When I was in high school I had an art teacher, Mrs. Byron, who introduced me to fine art. I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but in working class Bridgeport in the seventies there weren’t many models. What blew my adolescent mind were the French Impressionists. I already liked to spend my afternoons brooding on the beach of Long Island Sound in the winter. In the Dover Publication about Claude Monet, there was a little fact that piqued my interest. In order to capture the most fresh, untouched snow, Monet would fill hot water bottles to keep his hands warm as he trudged out into the cold to capture fleeting light in oil paint. I don’t quite know why it so impressed me other than this was my first contact with what a “real” artist did. They brave the weather to report the truth of the world. That was my early idea of what anyway.
It’s never really that straightforward; these heroic artist stories. Not everything was done en plain air. At some point the painting is a painting. It will tell you what it needs to be a painting, an image that has its own life not just a mute record. The artist is trying to capture that lightning in the organization of pigments and shapes. These days going out to work directly from the land is seen as the impulse of hobbyists and provincial landscapists. Art theory has taught us that all pictures are signs and neuroscience has taught us that what our eyes, ears, hands and skin take in gets reordered by the brain. The brain is always making predictive pictures in response to external phenomenon anyway so why get cold, wet feet when you can work from a digital photo or better yet just ask Chat GPT to do it and go have a sandwich.
Despite all of that, I do believe that drawing and painting from observation is more than just an academic exercise or failure to get hip to contemporary theory. We are bodies after all. Our minds reside in our hands and guts as much as our brains. Working from observation is a way to really see. In someways, (this is something I tell my students all the time) the resulting drawing is beside the point. Through your hands mimicking via mark-making media, what you see in the three dimensional world you actually behold. We are wired to scan. We scan a room as we enter, we scan a landscape for trails, weather and dangers. Digital media has put our scanning tendency on steroids. Scanning, not taking in, is what we do all day. To stop and stare, to record visual phenomenon takes time. Working this way emphasizes that perception is time-based. The land is not static: clouds drift and light changes accordingly. Unlike the quick click of a phone camera, sitting to observe allows knowing to unfold. (I use my iPhone all the time for compositional and visual research. I’m not anti-photo reference). The phone mediates the view and compresses it.
I have been at Playa Summer Lake at the edge of the Great Basin for a week. The first two days I could work outside. There was relatively little wind and the sun was bright and clear. Then a doozy of a winter storm came in. Snow and ice covered everything. I thought I would impress my fifteen year old self by braving the new snow just like Monet. I packed up my portable, folding easel, a set of watercolors, a small jar of water and roll of brushes. I brought a modest sized watercolor block that would fit into my backpack.
My cabin looks out at a pond lined by cattails and further ringed by bleached sagebrush and straw colored native grasses. Beyond that is the playa; an oceanic flatland surrounded by hills and mountains. Just down the hill form the pond is a path partly buffeted from the wind. On the playa itself, the wind can be fierce. When the ice and snow is present and you stand far out in the open space, great ribbons of snaking snow banners come writhing from the wind’s direction along the ground. Beyond the open space, sunlight can be seen gracing the tops of the surrounding mountains whose ribbed, snow rubbed sides reveal ancient marine memories. We are above 4000 feet. The playa is open and flat. Wind has an opinion here.
Nevertheless, I thought I too would work in the weather. The experiment failed almost immediately. My lightweight easel, designed for pleasant outdoor excursions isn’t ideal for high wind; especially if you’ve attached a “sail” to it in the form of a watercolor block. My hands in their fingerless gloves were freezing. Every move made with fresh wet paint would break out with a stiff breeze creating unwanted skeins of washy color. When I was young and bullheaded, I would have persisted. I would have seen my working through the weather as heroic. I would have actually been the quintessential fool, a plein air Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton chasing my materials into the tall grasses. Instead, I calmly packed up and tried to do some quick sketches in my sketch book. I took several reference photos. Back to the windless studio I went.
The watercolors are records of perception as much as they are pictures meant to communicate the animate land. They are works of art in conversation with the history of art and they are artifacts of my meditations on the experience of place. Once inside, with the help of some tea, I continued the watercolor. If I become overly reliant on the static information of the photo I have to allow my hips and feet as it were to remain loose. The photo has visual information I may have missed but I mustn’t discount my own animal memory of being in the place. The photo should be a mnemonic tool not a sacred text.
For many years I taught a Theory and Practice class called “Homeland: the American Landscape”. The class always began with landscape theory and standard landscape images before moving onto ideas of place and ecology. Every semester I began the class with an essay by WJT Mitchell called “Imperial Landscape”. I love looking at landscape paintings and I am aware of their stodginess and troublesome viewpoint from the perspective of colonialism. Mitchell begins his essay with his “Theses on Landscape” one of which is “ Landscape is an exhausted medium no longer viable as a mode for artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring. We must not say so.” He is being a bit arch in that last line but it is the way that the subject and genre of landscape is often viewed. Throughout the essay he breaks down the genre, especially nineteenth century painters such as Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand to reveal how they are “texts” of empire and manifest destiny. It is true in part. Thomas Cole may have been an early environmentalist but he was also an imperial fatalist. His canvases contain hints of the inevitability of Indigenous destruction; a kind of wishful thinking for empire.
I began the class with that essay because I didn’t want to romanticize the genre. I also (the name Homeland might be a hint) began the class in response to the Bush Administration’s war mongering and the Patriot Act. Also, a newish teacher without an MFA I wanted to show that I could be rigorous and hard-edged too. Throughout the class we would critique the idea of “landscape”. Here are some things that we examined: a landscape is a view, beholden to pictorial conventions. Words like “landscape” and “nature” come from a particular nineteenth century viewpoint and are often the counterpoint to “man” as a separate entity. Following Mitchell’s example all landscapes were seen as either imperialist in nature or hokey and romantic; that in itself a suspect sign.
Let’s begin with the first assertion. Obviously the word landscape also in everyday parlance refers to a tract of land, a place where geologic features, weather, flora and fauna all converge. It is true that pictures of landscape shape how we look at the world around us. Just think of every time you are driving across the country and you see a “scenic view”. You are invited to pull over and take pictures. You will probably find yourself confronted with a view; an actual physical place of course, but a view that conforms to certain pictorial conventions. The place is real but your taking in of the place is centered around a certain removal. It is camera ready. The Hudson River painters did sketching and plein air excursions out into the mountains and countryside. They wanted to make canvases that felt as sublime as their experience. I think the imperial impulse was baked into their psyche not necessarily a conscious agenda. (With the exception of Asher Brown Durand who was involved in land grab schemes). The canvases that we look at and study were constructions. They created operative works out of several different views. Like the Hollywood directors that they influenced visually, they create what seems seamless for maximum dramatic effect. One example of this is an Albert Bierstadt painting of Mount Hood at the Portland Art Museum. The view of the mountain and the meadow we seem to be standing on are nowhere near each other.
While those painters are well-known for their great dramatic pictures that showed an ideal and heroic American landscape, there was another wing of contemporaries referred to as the “Luminists” who painted quiet images of reflective water, often with some small sign of human fallibility like a decrepit boat. They were probably no more stringent about the verity of their views than the Hudson River painters. They were trying to communicate something divine inherent in the landscape and as a result turned the volume way down. These painters sought soul solace not bombast.
That brings me to the word “nature”, a word that occupies the mind of the great transcendental writers of that time like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A practice that accompanies not just the Transcendentalists but nineteenth century explorers was the field drawing. Early explorers and scientists went along the in same colonial boats and expeditions as fortune seekers. The views expressed in many of those journals drip with the chauvinism of western thought. John James Audubon whose name is synonymous with birding and natural history shot his specimens in droves in order to create his delicate illustrations. Nature was something with secrets to unlock or to write poems about. It was out there. Current academic trends pick through Thoreau and Emerson to reveal how awful and wrong-headed they were. If you really read them and are patient enough to look through the temporal ticks of language you see that they were seeking to experience the world wholly. Nature and landscape are separation words. Contemporary writers such as Camille Dungy and Robert MacFarlane prefer the term “living world” because it describes a dynamic and reciprocal relationship of which we are part. It is not the static binary of the still picture meant to be dissected.
Mitchell is particularly critical of the whole enterprise. It would be easy to write it off as colonialism pure and simple. No doubt, much of it is. One of the traps of academic theories and their dissemination through curricula is that they can have the ring of absolutism. Once a way of looking at something has been dismantled and replaced, it is very difficult to look at the thing whole again like Audubon’s dead birds. The problem is not that these theories are useful for looking at things anew, they are vital for that, but that they resist double vision. These theories want the stage all to themselves. All that these critiques of landscape say are true. And there are other ways of seeing. Jaune Quick-to See Smith and Kay Walkingstick are two contemporary Indigenous artists who take the piss out of Western landscape tradition. They point out that the Earth, that land is a process, a dynamic intermix of geology, history and ecology. It is not a static view. But the picture, the artwork has the ability to remind us of that process.
Barry Schwabsky’s book Landscape Painting Now which includes Walkingstick is a delicious compendium of contemporary artists who are engaged in the genre. Some use irony and critique to probe its history and some lean into the tradition of recording the ineffable in paint. What all of those disparate artists have in common for me is they make images that stir in us the knowledge that we live in the Earth connected through webs of perception, dreams, memory and embodied experience. Contemporary discourse is turgid with gate keepers and fence builders. Thou shalt nots and No Trespassing abounds. It is possible to acknowledge that a kind of picture genre or way of making could contain multiple, contradictory possibilities.
For me, the practice of observation to produce an image of land in a physical medium is a way of knowing. I want to behold the world. When I concentrate on trying to get the curvature just right of the branch of a hundreds year old Oregon White Oak, I am in conversation with that oak. When I stand on a dirt path and attempt to articulate the relationship of mountain top to the plain below all the while the clouds flowing overhead, I become aware of the sound of the land at that moment. My stillness as I work allows the California quails to bob quietly back into their grassy hideouts. It allows me to pause and watch a hawk do curlicues in the strong wind and then seemingly stop still in midair. I pay attention to the real structure of the sagebrush. Are those florets or leaves? And the color. Not sage as described by a paint company, but some kind of desiccated taupe with a memory of olive green.The winter grasses, oh the winter grasses. They are bleached ocher but at times a white yellow with a touch of faded maroon and Paynes gray roots sapped of their blue vitality but nevertheless radiant. The clouds. Who can say? They are changeable. I pause to see the structure and dynamism of the land that I wouldn’t notice had I not sat there getting cold and trying to imitate their forms on a piece of paper. It is a way of finding the thingness in things.
You don’t have to be a “good” drawer or technician to experience this. Simply sitting and looking, using a hand to imitate the shape of a branch or record the sudden shift of light immerses you in place. Through the act of picture making you can see that which might be overlooked. It could be the most radical thing you can do, absolutely anti-colonial to sit out somewhere and watch and listen. It forces you into conversation with the land around you. That could be the first step into changing the doom of climate catastrophe. If a picture you make has the power, I’m not saying a good or bad picture but has real juice it might just make someone else see differently too. So grab your hot water bottles and go forth.
AND A REMINDER: For anyone interested in taking the drawing and storytelling workshop Nostos: the Long Way Home at Building Five in 2024 (details below) we’ve changed the dates from the original announcement. For the month of January, the workshop will be $1600, that’s $300 off of the full price. This workshop will be a rich and deep exploration of storytelling, drawing and visual narrative. We give the story of the Odyssey lots of time to open up, expand and allow you to enter into it. Ultimately you will tell your own story about home; whether that is as a native, an immigrant or a refugee. Join me in 2024 to inaugurate this workshop. Go here to register.
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors?
Over the course of the five sessions we dive deep into the story of the Odyssey through oral storytelling and book discussions.
This course connects one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling, themed readings, and image making exercises are braided together into each session. This course is for teachers, writers, cartoonists, artists, or anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require drawing skill or previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Each weekend begins with a Friday night lecture.
Saturday is a full day of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
Sunday is work time and presentations.
Building Five, NW Marine Artworks,
2516 NW 29th Ave., Portland, OR 97210
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
Out at Sea
Now that the initial excitement of setting off has settled into the day to day, how do we move through the days? Telemachus tries to be a man, Penelope fends off the suitors, Odysseus heads home and is thwarted. What does it feel like to be a refugee and cast from home? More quick exercises, we build on images from the previous session.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
Leaving Home
The journey begins. War comes to Ithaca. What causes us to leave home in the first place. Odysseus goes off to war. Telemachus grows up with the weight of an absent father, Penelope takes on leadership and grows into her role. It is springtime. Are we setting out with excitement and possibility? With a heavy heart? With regret? We consider the traveler, the wanderer and the tourist. After each storytelling session you draw. We go from quick intuitive drawing exercises to longer more reflective pieces.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Dreams of home fires
We’re right in the middle. Everyone tries to hold the line and survive. Immigrants and natives consider what home means. New materials, longer exercises after the storytelling sessions.
NOV. 2-3, 2024:
The Land of the Dead
Odysseus consults the dead. Underworld musings, ancestors from the other side of the veil come to have a word. One long project after the telling.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecomings
Odysseus comes home as a nobody. Penelope starts to waver and Telemachus gets a hint from Athena. Not all homecomings are happy. Who are you when you return after a journey? One final work session and a mini-exhibition.