s (although she wasn’t quite clear about the dating. The CCC guys were working in this area in the 30′s so that seems like a possibly accurate time period. ) The Agate House is said to have been part of a large walled compound, although my eyes could detect nothing else human-made in the surrounding landscape. The ranger said the walls of the large compound are quite obvious when seen from above, but since the remaining building sits on a high point, well above the surrounding landscape, I suppose I can be forgiven for my inability to detect any further building. In fact, I find it amazing that these structures can be found at all, although I understand that pot shards were wide-spread until “gleaned” early in the century. And perhaps a bit of training in archaeology would enable me to improve my eye for lost habitations.
The southern part of the Park is particularly known for its petrified logs, which are everywhere, all sizes and shapes, with beautiful minerals showing in the fractured pieces. The logs were fractured from earth movements over the millions of years that they laid there, and are now in evidence because of the erosion of the softer soils around them.
The landscape is fascinating – soft prairie grasses surrounding multi-colored logs, mostly red, but some in various other mineralized colors. This is also perhaps the area most heavily (perhaps innocently) pilfered prior to government protection in 1906 (and rocks are still being stolen in spite of the precautions, warnings, signs, and heavy-duty finger shaking from all sides.) The rocks are indeed almost irresistible (I am resisting!); luckily (I guess) immediately outside the park as well as in the town of Holbrook, large commercial outfits sell the rocks that have, so we are told, been legitimately gleaned from private lands. There are also small shops inside the park where vendors sell artifacts made from the gorgeous stone, paperweights, beads, sculptures, etc.
My aim this morning was to paint Agate House, as a companion to the painting of the Painted Desert Inn. I wanted to include it in its landscape, giving it context.
Agate House, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
This photo is particularly bad: the hues, on this computer, look wildly off from the way they look in the painting –this is not a snow scene, regardless of how it looks on the computer screen. I am actually rather pleased with this painting, although it will, as usual, need a bit of tweaking. The pleasure in part comes from surviving both the 3 mile walk before I could begin painting (up and back to scout and up again to paint) and the heat, which came from having started the painting at 9:30. So my pleasure comes from a variety of sources.
I realized during this bit of exercise that I might have an idea about how these paintings might be presented so they can be seen singly but also in context. This “notion” will probably change, but it helps focus my next choices of painting places a bit.
I’m envisioning a rectangular set of paintings (think quilt blocks presented singly in a rectangular shape), with 4 or more in the center, surrounded by four longer landscapes plus four corner blocks.
I am imagining keeping the natural elements, landscape and landforms, on the outside edges, while the interior paintings will be of the human cultural manifestations. There are plenty of human elements to be painted, both in context as well as without context but with clear readable scenes.
Here’s one human context that bemused Jer and me; apparently the trail to Agate House and a longer trail through ravines of petrified wood called the Long Log Trail was recently a two-lane road:
This is the walking trail, with the center stripe of the old road visible. The buildings in the background are of the south Park Compound, including a museum which we haven’t explored much yet. It’s on the list….
Of course, plans about presentation are all speculation. We are on Day 5 of our visit, so in 9 days, the plein air painting will be completed. After that, photographs will have to suffice. I am asking Jer, who has the best camera, to take photos of elements that I might not get to or that might need to be redone. But he is an editor to his very core, so unless he gets specific instructions, all but his very best photos are deleted before I have a chance to snatch them. Another reason to have a plan – asking politely for a set of photos is easier than trying to snatch them from him before he tidies his files.
We couldn’t bear to drive back the 22 miles to the Park’s southern end to paint more of that territory this afternoon, so I painted at Pintado Point, five or so miles away from our northern-end apartment. Because I have a presentation scheme in mind, I decided I should start in on the bigger horizontal boards, 12″ x 24″. I started painting this big board a bit late, after 4 PM. Jer reappeared at 5:30 (the park closes and the sun disappears at 6). I had forgotten how much time it takes merely to get some paint all over the board, let alone get the paint to do what you want it to do. So this painting is rough. The northern part of the Park is of the wildly colored rocks and soils, like those I did earlier this week, although this painting also includes Pilot Rock, an isolated eroded butte that can be seen for miles around.
Pilot Rock from Pintado Point, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010
I’m discovering that the tourists in the late afternoons are not only much more numerous than at 6 AM (this I can understand) but they are also far more talkative. I think the long day of driving and stopping and driving and stopping finally breaks down their reserve; they yearn for a bit of humanity against the landscape. So the artist gets to chat away, which is fun, but also difficult to paint around. This particular painting needs more work, but it shouldn’t be difficult to manage.
Four of the ten paintings on the back patio (all in varying states of completion) are now dry to the touch, which means they can be readily reworked. The desert definitely has some advantages over humid Portland. And there’s a 30% chance of rain tomorrow; the clouds this evening were glorious. Who ever would have imagined that a Portlander could be excited at the thought of rain?
Reported from Apt. K, Petrified Forest National Park, September 30,2010. –June
Day 6, Petrified Forest, October 1, 2010
Off we went, late this morning – 6:30 rather than 6 AM. The ranger had already opened the gates and moved on. Some mornings we have arrived before he did (we have a key to open the gates ourselves). Other mornings we arrived just as he did, and he got to deal with the ornery locks. But this morning, the road was wide open, nary a soul in sight.
Which is how it remained as I painted until past 8 AM when the tourists began arriving. I painted today at the Puerco Pueblo site, which overlooks the Puerco River, about eight miles south of the northern Park entrance. There I painted the River first and the excavated Pueblo remains second.
The first painting shows the river — as you would know it was there but not see it – that is, without water, just a line of green trees moseying in a river- like fashion. The Puerco is dry a lot of the time, although we arrived shortly after a monsoon rain had made it a muddy meandering flat. But by today, a week later, it was almost dry again.
The painting is really a color study, appropriate enough in something called the Painted Desert. The early morning sun washed across the tops of the meadowy grasses, blinked at the gray greens of the river trees and fell lightly on the hills beyond. I was on a hill myself, overlooking the declivity (arroyo? wash? valley?) in which the Puerco sometimes flows.
The Puerco River in the Petrified Forest Park, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
An amazing amount of grass grows in parts of this Park, which also contains amazing amounts of badlands which are made of bentonite clay, which contracts and expands in such a way that no foliage at all can gain a foothold. But this particular slice of parkland is like a shortgrass prairie, albeit having lots of stony remains of the pueblos that were here in 1200/1300 AD.
Puerco means “pig” in Spanish, but its earlier etymology was something closer to “dirty” or “messy.” The Puerco isn’t a clear mountain stream, but rather a meandering body of brown mud that carries eroded materials into the Little Colorado which flows into the big Colorado. It also provides a source of water for cottonwoods and other green growing things.
I am using masonite boards for these paintings, and have discovered some interesting, mostly useful, traits of my supplies. Just before we were to leave for Arizona I discovered I didn’t have enough boards. I went to every art store in town, gathering any 1/8 inch masonite board which had 12 inches on one of its sides: these would fit into the plein air boxes that I’ve accumulated. (I have 12 x 12 inch boards, 12 x 16 inch boards, and 12 x 24 inch boards.) Because they were gathered variously, some were Ampersand Gessoboard with the Ampersand white gesso finish. Others were Ampersand without any gesso. Others were other brands, mostly without gesso.
I spent a couple of days before we left gessoing the boards, in varying colors (it’s helpful to have some initial color on the boards to modify the stark desert sun). I ran out of time before I gessoed all of them, but as is often the case with my unmethodical approach to things, some I gessoed with a paint brush and some with a roller.
It turns out that in the dry desert heat and sun that even oil paint turns tacky rather quickly. The boards on which the gesso was rolled have tiny raised dots, as a rolled surface will, and I can use those dots to scumble across the tacky surfaces of my underlayers of paint. This gives a greater depth to something like the distant colors, which are almost but not quite smooth and flat. Just a fun observation – at least this morning it was fun. The other day, I didn’t want that bumpy effect, and it was a great deal less fun. I am unmethodical in my choice of boards at 6 AM, so what I grab from the pile to work with is what I work with. It make painting interesting.
After finishing the color study, I knew I had to tackle the Puerco Pueblo remains themselves. Mostly the remains are just walls, the bases and partial sides of buildings that may have been six or seven feet tall. Like all the Pueblo buildings, they would have been entered from the top, with no side entrances. Most of the activity of the pueblo would have taken place outside, in the main communal courtyard. The Park service archaeologists excavated many of the rooms of this compound, but returned the soil to them; it’s the easiest way to preserve them for future study. They left enough stabilized walls open so we the tourists could more readily imagine what the full compound might have looked like.
Just beyond the line of rocks marking, in irregular heights, the Puebloan structures, is an unused, obsolete concrete block Park restroom, now closed off. My thought in choosing this place to paint is that the two structures, both human artifacts, would talk to one another. They don’t quite, in the painting as it now stands, because I need to reinforce visually the concrete block nature of the contemporary rest room a bit more. But by the time I had finished with this much of the painting, it was 10:30, time to close up shop before I fainted from the heat.
Puerco Pueblo Walls, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010
Jer arrived just as I finished and after stowing the gear in the car, he and I joined Sherry, a volunteer at the Park, on her tour of the Puerco Pueblo site, a tour which gave us further insights into why the people who settled here would have done so. They were farmers rather than hunter-gatherers, and so they made permanent shelters rather than moving around. Sherry explained that deciding on a place to settle down depended upon a source of water (which the river, but, more importantly, many nearby seeps) provided, shelter, available because of the easily chipped and shaped sandstone from which the buildings were made, and food, which had to come from farming, since only small or fast animals inhabited the area at that time. The other thing needed was pottery, a bit of information I hadn’t guessed. Pots were essential to carry over the farming products through the winter, providing food and seed for the following year. The typical pots from these Puebloan people had small necks, which could be sealed against the mice and other animals.
I forgot to take many photos, except some of the human culture that this 800 year old settlement is surrounded by. I’m thinking that the next plein air gig I take on will definitely have to include a recording device. At 6:30 AM, bird sounds prevail, although some trains also get heard, as well as peepers, or little frogs. (I actually saw a quarter sized frog and got a photo of it). At 8, the tourists, speaking many languages, most of which I can’t guess the origin of, wander by. By ten or so, the vehicular traffic, big buses, trucks and RVs add to the sound track.So here’s the appropriate photo, with the line of cottonwoods along the Puerco River showing as part of the scene.
Obviously, poetic license dictated that I leave out the tourists, the train, and the cell tower from my pretty color study <snort>
After the tour, we went back to our apartment, where we entered through the front door, turned on the faucet to wash off the paint, heated up some coffee in the microwave, and poured out breakfast from the oatmeal box that we bought in Holbrook. No pottery or ladders for entry in Apartment K, but food, shelter, and water, plenty.
Reported from Apt K, Petrified National Forest, Oct 1, 2010 –June
Day 7, Oct. 2, 2010
The good news is that I painted the rusting car, which sits at the Route 66 stopping point on the PEFO drive, and it was fun. The other good news is that we had a desert thunderstorm all around us tonight and saw gorgeous clouds, a tad of rain, and smelt the sage as it was crushed a bit by the storm. The bad news is that the second painting of the day is pretty bad. The Navajo would say the universe was in balance.
The old car painting went far more easily than I had expected. I painted it in the early morning and had a fair bit of tourist traffic stop by. At one point it occurred to me that for most of the people I saw, the old car and Route 66 had about as much meaning as if it were an interpretive point on the Santa Fé Trail. And in fact, while the Indian history artifacts don’t tell us much more than this was an important trading center and homestead region around 1250 — 1300, written history writes of many important roads in this area: a survey party of eastern whites came down Lithodendron Wash (just under the hill beyond where I was painting) about 1853. The Beale Wagon Road was an important military highway in the mid and late 1800′s.The railroad surveyors and the railroad itself arrived in the 1880′s. The National Old Trails Road came through not long after that and by 1927 Route 66 (unpaved for a while), from Chicago to Los Angeles, “America’s Main Street” (if you lived west of Chicago) opened up. Interstate 40, which lies just beyond the line of telephone poles where the remains of Route 66 are visible, was begun in 1960 and finished in 1984, although many parts of it, particularly in the east where PEFO is located, were finished prior to that later date.
Route 66 Came Through Here, 12 x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010
The painting (at least the background) isn’t as washed out as the photo presents it, although painting in the desert does distort one’s vision in unexpected ways. Titanium white, for example, looks absolutely blue in this sun, so it’s very difficult to know whether what one paints will look like what one sees.
Here’s a photo of the old remains of Route 66 following the line of telephone poles.
The importance of Route 66 to the history of the Petrified Forest can’t be underestimated. It brought tourists by the car loads, adding greatly to the numbers of people tramping through the desert, and added to the collection and sometimes destruction of the Indian relics as well as further theft of the petrified wood. However, personally I like to imagine that my uncle and his family, when the factory he worked at went on strike, came out west via Route 66 in the 1940′s. I have no idea if this is the road they traveled, but it’s fun to think it might be.
By midafternoon, after I had returned to the apartment, the sky all around the area started piling up beautiful clouds. I took tons of cloud photos, but will record just one here. There is an irony about a Portlander getting excited by rain clouds, but life is full of wondrous ironies, all there just for our enjoyment:
I remained in the northern PEFO complex this afternoon to paint the visitor’s center, which was designed by architect Richard Neutra. Neutra was renowned for his international modernism, and for working closely with clients to provide them with what they needed. He did extensive research for the Petrified Forest buildings, built in the late 1960′s, and attempted to imitate what he thought was Puebloan style. But clearly, it is high modernism, with flat roofs, flat windows, and few decorative elements. His research left out some important items, like the nature of the wind in the area (one wag said the Petrified Forest has four windy seasons, winter, spring, summer, and fall). Now a debate is brewing over whether or not the modifications made to the building to account for elements Neutra ignored or was ignorant of should be removed, and the buildings returned to their original 1960′s state. There are arguments to be made on all sides. All I did was try to paint it.
Courtyard, Northern Visitor’s Center, Petrified Forest National Park, (First draft) 12 x 12 “, oil on masonite, 2010
This is a painting that will almost certainly be scraped and started again. I may even resort to a photograph to get the elements more closely tied to reality. [With further work, the painting started to take shape and remained within my grouping of the PEFO products.]
However bad the painting, I would note that some of the Neutra designs are elegantly conceived and work well for visitors — the public courtyard is one that, while modified in its plantings and having some sculptures and a pool added, retains a feeling of openness while providing some relief from the wind and sun. Neutra devised courtyards for the private dwelling areas as well as walling the private spaces off a bit from the public ones, so the staff and employees could retain lives separate from their employment. I find this bit of cultural history as fascinating as that of the Puerco Pueblo and will be watching to see how it develops in the future.
So today was a day of recent history paintings as well as embracing the desert skies full of clouds. I am planning to spend tomorrow in the “studio,” studio in this case being a lovely shaded back patio and walled yard, with a picnic table. There I think I will be able to scrape off the really bad paintings, fix the mediocre ones, and cheer on the best. I will also be able to lay out my putative presentation and see what else needs doing during the next five days, which is about what we’ll have left in our stay. It will be a full day. But I’m not getting up at 5:30 AM — I don’t need that much fullness.
Reported from Apartment K, Petrified Forest National Park, October 2, 2010 –June
Day 8, Oct 3, 2010
This was our day off, a day which I intended to be so lazy that I would awake at 10, take 3 naps, and be in bed before 8.
Good luck!
I woke up as the sky was lightening, but closed my eyes fiercely against the temptation. Then I opened them again as the sky was definitely light. Jer got up. I got up. It was actually about 6:30 AM, a bit later than our usual rushed teeth brushing at 5:45 AM — but definitely was not sleeping in. As I have noted, the desert has a way of making you actually want to get up early.
I took a nice long walk between 7 and 8 (Jer was on Wikipedia as I left; weekends have freed up the internet). When I returned to the complex, I got a (free) cup of coffee from the café next to the Visitors’ Center and circled the entire Neutra-designed complex. I am fascinated by the culture of the Park Service, the ways it changed over the years, and how PEFO exemplifies some, but not all, of the changes.
This is a very large complex, meant to house families, a school, a community center. It has bigger houses and small apartments and trailer sites, all placed inside walls meant to provide privacy and respite from the wind for the residents. We are here in off-season (albeit not off-off season) and it feels very quiet and deserted. Families no longer live here and the school has been converted to a research and preparator center.
Yet, in spite of the seemingly deserted environs, this evening, a number of people dropped by — the artist liaison, Todd, Alex, the Navajo cook, Amy, the other artist in residence, and Kenny, the lizard guy, as Alex calls him, the scientist in charge of critters in the park (he removes snakes to safer quarters) as well as someone who helps prepare specimens of dead critters for research and display. It was a fun gathering, although I felt enormously old at the end of it when I had to admit to needing dinner and a rest.
I did take a nap, mid-afternoon. I did put out my paintings to discover what I need yet to do. I put down papers on the patio and laid out the paintings, along with blanks, and then made notes about where and what I should do in the next five days.
The blank boards are the paintings yet to be done: two 12 by 12 inch pieces, three 12 x 24 inch (two of them vertical), and one vertical 12 x 16 inch work. Formidable but doable. Everyone loves the car (to my despair, since it’s my least favorite type of painting), I think because it’s both graphic and wonky. Jer think the large horizontal (top center) lacks focus, but Amy liked it. And mostly everything else is acceptable. I did tweak a couple of paintings (between naps and eating junior mints) but am not as disparaging about most of the paintings as I was when I did them. Two of the paintings got turned to the wall (i.e. to be recycled) and one has to be recycled because I need a different 12 x 12″ scene. But that’s not bad — 3 out of 14 rejections. I had feared much worse as I went to bed each night.
Of course, I’m looking at these things flat on the ground with ants crawling over them (I can’t complain — the ants were here first). If I were in Portland, Oregon, imagining my critique groups casting their eyes over them, I might be more critical. If they were vertical, on a wall space, I might regain my despair. But it’s good to feel good about what’s happened thus far — I haven’t enough time to really get discouraged.
At any rate, I see that I need 6 more paintings to fill out the rectangle. As I said: 5.5 days more to go — doable.
I’ve been asked about the housing. We are in a “row” apartment (radical for the Park Service in the 1960′s), but the one next to us is being renovated and a walkway is on the other side. It’s eerily quiet. And very comfortable.
Here’s our living/dining/office room (the frig, sink, and stove are behind the photographer):
The kitchen table has been converted into the computer center and we move the books so we can eat at the coffee table. Hey– we have our priorities.
Here’s my back “patio” studio, which works nicely in this late September/ early October weather — enclosed against the wind, with house walls (behind the photographer) to prop paintings on, and a picnic table to do all the painterly prep stuff. We may even sit out there and eat peanuts and drink wine one of these evenings:
For those of you interested in Park Service architecture and/or Richard Neutra’s ideas for the Petrified Forest and how they were carried out, check out this URL; it’s a gem.
In many ways, I think of this complex as interesting as the Puerco Puebloan cultural material; architecturally it has historical impact and culturally it speaks to our understanding of the way our culture lives.
Enough of the pop culture. My thought about art today was that many artists, like my compadre, Amy, think hard, sketch, ruminate, and then do the art that arises from the thinking. The plein air artist (moi, moi), however, paints first, thinks about what she has painted and wonders what it means, and then comes up with the thoughts to accompany the paintings. This is inefficient, for sure. But fun. –June
Day 9, October 4, 2010
I’m fairly brain-dead tonight. If I had any thoughts, they have fled to bed.
I painted at the Long Logs trail in the south end of the park. I needed a long horizontal landscape for the putative rectangular presentation and had already done one of the badlands in the northern end. So south we went at our usual ungodly hour (forgive me, those of you who find spiritual sustenance in dawn. I might, if I were awake enough to do so. But that would require getting up even earlier <snort>)
Anyway, we walked about a mile each way, trailing the painting cart behind. I did have the good fortune to have Jer with me, so when I scouted a site and found it, he returned to the fork in the trail where we had left the painting gear and brought it back up the hill to me. Even at that, I am tired tonight. But for someone who had a hip replacement in June, a 2-mile round trip on foot, part of it after painting four hours in the sun and wind — well, blessings on good Doctor Duwelius and all the healing energies that friends passed along.
I got to include some petrified wood in this painting — only the second time. After painting it, I thought I should work a lot on painting the stuff. It’s quite gorgeous, translucent and multi-colored, weirdly life-like in its unearthly (or 220 million years of earthly) way.
From Long Logs Trail, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010
The painting was made difficult by the glare of the sun on the board. I finally stood up and painted from an angle because that was the only way I could see what I was doing. And I discovered, again to my bemused (and somewhat irritated) amazement, that titanium white looks blue in the desert sun, as does raw umber. Go figure — I just blundered on!
The skies were incredible today — very stormy and moody. Not gray like Portland, but full of sturm und drang — big black low clouds, parting to show high rounded masses of thunderheads, behind which blue sky would appear. It wasn’t too hot and in fact, I came home and put on my long-sleeved turtleneck. But the clouds changed the appearance of the desert and threw various of the formations into interesting shapes and shadows.
On the way up Long Logs Trail, I saw the early sun hitting rabbitbrush in full bloom.
Then on the way home, we stopped at Chinde Point. The sky was doing its drama queen thing, and the view of Pilot Rock from the point, as well as the badlands in front of it were being tossed around by the light. And there was another rabbitbrush to photograph:
["Chinde", by the way, seems to mean "ghost" in Navajo; this I gleaned from the second Tony Hillerman novel I am reading. Jer has decided to read them all in sequence, and so I'm reading (and sometimes rereading) them after him.]
Because I was exhausted and the weather looked threatening through the afternoon, I decided not to return to paint a hoodoo at Crystal Forest (another overlook in the Park). It would have made a good midling-sized vertical, but seemed toooo hard. The Crystal Forest viewpoint is also in the south end of the Park, and a round trip down there generally runs close to 50 miles of driving. Jer had already made two trips today and was exceedingly content not to make another.
So instead, I went to the Neutra (Visitor’s Center) Plaza and painted the rocks that are placed like still lifes around it. I have grown to like that plaza very much, and at this time of the year it’s empty of other humans. I don’t know what it’s like in the high season of the park. But the surrounding buildings give some protection from the wind, yet the space is very open. A pool sits at one end, gurgling a bit, and there are trees in various strategic spots. So painting there was quite restful.
Many Logs, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010
It was almost dark (6 PM) by the time I packed up. I have an idea of some tweaks I want to make to this piece, but by and large, it’s OK.
This means that I’ve done 2 of the 6 that I need to do to finish out my putative rectangle. They were both ones that could have presented problems, since the first is large (12 x 24 inches) and the second is vertical — a difficult proposition in this park, where the verticals tend to be far away. So I’m pleased, if exhausted.
Tomorrow, I am going to hike partway down a steep trail into the wilderness area (Jer is going to hike much further down the trail) and do a vertical 12 x 24 inch painting of the Bidahochi Formation that sits on top of the Chinle Formation. This is the Parks’ big unconformity — the Bidahochi is about a million years old and the Chinle is about 220 million years old. And the younger one sits right on top of the older one, with nothing in-between.
Sometimes time gets lost, both for humans and for geologists.
For the painter, the unconformity means there is basalt on a steep slope, the basalt being the Bidahochi volcano remains, which has kept that part of the butte from eroding. It sticks out, dark and defiant (while being eaten out from underneath, where the sneaky Chinle mudstone and limestone slithers and slides away). Below is an eroded, bumpy colorful plain of Chinle sandstone, making for nice contrasts of color.
The trail is a bit steep and settling in to paint on the slope will be a bit fraught. But we checked it out and think it can be done. It looks like I will be out of the sun for a good while, and surely the wind will be blocked by the Bidahochi, which after all, hasn’t a lot of other stuff to do.
Wish me luck. –June
By the way, Henri Art Magazine published an article I wrote about my studio and how I work in it. I’m pleased with how it came out; go take a look if you are interested.
Day 10, Oct 5, 2010
After all that fussing about climbing down the wilderness trail, we woke up to rain. Not much, but a very cloudy sky and big fat drops. No wilderness trail hiking/painting for this cautious (or lazy) couple. We rescued paintings from the back patio, where we thought they were safe under shelter (not quite), did lots of computer catch-ups, and went a-touristing. We checked out several viewpoints we hadn’t seen before and took the “Triassic” tour at the south visitor’s center. We also bought a book or two, but we aren’t admitting that. We’ve already bought too many books from the two Visitors’ Centers.
Finally, at 2:30 it couldn’t be put off any longer. The wind was howling but the sky had sort of cleared and I needed to paint a biggish vertical. I had found my spot the day before, and it was on the way north to home. So Jer dropped me off and I painted, at a pull-in viewpoint called The Tepees.
The Tepees are large cones of eroded Triassic clays and sandstones. They are vaguely shaped like classic tepees, and have fine colorful lines of different soils that run through them. The biggest one is luckily near the viewpoint. Jer went home to lunch. I painted until 5:30.
The Tepees (Triassic age) and “The Triassic Tepee.”
I read somewhere that David Hockney (??) took photos like this after he finished a painting. I liked this one. The masonite on which I painted is long and narrow, so only a bit of the fat Tepee cone would fit on it. And of course, the real sky was much too bright for my camera to deal with, even though fifteen minutes later, when Jer showed up, it looked like quite wild and stormy.
The stretch of road along which I was painting was fairly deserted — this isn’t one of the favorite viewing spots for tourists. So about ten different sets of folks offered to take me “home.” One pair didn’t stay to look at the view — just pulled up alongside me and asked if I had plenty of water.
At some point, I realized that, given the wide vista and deserted nature of the spot, without a vehicle in sight, I must have been something of a strange vision — just me and the Tepees in a wide spot in the road. I was touched by the concern of those who inquired. I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by the seeming isolation — when no vehicles were around, it was gorgeously quiet except for a few birds and the wind.
Oh yes, the wind. It was quite a feat of engineering to get set up in the blowing gale, and a bigger feat to get the edge of my board and not its surface directly in the path of the wind. But, never fear, Fearless Underwood did not have a painting sail off into the forbidden desert soil; not even a bit of paper towel escaped, although it tried mightily. It helped that I set up in the corner of a low concrete wall, placing the most wind-happy items, like the big plastic box that I carry paintings in, in the corner with my foot planted against it. I felt thoroughly happy with my afternoon’s endeavors, and I now have one of two essential vertical 12 x 24″ paintings for my putative presentation.
A Triassic TePee, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010
Tomorrow (and Thursday and Friday) I’m scheduled to “demonstrate” painting at the Painted Desert Inn from 1–4. This mostly means chatting up the tourists while I play with color. I’ll be either inside or in a nice enclosed outside porch-like place. I can take my finished pieces to the PDI and exhibit them. I am tempted to put “exhibit” in quote marks in that last sentence because I think they will mostly be leaning against the wall of the upstairs patio. Or perhaps laid out on the floor there. We’ll see. This is definitely a casual arrangement.
However, I don’t think I should attempt to climb down the wilderness trail and do another vertical painting tomorrow. maybe I’ll figure out a way to do one of the small ones that I still need. The Wilderness Trail will have wait. –June
Day 11, Oct 6, 2010
I have no painting to show today, what with rain, hail, and demos at the Painted Desert Inn. Not to mention tourists freaked out by flooding and wild weather at the Grand Canyon and tornadoes at Flagstaff. All in all, I was grateful for my “studio” in the enclosed and roofed upper patio space at the adobe Painted Desert Inn. I am claiming the painting I did was plein air — after all, there was plenty of air in this space without windows:
The painting I did is stashed in the ladies room at PDI, which is without water at the moment and so unused. It will make a good storage space for the next few days.
The space shown above is open to the public, yet out of the main path of tourists wanting to know where the bathrooms are (porta-potties, outside) and where the petrified wood is (down the road a piece). So I got to chat up those interested in the landscape and or/the paintings. It was entirely pleasant.
This is how the landscape looked at 11, when Jer and I just narrowly missed a pouring hail and thunder-storm. We went to set up the “exhibit” a bit earlier than I had to be there, and the sight of the desert through the rain was startling. And beautiful.
I became very aware of the adobe surfaces of my space as I painted the view beyond them. In that painting , I incorporated a bit of the adobe to frame the view. Looking at the adobe walls to paint them I was suddenly struck by the realization that the adobe had been hand-troweled onto the walls, troweled by guys the age my father was when he broke rocks for the Pine Creek road with the CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps (run by the military) was part of the Great Depression’s federal work corps, made up of more than 3 million young men who had to have at least 3 teeth, were provided with room and board, and were required to send home $20–$25 a month of the $30 they made — this money not only aided families but put more money into the economy to help slow its downward spin (The pay amounts apparently differed from place to place, or at least the stories of the pay differ; the requirement that most of the money get sent home is always included).
Dad didn’t trowel adobe, but the beauty of the building had to have come from boys like him who built roads and trails in parks, constructed conservation dams, made campgrounds, planted trees, drained swamps, replanted grazing land, renovated historic buildings and strung telephone lines. Many of these things still exist and are part of the utility and beauty that we all still enjoy. I found touching the walls a moving experience.
But of course, mostly I chatted up the tourae, and painted a bit between times. Chatting up people is something I do pretty well, but I also find it totally exhausting. Jer practically had to carry me home. Once we got here, he went out to the gas station and brought back six variations of an ice cream sandwich (their total selection), which tided me over until dinner. Well, I didn’t eat all six — after all, I have to go back and chat tomorrow, too.
Here’s the view, of Pilot Rock and the Bidahochi Formation, that I painted at while gabbing away:
The camera’s ratio didn’t allow for the adobe to show up in the photo, but my handy-dandy plastic viewfinder, a tool I’ve become totally reliant upon, showed this view and the adobe wall to the left. The sun kept playing footsie with the clouds, so all day different bits of the landscape would shine into view and then be eclipsed by shadow again. Pilot Rock is lit by sun in this photo; the bit of rock face to the far left center is the Bidahochi. More about its interesting characteristics when my brain is functioning a bit better. I’m going to bed.
From Apt K at the Petrified Forest National Park, a grateful tired artist --June
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
Day 13, Oct 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
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
Day 15, 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 PEFO 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 mercantile store 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 humans 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
Days 16, 17 etc. After Oct 10: The Lightning Field
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
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 appearance of moving water, actually 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
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
A Concluding Remark or Two, upon returning to Portland
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.
PEFO Paintings, the Oeuvre
The following paintings are the finished products as of January 2011. I 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. The paintings will be mounted , floated on backing boards, so they can be readily hung. — June
0 Responses to “Petrified Forest, Sept. 2010”