Diary of a Residency, Day 25, March 12, 2009

We went a-touring in Death Valley today. I took something like 120 photos, all of which fail to capture the place. But of course.

And I am now pondering a conundrum about my own landscape work. I haven’t quite enough distance to say for certain (speaking of landscape) but it seems to me that my interest in context and a sense of place interferes with my achieving a stylistic breakthrough with the set pieces, like the mountains around Beatty.

As David T would say, walking into a gallery with those paintings, he wouldn’t think of them as being by June Underwood, just as “nice” (not a compliment) landscape paintings.

There are models, of course: Grant Wood’s landscapes and Lawren Harris in the Canadian Group of Seven; perhaps Arthur Dove; maybe Hopper would be helpful. Rackstraw Downes is a kind of heroic figure to me, and he and David Hockney represent a form of seeing that I believe in. Hockney’s desert road (Plum Blossom Road or some such name) is a masterpiece of getting an angle that makes sense (angles, I should say) and Downe’s work in Texas — his five-part series — are also inspirational. I rather like the jaggedy edgings of Hockney’s collaged landscapes, but I admire immensely Downes refusal to avoid what is there, whatever is there.

David T and the abstract landscape painters who are just on the other side of the continuum of the center of representational and abstract are interesting, but spiky. For the life of me, I can’t get my painting brain around that kind of corner.

What is it that might call to me in this landscape, this sense of place, that could be translated into a personal style? The colors, of course, but they tend toward the conventional — lots of landscape artists jack up the color in  order, I suspect, to try to make something their own. The shapes and forms are phenomenal, particularly as you go into Death Valley from Beatty on the Beatty Cut-off. I  am interested in the intersections of geology and painting — the fan-shaped alluvials, the fault scarps, the up-lifting and down-tilting, the intersections of faults and washes, the washes that join into the wine-glass formations, cutting deeply into the hillside. I can see them; I just saw them. They are gashes, and up close they are canyons, formidable, unyielding except to wild rushes of water such as I doubt I will ever see. The shapes that pile up on one another in different colors are wonderful to see; the rocks, some rounded, some sharpened, some cut through with various mineral veins; and those amazing desolate playa, rocky plains, where almost nothing grows except rock. Truly rock gardens, although garden represents something too tame to be accurate here. Immense flats of basketball sized jagged rocks set within smaller ones. On and on and on. A vision of a sort of hell.

I wonder if I cropped out the sky, so lost the urgency of the landscape format, if that would enable me to see and paint differently. Or sketched without including the edges of mountains, the contours by which we judge our surrounds.

Here’s a cropped version:

Below is a naturally cropped (ie with the camera rather than photoshop) version:

And finally, here’s one with the sky:

This last also has the classic, into-the-photo road, which brings it totally into the conventions of landscape work.

I will have to ponder on this and look at these photos more, trying to see if I can retain context, a sense of place, and yet add the stylistic twists that would make it all my own.

Reported after a hard day of being a tourist,  Beatty Nevada, just outside Death Valley, in our cool, snug house. No expanses here.

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