Three untitled (Treasure)

Sometimes you just have to see the real thing.

Recently, I visited the conservation labs at the Legion of Honor, also known as the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. The first thing to greet me, once I got through the doors, was a watercolor of a placid lake surrounded by dark, moody hills, and above which was a gray and red sky. Red. Not pink, but red—a kind of boldness I wouldn’t normally associate with this medium. And even from forty feet away, even without being certain that I’d ever seen this particular painting before, I blurted out, “that’s a Winslow Homer.”

Below is the painting in question; it’s called Sunrise, Fishing in the Adirondacks, and dates to 1892:

Winslow Homer, Sunrise, Fishing in the Adirondacks

Approximately 13.5 x 20.5625 inches)

Watercolor on paper, 1892.

Photo: FAMSF

I know Homer’s work and admire it, but I haven’t felt tremendously influenced by it. He has been so often imitated that his style and subject matter has become a kind of schtick, a genre that borders on cliché. Rugged New England scenery—seacoasts or mountains—and a loose and watery painting style. Lots of burnt umber, lots of indigo, lots of viridian. And if you, like I, have only seen Homer’s work in reproduction, you may be forgiven for feeling the same sort of dispassion about his work.
Then you see one in person. Even framed (as this painting was) in a historic but worse-for-wear gilt millwork, even (as this painting was) behind glass, the work draws you in. The colors, first of all, pop in a way that no reproduction ever can. The photograph I have posted above was made by the FAMSF itself, but it looks terrible, the colors muddy, the tones totally missing. (I’ve tried to correct it in Photoshop but even that work has only gotten the image so far.)

Getting closer to the image, my preconceptions about Homer’s style disappeared. His dark areas are not at all as luminescent as his later imitators, and in fact the hills and river are so thickly laid they might well be impasto. (The thrill of thinking: we share a technique!) The line for the fisherman was made by using a knife to scratch into the surface. The sky? He used a sponge to lift away color and, as it dried further, scrub and smear it. The whole painting exudes a kind of earthiness that few watercolors manage.

Later in the day, I was able to see work by a painter who I greatly admire, Childe Hassam. One of the “American impressionists,” Hassam had painted in Oregon off and on, mostly in the seldom visited area of Harney County in the southeast portion of the state. The Portland Art Museum has several of his paintings. I saw them on the enforced culture trips of grade-school visits, and their presence stuck. I can’t recall any specific details, only the general sense of beauty and the light. It has been years, however, since I stood before one—possibly decades—and so I wasn’t prepared when a very real Hassam watercolor sat (framed, of course) in my hands.

From across the room, the painting titled Rainy Night (1895) appeared to be a fairly simple if striking impressionist-style painting of New York around the turn of the century. Buggies, pedestrians, street lamps, soaring gothic buildings. That sort of thing. For a semblance, see this photograph:

F. Childe Hassam, Rainy Night, 

8.25 x 11.25 inches, 

Watercolor on paper, c. 1895.

Photo: FAMSF

Holding it up close, however, I became enamored. Not only had Hassam painted a wet night, he had painted it wet. Throughout the image are telltale signs of him working in color with a very small brush, so that (like raindrops themselves) he made a whole out of fragments, working his pigments into a wash underneath that was still damp. Best yet was his dropping of clear or nearly clear water into the damp surface, making a lighter area that is ringed by a dark halo of pigment. In papermaking, this is known as “printer’s tears,” and shows where water dropped onto still damp paper; in watercolor it is usually a sign of an errant water drop from a too-vigorous (or too-sloppy) brush. Here, Hassam used the effect of an error as an intentional technique.

The result is that the pavement especially feels slick and wet. Does this visual reflect the seen reality of the place? No. Does it evoke the wetness of that night sidewalk better than a literal depiction would have? Yes.

Here, then, is a tension I have been struggling with for about the last year: how to move beyond the literal while holding onto—no, while getting closer—to the truth of a moment and place. To be specific and faithful without being pedantic.

What I made this week immediately followed the visit to the Legion, work I made as soon as I got back from the city. It stuck me that these small things—Hassam’s printer’s tears, Homer’s grittiness—are the precious things. Mountains of gold? Keep them—it’s the small, the tiny, the intimate that is closest to the heart.

Alexander Benjamin Craghead, untitled (three pieces)

Approximately 1 x 1 inches each, 

Watercolor on paper, 2016

Mouth of the Columbia (Mend)

I remember the day that I went to go get my California driver’s license. I put it off for a long time, because it felt like some kind of betrayal. Although there are many Oregonians who absolutely abhor Californians and all that California stands for in their mind, I am not among them. I have no great ill will towards California, although I do feel I will always be an outsider here—though isn’t that, itself, a very Californian thing?

The reason I had put off switching to a California license had nothing to do with disliking California, but with what it meant that I was giving up. My Oregon driver’s license, no matter how dull and depressingly bureaucratic an object that it was, was also my last legal and tangible link to the place of my birth.

I don’t just inhabit landscapes; they also inhabit me. Place is like a faith, and I feel like the rivers of my birth are as much in my blood as any parental DNA. I remember reading once that your body replaces millions of cells a day with new ones, new ones that are built up from the nutrients taken in through food and water. Was I not, for most of my life, literally made from the northwest? Was I not cut from the cloth of Washington wheat, fashioned from Bull Run water, reconstructed daily out of grapes and peaches and apples and pears and every other foodstuff of my youth?

Such scientific reasoning is an interesting thought experiment, but it fails to account for why I feel as I do. To belong to a place is one thing, to know it is another. Why did others see a river, when what I saw was my heart pouring out to the sea? It is that same brokenness of love, rending me in two but making me whole again with the same breath.

Although I did not grow up there, Astoria is one place where I feel this strongly. Perched on a little mound of hills at the great mouth of the river, the city is far enough from the beach not to suffer from saltwater taffy or $5 agate souvenirs. Here, the Columbia reveals all her might, widening out to more than eleven miles thick, always moving even under the ebb and flow of the tides. Out beyond the high Megler bridge, the mouth itself lurks. It seems so far away, and so vast, and even if you don’t know the stories, you know merely by beholding its distant merge into the Pacific that it possesses myths of its own.

And even now, even in my mind more than 700 miles away, it still possesses me.

Mouth of the Columbia River, Watercolor on Paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2016.

Mount Rainier, from the East (Gather)

Another of the classes I am taking this semester is a graduate course on technical art history. Put plainly, the idea of the course is to see what can be learned about an art object by closely examining it for signs of how it was made. (This differs the other main leg of curation, connoisseurship, which could be restated as taste.)

As a result, each week my small cohort travels to either a conservation lab at a museum, or an artist's studio, and see firsthand how art is made, or how it is investigated to learn how it was made. Last week, we went to the Crucible, a large industrial arts studio in West Oakland, where we got to visit the forge, the smith, an enamel studio, and a jewelry studio. 

Yes, that's a Hello Kitty forge. No, I don't think they paid the licensing fees. Shhhhhhhhh!

The forge was particularly impressive. While not large in scale, here artisans were making sculptures, vessels, and other three-dimension work in bronze, iron, aluminum, and several other metals. The process of making a bronze, however, was the most eye-opening. These are the steps, from my notebook:

1. Make an original sculpture from some dense material, such as hardwood, clay, stone, etcetera.

2. Make a mold of this sculpture using plaster.

3. Pour hot wax into the plaster mold and let cool. 

4. Break the mold and retrieve the wax sculpture. 

5. Repeat above steps to make as many wax sculptures as the number of finished bronzes.

6. Encase each wax sculpture in a special ceramic.

7. Using a special oven, melt the wax sculpture, leaving only the ceramic negative.

8. Pour molten bronze into the ceramic negative.

9. Once cooled, destroy the ceramic negative to free the finished bronze. 

So many steps, but what struck me at the time was one key word: the negative. Here, in a process literally older than recorded history, was this concept of the "negative" as a precursor to a finished "positive." A finished bronze seems so unitary, so complete and whole, but in fact it is the end product of a process of positives and negatives, most of which are lost in the making of the thing. Nobody just cracks out the metal, says et voila!, pours, and has a masterpiece. Every bronze, to my eyes, now exists alongside a ghostly presence of every positive and negative that lead to it, works that were no less the result of fine craftsmanship and sensitive artistry—lost masterpieces of wax and of mud. 

When we moved on to the smith, there was a similar lesson. They were working on a large iron sculpture, a figure with elongated proportions. The work so far was handsome, but what struck me was that the final project was dependent on a series of graphite sketches made on a 12" x 48" piece of wood. Here was a work of art that needed a human capable of wielding large hammers, jostling around awkward and heavy pieces of metal, capable of rough work in a loud and rough environment. Those hammers, however, had to be wielded with sensitivity. And before the work could be done, that same artisan needed to be able to draw complex shapes with enough finesse to represent three dimensions on two. Who would ever see that board, with its pencil sketches, but us who got to visit during the making process? Yet that work was as beautiful as anything that was placed on final display somewhere. 

As I considered my work for this week, it was these thoughts, gathered from my visit to the crucible, that swam about in my brain. What would it be like if I slowed down the iterative process that proceeds a painting? In the past, I have treated any work that precedes a painting—field photographs, sketches, diagrams, paint tests—as valueless in themselves. They were merely a means to an end, best done with speed and efficiency in mind. Get on with the main event! Et voila! The cloth is removed from the great work.

So this week, I tried to linger through the process. It was not that I spent any more time on it, but rather that I tried to go through each step with full attention and care.

First, I decided to paint an image so strong that it stuck with me in my memory: a view of the east face of Mount Rainier from eastern Washington State, on a visit more than ten years ago. As a westsider, I was used to seeing the Cascades volcanos rising in the east from great forested mountains, but in the high coulee country of eastern Washington, there sometimes appear to be no foothills. There is the wheat, rolling on the landscape ever westward, and at the horizon, Rainier simply pushes up without preamble. I noticed it only toward the end of the day, the sky glowing an odd orange, the land fallen to darkness. 

Bringing out a few gray markers and a small newsprint pad, I sketched out the idea, paying attention especially to the horizon line that would make or break the work. 

Next, using some ink pens, I redid the scene, paying more attention to detail. 

At this point I realized that I didn't have a handle for the exact outline of Rainier from memory. While the idea overall was to paint a landscape remembered, I wanted the mountain to feel right, so I double-checked my memory by doing a google image search for "Mount Rainier" and "Ritzville," a town near where I first saw the scene. Using these, I made some reference sketches in ink to get the outline into my head. 

Next, I wanted to see what I could do with color to capture that feeling. I wanted to capture the sense of starkness, yet not flatten the image into a purely graphic form. Using a smaller piece of watercolor paper, I painted in two different versions of the sky, and then laid out two different treatments for the foreground land atop these skies, giving me four alternatives. Once dry, I compared these until I decided which approach I liked best. 

It was only after these stages that I finally began the painting. I found my approach included more trepidation. The painting did not always go as planned, but when it didn't, I found myself more open to working with the peculiarities of the paint and water, letting it add its own layer to the prior work. 

I'm still processing this process, pun intended. I'm not yet sure what I make of it. The pre-work still feels like "pre-work" to me—could it be more than that? The originals and waxes that preceded the final bronzes had character in their own right—could the pre-work for my paintings be equally elevated? Could they, or should they, be part of a final work? Or should they, like the waxes and the negatives, be hidden or even semi-ritually destroyed? I'm still working through the answers.

Mount Rainier, from the East. Watercolor on paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2016.

Humboldt, Beoware to Pallisades (Meander)

Who meanders, the world, or me?

I remember the first time that I saw the Humboldt River, deep in the wasteland of Nevada, a weird long languid thing that seemed eternally confused over whether or not it was a river at all.

Alongside the Columbia River, 400 miles to the North, it formed a critical lifeline through the intermountain West and a trail to Oregon and (eventually) California. The two rivers have a common bond, with numerous connecting paths between them. They are, however, almost diametric opposites. The Columbia is vast, purposeful, one of the most powerful rivers on the Earth, pushing out into the Pacific Ocean more than 265,000 cubic feet of water per second. The Humboldt? It starts nowhere, and it ends nowhere, its waters never reaching any sea. It is a river without direction or purpose, a water that meanders across the barren lands of the Great Basin.

It was named for Alexander Von Humboldt, a polymath best know for his contributions to physical geography and botany, a man whose path also wandered about the globe but, unlike the river, did so with distinct purpose. Ironically, Humboldt never saw his namesake river.

For me, standing on the hilltops above Pallisades, looking back towards the small ranch settlement of Beoware, it was simultaneously alien and familiar. Here was the anti-Columbia, here a river that gave little life and yet was all the more precious in its setting. It was a twisting, turning path that though it lead to nowhere, still lead thousands to new lives in the West.

Humboldt, Beoware to Pallisades. Ink on Watercolor Paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2016.

San Francisco Bay (Touch)

From the OED, I. 1. a.: "The action or an act of touching (with the hand, finger, or other part of the body); exercise of the faculty of feeling upon a material object. †In quot. 1340, ? a tactile organ (obs.). In quot. a1616, Hold, grasp, embrace (nonce-use)."

Late last week, I twice attempted to paint the San Francisco Ferry Building. Both attempts were hackneyed.  Dead, unfeeling, wrong. Flat. Cakes that never rose in the oven.

Ironically, by trying to paint something literally meaningful, I had made paintings that were spiritually meaningless. They put my on my back, on my bed, miserable that I could not paint. Miserable that I had conflated meaning with literality and ended up making massive muddy postcards.

I had forgotten, too, that San Francisco doesn't mean the Ferry Building to me, not really. The city is not its amenities, its architecture, or its plan. It is, rather, the Judah Street apartment building that I have never seen, but that my great grandparents called home. It is a fragment of a story of my parents' travels, made before I was born. It is the memory of a one day layover made so that I could have a drink in town with a long distant but much loved and missed best friend. San Francisco has existed for me less as a reality than as an imagined place, a construct of memories, a glimmer on the night horizon. It cannot easily be held, it has little materiality, and to try to touch a "real" San Francisco is only to wake up, and to lose that magic.

San Francisco Bay. Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, appx. 14 in x 20 in, 2016.

There are no endings

It's been almost two weeks since we wrapped up VS 280 for the Spring 2016 semester. It already seems like ages since Alison and David (seen above) pinned up their semester's work, or since Josiah hung his canvases (seen at right), or since any of us spent an evening in Wurster 170 bouncing around the world of art and visuality.

If this class was meant to be a journey, then theoretically it ended with that—but anyone who travels much in life knows there is no real end to any journey, rather there are only transitions.

When I began this course, I felt I had a pretty secure style of painting, a fairly developed sensibility. I had also, however, not completed in painting in several years. I tended to blame this on graduate school—too busy, and yada yada—but I wonder if that's being honest with myself. For the last few years of my active painting, I experimented with doing series, and with changing the size and scale at which I painted. In retrospect I see these as markers not of growth but of dissatisfaction. Sure I had a developed style, and that meant that a painting was little more than a technical exercise.

I began VS 280 thinking this would be merely a nice way to pass some time. It would fill up my course schedule, it was at a time that didn't conflict with anything else, and it would give me an excuse to paint again. And it was those things. But it also did more. Even straight out of the gate I knew I couldn't just do what I was doing before, I knew I had to do something different, special. And because it was a class, it was also an opportunity to try things without consequences. So I started with an experiment: what could I do if I took my limited palette idea to its fullest extreme, and used only one paint color? The result was the first assignment, Alcatraz Avenue.

Alcatraz Avenue. Watercolor on paper, 9.5 x 18.0 inches, 2016.

Yet I struggled after this. I tried to mimic, I tried to change forms and formats. I found frustration where I sought solace, yet I also found escape from that frustration. I let go of the form and the precision, and for the last week, I painted Farallones / Islands of the Dead.

Farallones / Islands of the Dead. Watercolor on paper, 18 in x 24 in, 2016.

I would not have painted this had it not been for VS 280, had it not been for our weekly ruminations about representation, form, style, intent, meaning, art. I don't know where this leaves me now, but I do know that I have been changed, and in a way for which I am profoundly grateful.

To Alison, Daniel, David, Elva, Esther, Josiah, Judith, Marco, Robin, and Tamara—and of course, to Tony—I thank you for sharing this journey with me, and I wish you all the best on your next.

Farallones / Islands of the Dead (Anchor/Soar)

Light is different at 10,000 feet. Sure, this can be said of light at almost any altitude, but 10,000 seems to be a magic number for me. As a passenger aboard a commercial airliner, 10,000 feet is only experienced when ascending after takeoff, or approaching a landing, so there is a kind of anticipation within me in either case. It is more than that, though, it is real; there's something about the way the sunlight banks off of the ground and especially off of water that captivates. The distance from the terrestrial world is close enough that details can be seen—branches on trees, makes of automobile—but distant enough that the specific and the relational can be seen at once. It's a place where at least two scales can be simultaneously experienced, a transition zone that is both/and rather than either/or.

One of my closest friends works in the maritime industry. He serves as an engineer on cargo ships, and so his life—seventy five days on, seventy five days off—is linked to the Pacific Ocean in a very real way. It's probably why I noticed the little ships, criss-crossing on the shimmering void, as I sat in my window seat on a recent trip south. The two ships made sharp wake lines, out by the Farallones, the islands the natives of California had forbidden as the "islands of the dead" (but that San Franciscans had once made the city's foraged "eggery").

It's all not quite real. It's all not quite safe. The steel ships—massive in person, massive compared to me—but tiny compared to everything else. The sky and the ocean are filled with colors not of this Earth—yet outside my plexiglass, air-compressed cabin window, they exist.

The first time that I stepped onto a plane, the first time that I experienced the sensation of taking off, I was thrilled and hooked. The feeling of flying has never frightened me, nor mystified me—I could look out at that flexing wing and see the horizontal equivalent of a boat's sail, working with the air to move. But I am older now, and I've stepped onto many planes, and will do so again, and again, and again. In tandem with every flight, my life grows a little more complicated, and my sense of risk increases. It is not merely personal risk; it is not merely that I, or even I and my fellow passengers and the plane crew are at risk through the art of flying. It is that the whole world is flying up there in the air, all of the time—it is that everyone is out there on the ocean with those boats, that everyone is always in motion even at rest.

Farallones / Islands of the Dead. Watercolor on paper, 18 in x 24 in, 2016.