by Carl Judson unless otherwise noted.

Transcription

All paintings reproduced in this publication
by Carl Judson unless otherwise noted.
Copyright ©2011 by Carl Judson.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4507-8453-5
Printed in Denver, Colorado.
II
A Guerrilla Painter’s Notebook II
CARL JUDSON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1
LIMITED PALETTES
3
PAINTING NEVADA
5
CONFESSIONS OF A TURNCOAT
7
PAINTING AROUND MONTÉLIMAR
9
APRIL ROADTRIP
11
PLEIN AIR PALETTE
13
RAINY DAY CHAIRS
15
IN PRAISE OF SMALL PAINTINGS
17
MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU LOVE
19
VISITS WITH HUGH AND KAY
21
WHERE TO STICK IT
23
FENCES, GATES AND CATTLE GUARDS
25
PAINTING BUDDY
27
WILDFLOWER RIG
29
PANORAMA
31
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II
This second volume of A Guerrilla Painter’s Notebook, an edited compilation of brief
essays and anecdotes written over the last dozen or so years related to painting the world
around me, picks up where the first left off.
The Right Way to Paint - Although I often say that I have no intention of
persuading anyone to a particular way of painting, this is not entirely true. Actually, I do
think there is a right way to paint, and as a matter of fact, only one right way - your own
way. Easy to say but not so easy to figure out.
To me painting is a mystery. Trying to apply methods, formulas and rules seems
analogous to resolving religious mysteries with dogma. So in painting as in religion, I’ve
been stuck with finding my own tortured path. This is not to say that it has not been an
immensely satisfying and rewarding adventure - all the more so.
As Winton Marsalis talks of the importance for musicians to appreciate and draw
from the whole of music, so I have profited from trying to appreciate and understand a
wide range of painting. Continuing to milk the jazz metaphor... Miles Davis said “There
is no wrong note.” Even though I depict the world around me with some semblance of
realism, the longer I paint (30 years give or take) the more I feel a kinship with abstract
expressionists, surrealists, minimalists, pop artists, cave painters … It seems to me that the
difficult process of resolving images is common to all painters, regardless of “school.”
Maybe this will give some comfort to others who have been looking in vain for a secret
painting formula. I think it is a good idea to beware, as often artists with “systems” have
simply ceased to push the envelope.
I began painting after reading Winston Churchill’s charming essay, Painting as a Pastime,
wherein he prescribes painting as therapy for stress and overwork. Since I felt stressed and
overworked and Churchill is a good pursuader, I took to painting.
I carry a small paint kit, known as a pochade box, with me almost always and I try to
paint every day as a sort of visual journal entry, I paint a wide range of subject matter, from
agriculture to industrial and landscapes to interiors. I frequently paint in public settings in
order to include people in my paintings.
I am fascinated by the patterns of colors and shapes in the ordinary aspects of our world.
The interplay between the abstract beauty of these patterns, the subject matter, the sensuousness of the paints and the rich variety of painting surfaces define the dimensions of my
painting world.
I try to balance these factors in each small painting in as straight forward a manner as I
can within the time constraints of painting on the spot with constantly changing light and
moving subject matter.
I paint for my own personal account and no longer sell my paintings.
My “System” - (Hardly the sort of thing I would recommend to anyone else.) It might
be described as a 12 step program:
1.
Try not to take too much stuff with me.
2.
Find a comfortable place to paint.
3.
Decide what to paint.
4.
Begin painting.
5.
Dig a big hole.
6.
Try digging out of the hole (paradox acknowledged).
7.
Worry about when to stop.
8.
Stop, seemingly too late.
9.
Pack up and go.
10. Stare at the painting.
11. Consider making adjustments.
12. If making adjustments, repeat 10 and 11 as necessary until satisfied or resigned.
(Most of the above steps are accompanied by my Gully Jimson-like monologue1 while trying
one thing, wiping that out, then trying another.)
1
1
Gully Jimson is the obsessive painter and
tragi-comic main character of Joyce Cary’s 1944
novel, The Horse’s Mouth, and the 1958 movie of
the same name, starring Alec Guinness, who also
wrote the screen play.
Daisies
Merchant’s Island, ME, 2004
Oil on museum board. 5" x 7" (shown full size)
2
LIMITED PALETTES
I find it helpful to switch painting gears
every once in a while to get out of a rut
or keep from getting into one in the first
place. I need to not get too comfortable
or my work gets stale. So I shake things up
from time to time by making an abrupt
change in something: painting surfaces,
sizes, brushes, subject matter, etc. One
strategy I’ve used several times is limiting
my palette. At different times I’ve painted
with one, two, three and four colors (plus
white).
As I limit the number of colors on
the palette, value becomes even more
important. One color plus white is mostly
about value - except for “little things” like
composition, line, mass, shape, movement,
texture, etc.
I tend gradually to get too literal about
color in the things I paint, so that I’m
painting more and more what “I know”
and less and less what “I’m experiencing.”
Not only does a limited palette force me
to focus more on value, but it frees me up
to accept (by necessity) colors that aren’t
“real” but still can work and are often
interesting, as in these little paintings.
A classic three-color palette for oil
painters is ultramarine blue, alizarin
crimson and yellow ochre (I prefer Indian
yellow). Admittedly, there are a whole
range of greens (and reds and yellows and
blues) that you just can’t get with this
palette.
Other examples of limited palette
paintings I’ve noticed over the years
include monochrome paintings in blue by
Fredrick Remington and many of Russell
Chatham’s paintings that look like they
were painted only with blue, orange and
white.1
Some of the limited palettes I’ve used:
• Ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and
Indian yellow,
• Chrome oxide green and cadmium
orange,
• The “four cobalts”- cobalt green, cobalt
blue, cobalt violet and aureolin (cobalt
yellow),
• Cobalt violet, alizarin crimson,
cadmium red and cadmium orange.
Wood Strawberry
Oil on museum board. 5" x 7"
Wild Mustard
Yarrow
Dwarf Dandilion
Merchants Island, ME, 2004
Oil and pencil on museum board. 5”x7"
Even so, the results are frequently
rewarding and include paintings that tend
to be more harmonized and unified and
often have a distinct mood. Corot’s work
comes to mind as limited palette paintings
that set a mood.
3
The six paintings shown here were
painted using the “four cobalts”, a cheery
pastel palette that works well in many
landscapes. All four of the pigments are
expensive, but small landscapes use so
little paint that cost needn’t be an
overriding factor. The cobalts all dry
very quickly, making them ideal for
travel painting. To take maximum
advantage of their quick drying properties,
I use them with flake (lead) white, which
itself dries very quickly. All of the cobalts
and flake white are toxic, so I take care not
to rub my eyes, pick my teeth, scratch my
nose or eat potato chips until I’m through
painting and have washed my hands.
King Devil
Using a limited palette from just one
part of the spectrum offers interesting
possibilities. I once used the violet through
orange palette previously mentioned over
several months for nude figure painting.
I could readily imagine a green through
violet palette for landscapes.
In addition to the creative and
disciplinary advantages of limited palettes
are the practical benefits: travel and
painting is considerably less daunting
with four or five tubes of paint instead
of a dozen or more. Limited palettes are
less complicated; I find that I spend a lot
less time mixing color and more time on
pictorial issues when I’m painting with
three or four colors than when I’m using
my usual palette.
1
See One Hundred Paintings by Russell Chatham.
1990 Livingston, Montana
Fall Load Out
Dutch John, UT, 2005
Oil on linen. 7½" x 10"
4
PAINTING NEVADA
I’m a retired rancher who grew up in
the west of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and no
western state dredges up the feelings from
those bygone days for me like Nevada
does, so I’m always chompin’ at the bit
whenever the prospect of roaming and
painting the byways of that great state
crops up (and getting to and from Nevada
isn’t too shabby either). A 2005 business
trip to the west coast had me budgeting
some extra painting and roaming time.
I can’t quite put my finger on what type
of scene evokes the kind of emotional
response that will make me swerve over
and start painting, but like the Supreme
Court, “I know it when I see it.” My first
U-turn was triggered by this abandoned
gas station (below) on the old main drag
going west out of Elko.
ranchers can make a go of it in country
that would make a rattlesnake think twice.
Desolation piled on top of desolation, like
this burned over landscape (below), is not
out of place in this biblical “Job” country,
notorious for plagues of locusts and salt
flats.
The Friendliest Truck Stop
I80 & US 93, NV, 2005
On the return trip, I wandered off into
the remote Antelope Valley. The hot,
“high-noon” washed out landscape (below)
contrasted with the dark doorways of the
giant shop building. I didn’t inquire,
but I think the shop was for housing and
servicing the ranch’s semi-trucks used to
haul the hay raised in this remote desert
oasis hundreds of miles to market.
Out of Gas at Metro Gas
Elko, NV, 2005
Oil on linen. 7½" x 10”
Farther along, this abandoned truck
stop (above right) at the junction of I-80
and US 93 caused my next “one-eighty.”
The sign by the highway said “OPEN” and
pronounced the long-closed Trinity Truck
Stop as the “Friendliest Truck Stop”- a real
Stephen King setting.
Ranch
Antelope Valley, NV, 2005
The next day found me just over the
border in the withering landscape of
northwestern Utah. Even here you find
ranches - under the right conditions, good
5
Sage Brush Burn
Fall Valley, UT, 2005
South of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, I went
looking for the old Stewart homestead
in the Uintah Mountains (from Elinore
Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader
and the movie Heartland). Eleanor Stewart,
an unschooled orphan who taught herself
to read and write, homesteaded near
Burnt Fork, Wyoming before World War
I. She wrote of her experiences in the
form of letters that were published in The
Atlantic Magazine, bringing her national
recognition but little financial reward. My
father homesteaded in Wyoming just after
World War I, so I can attest to Elinor’s
letters for their ring-true charm and the
movie for its no-frills accuracy.
Unfortunately Elinore’s hard life ended
prematurely in her 50s as a result of
injuries suffered in a haying accident while
she was driving a horse drawn mowing
machine.
In my search for the Stewart
Homestead, my knock on the door of
an old log ranch house was answered by
Don Stoll, in his 80s, who had known
Eleanor Stewart as a boy. Mr. Stoll’s great
grandparents settled in Burnt Fork and
he considered the Stewarts to have been
johnny-come-latelys. His grandmother was
the character “Gramma” in Elinor’s letters
and the movie.
Mr. Stoll’s great-grandfather “Dutchy”
Stoll (originally from Germany) had
come to Fort Bridger with the 1st Nevada
Cavalry on account of the “Morman
War” of 1857-58. After mustering out of
the calvary, he established a brewery next
to the fort. The army soon declared it a
public nuisance and shut it down. He then
moved south to Burnt Fork, the site of the
first mountain man rendezvous (1825).
After my very pleasant visit with Mr.
Stoll, I did manage to spot the Stewart
homestead, but it was about a mile away
on private land behind a locked gate.
Then I proceeded south and came upon
this scene of a fall round-up over the line
in Utah (opposite page). At the extreme
right is a “cattle pot” backed up to a
temporary corral and loading chute.
I used to run cattle in this kind
of country. It’s hard to beat working
horseback on an Indian summer day in
the mountains with the aspens in full
color. While I was painting I could hear
the cows and calves bawling in the woods
as they were being driven to be sorted and
loaded… and I got to use my fluorescent
oil pastels.
These paintings were painted sitting
in my car using a small pochade box. I
squeezed out plenty of paint before I left
so I didn’t need to take any paint tubes
with me. The paint kept just fine for over
a week.
Bordello
Salt Wells, NV, 2006
Acrylic on canvas. 7½" x 10"
6
CONFESSIONS OF A
TURNCOAT
In my years of plein air painting, I
always looked down my nose at acrylics.
For one thing, I never minded the slow
drying time of oils…and besides, oils are
so classy. With some urging from others,
I tried acrylics one day using a Sta-Wet
Palette. It was OK, but I went back to my
oils. Three months later, I noticed the
Sta-Wet Palette in my studio and opened it
up. The acrylics were still wet and ready to
use – that had to be good for something!
Then I took a short trip and came
back with a couple of nice little acrylic
paintings. This time, I had prepared
some textured and colored panels using
acrylic paint applied to canvas boards
with a palette knife and a broken comb.
The result was a rich surface, and it was
difficult to tell that the paintings were
acrylic and not oils.
give acrylics a try. Two paintings later in
the middle of Nevada (opposite page) I
was kicking myself for wasting my trip on
acrylics, but it was too late to turn back.
Among my problems were the fact that
acrylics are more transparent than oils
and the texture didn’t hold up. Painting
in the manner of my oil painting was not
working. By the time I got to Northern
California, I had developed a different
approach and was getting to be more and
more pleased.
Another adjustment was to take
advantage of the rapid-drying acrylics. I
put out twice as many colors on my palette
and began using them more like pastels layering on the painting with less mixing
on the palette. The layering was curing the
transparency problem and the textured
surface was yielding increasing richness
and complexity with each successive color
layer.
If you want to keep paint on the
Sta-Wet Palette between sessions, the paint
runs all over the place unless you keep the
palette flat. I modified my pochade box
by moving the handle from the side of the
box to the top so that the palette would be
flat when I carried the box.
Track Hoes
Redding, CA, 2006
One trick was to return to preparing
those textured and colored acrylic canvas
boards (below).
Stimson Lumber Co.
Bonner, MT, 2006
If you’re painting in one session,
there are some things that you can do in
oil that you can’t do easily, or at all, in
acrylics - and vice versa. With acrylics, in
addition to layering colors one over the
other in rapid succession, you can scumble
and glaze easily, creating effects that are
difficult in one-session oil paintings.
Another nice thing is that transporting
acrylic paintings is less problematic than
oils, but don’t get lulled into complacency
- they will scratch and discolor if they are
allowed to rub together.
House Boats in Beauty Bay
Lake Coeur D’Alene, ID, 2006
The Sta-Wet Palette wicks moisture up
from the sponge underneath and mixes
tend to get watered down, so it’s nice to
have a dry mixing surface handy, too.
I used some Velcro® dots to hold the
lid of the palette in place on the palette
extension, which provides additional dry
mixing space.
Cascade Fall Rain
Startup, WA, 2006
Still not a convert, several months
went by and then I had a chance to take a
two week spin to the west coast and back
through Montana. I decided to really
7
Jack Rabbit
Converse County, WY, 2006
The Old Rochemaure Bridge
Drôme, France, 2007
8
PAINTING MONTÉLIMAR
Montélimar is a town in the south
of France in the southern part of the
Drôme department (province), the western
boundary of which is the Rhône River.
Across the river to the west is the lightly
inhabited Ardèche department - kind of a
French redneck outback. To the south of
the Drôme is Provence. The Montélimar/
Dieulefit region of the Drôme is best
known for a small goat cheese, called
Picodon, nougat candy and traditional
pottery. Olives, wine and fruit aren’t far
behind.
My oldest daughter, Meredith, and her
family returned to live in Montélimar
where she spent her senior year of high
school in 1984-85. As a consequence, we
have friends there and, between family and
friends, it was hard to find time to escape
to paint when we visited there recently.
Meredith was kind enough to lend us her
car, which helped with our occasional
getaways.
me depict atmospheric distance in these
small paintings.
Sarah and I managed to be a few hours
early for dinner with a friend in the
little hill top village of Le Poët-Laval, so
I climbed to the top to capture the view
looking east toward the mountains (below
left).
In the 12th century some tough
customers named Adhémar ruled this
part of the Rhône Valley. They built an
amazing castle, Rochemaure, on the top
of an eroded volcanic pipe that sticks out
of the mountainside on the west side of
the river. This is a view looking down on
the castle ruins and across the Rhône to
Montélimar (below).
Site Nucléaire du Tricastin
Ardèche, France, 2007
makes these towers a great subject to
include in Rhône landscapes.
The two towers (above), painted from
a vineyard in the Ardèche, are at the Site
Nucléaire de Tricastin, in the Drôme,
about 20 miles south of Montélimar.
These four cooling towers (below) at
Site Nucléaire de Cruas are on the Rhône
about ten miles north of Montélimar. My
vantage point was way up the mountain
looking down on the Rhône and the
patchwork fields in the valley.
Château de Rochemaure
View from Le Poët-Laval
Drôme, France, 2007
I took oil primed linen mounted on
museum board this trip. The beautiful,
fine weave of Belgian portrait linen helps
This abandoned suspension bridge
(opposite page) spans the Rhône below the
village of Rochemaure. The ruins of the
Adhémar castle can be seen on the needle
of volcanic rock way up the mountainside.
Another class of majestic structures, the
cooling towers of the nuclear generating
plants, vie for attention with the castles
of the Rhône valley. I think the tension
between the sculptural beauty of these
huge forms and their controversial use
9
Site Nucléaire de Cruas
France produces about 80% of its
electricity from nuclear energy. When
Meredith asked one of her English
students, a local politician, about safety
of the two nuclear power plants near the
town of Montélimar, he smiled and said,
“What I always say when someone asks me
that question is: First of all I live here with my
family and feel safe; and that with such blue
skies, we are in desperate need of cloud makers,
aren’t we?!”
All of this, of course, takes on a more
problematic edge when placed against
the backdrop of the 2011 earthquake and
tsunami that caused the meltdown of four
nuclear reactors in Japan.
New Subdivision Coming Soon
Johnstown, OH, 2007
Acrylic on canvas. 7½” x 10”
10
APRIL ROAD TRIP
I always look forward to a road trip,
even for business. I like to see new places
and look for interesting things to paint.
It’s a challenge to schedule enough time
to take some byways and still have time to
paint when something happens to catch
my eye - I’m prone to being attracted to
oddities as subject matter.
These paintings were done on a
business trip from Colorado to the east
coast and back.
It was late afternoon as I was driving
through southeastern Nebraska with an
overcast sky, when this green bridge just lit
up the landscape (left, top).
Farther down the road in southern
Iowa on a Sunday afternoon I found
these cement trucks on an embankment
above the highway like some kind of
surreal bumble bee pageant - an Alice in
Wonderland sort of image (left, bottom).
And in central Ohio was this orange
neon band with the electric green spring
grass (opposite page). From my vantage
point, the neon band was a mystery. After
I finished the painting and drove down
the road, I saw that it was a construction
boundary fence for a new subdivision
going up on the other side of the hill.
painting opportunities. I finally forced
myself to stop and paint this hedgerow
before the light faded (below).
Wood Splitter
Boone, NC, 2007
Acrylic on canvas. 7½“ x 10”
This home-made log splitter sporting
the flag (above) was too good to pass up. I
spotted it off a winding road back in the
hills.
Almost right on the border of North
Carolina and Tennessee, this derelict road
house (below) struck a somber note. The
sign for “Flat Springs” Road echoes the
feeling of the setting.
Green Bridge
Osceola, NE, 2007
Hedgerow
Alton, MO, 2007
The Kansas Flint Hills are legendary in
early west cattle lore. I stopped to paint
this scrub thicket with some redbuds just
starting to bloom (below). I’d had my eye
on the rebuds for quite a while and I knew
I was running out of time - this is about as
far west as they thrive.
Oxford – Bellevue Ferry
Oxford, MD, 2007
This is a ferry slip on the eastern shore
of Chesapeake Bay. It was a chilly, gusty
day following a “slush” storm and lots of
bad driving conditions. The eastern shore,
free of snow, was a nice respite (above).
“Ideal” Ready Mix Trucks
Chariton, IA, 2007
Flat Springs Road
NC / TN border, 2007
One of the most beautiful stretches I
have ever driven is US 160 in southeastern
Missouri. It was so captivating that I
didn’t really want to stop despite a glut of
11
Redbuds
Kansas Flint Hills, 2007
The palette of my
5x7 pochade box
12
PLEIN AIR PALETTE
“When I run out of red, I use blue”
- Pablo Picasso
There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ colors forr
plein air painting. I think you can make
any color work and you can successfully
use a palette that has anywhere from one
to a hundred colors.
A serious painter’s choice of colors for
a plein air palette is an individual thing.
If a painter you admire uses a particular
palette, it may not work for you. Each
painter’s color sensibility is different. I
think it pays to experiment until your
palette really feels right.
It is common to choose a palette that
has a warm and a cool each of red, blue
and yellow. Most plein air painters end
up with a working palette between 6
and 12 colors. There seems to be broad
agreement that black is not a helpful color
for a plein air palette. Of course there are
exceptions: Wolf Kahn is said to go out
painting with as many as 60 tubes of paint,,
and Paul Bridenbaugh used black very
successfully in his great Bay Area plein air
urban-scapes.
The palette I currently use has evolved
over time and reflects my own personality.
It is a moving target, in any event, as it
continues to change. I haven’t included
earth colors on my palette because, being
close to the colors found in nature and
considering my personal weaknesses,
they would be too tempting for me to use
straight out of the tube. For more than 20
years, I have used only bright hues on my
palette because it forces me to mix all my
colors. My current palette, in the order I
lay it out, is:
Chrome Oxide Green - A warm, low-key
green. Excellent for making opaque darks
and shadows. Very opaque.
Opaque. Toxic (Gamblin makes a
nontoxic Flake White Substitute, which is
almost as nice to work with).
Cadmium Yellow Lemon - A very cool
shade of yellow. Opaque. Toxic.
Medium (1 part stand oil, 5 parts
turpentine) - Not really fast drying, but
quickly becomes very tacky, which allows
me the opportunity for careful over
painting in a matter of minutes.
For toning down and graying out this
bright palette I do several things:
1) I’m not too fussy about cleaning my
brushes while I’m painting, as the cross
contamination tends to take the garish
edge off of my color mixes and creates
some harmony.
2) After I finish painting, I scrape up
my unused color mixes into a little pile
in the corner of the palette. I don’t mix
these scrapings together but just kind of
pile them side-by-side, accordion fashion.
I always have this to dip into as a source of
odds and ends.
3) I find small amounts of the
Cadmiums and Chrome Oxide Green are
very useful in graying mixes and giving
opacity to darks. Transparency and opacity are important to the way I paint. For
instance, Cadmium Red Deep is even
more useful to me for its opacifying power
than for its color.
My palette provides all the colors I have
needed to paint anywhere, but I rarely
use more than half the colors in a single
painting.
I vary my palette some from time to
time, adding or subtracting. I use a pencil
with my stand oil/turpentine medium for
fine, dark lines, and I often carry a few
fluorescent oil pastels for traffic signs and
cone zones.
For my paints and mediums, I always
use professional materials. When you
paint small you can afford the best.
Indian Yellow - A warm yellow, which I
use to “make” Yellow Ochre and a whole
lot more. Transparent.
Cadmium Orange - I use this a lot mixed
with blue—sparingly for skies and boldly
for dark foliage greens. Opaque. Toxic.
Cadmium Red Deep - Like Chrome
Oxide Green, excellent for making opaque
darks and shadows. Very opaque. Toxic.
Alizarin Crimson (permanent) - I’m
careful to get the new permanent version,
as traditional Alizarin Crimson is not
lightfast. Transparent.
Purple Alizarin Madder - A beautiful,
smoky, red-purple. Unfortunately Winsor
& Newton has changed the formula and
it’s not quite as nice as it used to be.
Semi-transparent.
Cobalt Violet - A seductively beautiful
pinkish violet. Transparent. Toxic.
Ultramarine Blue - The indispensable
warm blue. I mix it with Indian Yellow for
a “Sap Green”. Semi-transparent.
Cobalt Blue - A neutral blue for skies and
mixing grays. Semi-transparent. Toxic.
Pthalo Blue-Green - Cool and
transparent. I use this with Cadmium
Red Deep and the blues for dense,
flat “blacks.” Or I use it with Alizarin
Crimson for bright, transparent darks.
Flake (Lead) White - A warm white
that dries very quickly. Very traditional.
13
Johnny’s Rocking Chair
Merchant Island, ME, 2001
Oil and pencil on carton. 7½” x 13”
14
RAINY DAY CHAIRS
I was shuffling through some of my
paintings the other day and came across
these chair sketches from painting trips to
Merchant Island, Maine in 1997 and 2001.
I was surprised that I had forgotten about
them.
A painting friend and I were staying
in a house on the island furnished with
an eclectic assortment of Maine woods
stuff. I had found the Adirondack chairs
particularly comfortable, and I had
originally intended to do a mechanical
drawing of one for the purpose of making
one in the shop back home, but since it
was raining and I was bored, I thought
“Why not make a painting instead and kill
two birds…?”
I started with an oil-primed, colored
and textured carton panel that I had
prepared for landscapes. I drew a grid
in pencil to represent 6” squares, laid
out front, top and side views, took my
measurements, sketched the chair in
pencil, filled the drawing in with flake
white, put in a couple of notes about
bolts, made a scale and a title with alizarin
crimson and white. Although I have never
gotten around to making one, there is
enough information for me to make an
Adirondack chair from this sketch.
Several years later, another couple
of rainy days saw me at it again with a
pleasing Windsor chair and a slightly
dilapidated but very comfortable cane seat
rocking chair. The carton panels are too
absorbent by themselves, so sometimes
I am in the habit of smearing my palette
scrapings into the surface to form a sealer.
The resulting multi-colored surfaces are
pleasingly accidental and can provide a
nice background to paint on.
Adirondack Chair
Oil and pencil on carton. 7½” x 13”
Windsor Chair
Oil and pencil on carton . 7½” x 13”
15
Reservoir Study
Renato Muccillo, 2008
Oil on panel.4" x 4” (shown full size)
The Promise of Spring
Chester Arnold, 2008
Oil on linen on board. 4" x 5" (shown full size)
16
IN PRAISE OF SMALL
PAINTINGS
Aside from the plein air considerations
of time, portability and convenience,
small paintings have merits not always
appreciated. But change is in the wind.
The current plein air rage, with clubs and
paint outs, may fade with the passing of
time, but small, realist paintings aren’t
going away anytime soon - rather the
opposite.
Tootsie
Erin W. Berrett, 2009
Oil on panel. 4” x 4”
There is a more durable trend afoot.
Art schools drive long-term trends, and
up-and-coming young artists of today are
the harbingers of the painting directions
of tomorrow. Anyone reading the current
academic art press, like Art in America,
Art News or New American Paintings (my
favorite) can’t help but note the growing
number of prominent young artists
coming out of MFA programs around the
country showing a predilection for small
paintings depicting observed reality. Small
image sizes from 3” x 3” up to 12” x 12”
are becoming more and more common.
Conventional art instruction urges the
student toward larger scale work to free
up gesture and large brushes to discourage
undue attention to detail - worthy
objectives that, however, are all too often
codified into dogma. Just as we have come
to appreciate different forms of literature,
from epic novel to haiku, modern art
has offered us an equally broad spectrum
of painting to appreciate. There are any
number of characteristics by which we
classify painting - realistic vs. abstract, oil
vs. watercolor, impressionism vs. trompe
l’oie, folk vs. pop, small vs. large, etc. Of
these, none is inherently more judgmental
than size - the bigger, the better - a notion
that we almost universally decry but is
nevertheless deeply embedded in our
culture.
Sometimes it is undeniably true that
bigger is better. I was well acquainted
with the image of Picasso’s Guernica, but,
never having noted its dimensions, was
completely unprepared for the emotional
charge its enormous size (11’ x 25’) imparts
when I saw it in Madrid.
On the other hand, we are all familiar
with paintings that disappoint when seen
in the flesh because they don’t live up to
their size. I am often pleasantly surprised,
after being arrested by an illustration of
a painting in a book or magazine to note
how much smaller than my impression it
actually is. It provokes admiration to see
a painting that packs a punch beyond its
size.
Some of the advantages that small
paintings offer:
• Presence - small paintings invite
engagement - you need to get close
to see them. Our culture is not very
good at “seeing” paintings, so a good
17
Night of the Cowbells Party - Lost Springs, WY
Chessney Sevier, 2008
Acrylic on panel. 2¾" x 4¾" (shown full size)
•
•
•
•
place to start is by inviting the viewer
in to check it out. Large paintings are
often just so much visual background
noise.
Composition - small paintings offer
an opportunity to abstract and
simplify.
Serendipity - every tremor and twitch
of the hand holding the brush invites
the “happy accident” on a scale
inversely proportional to the size of
the painting.
Bold Texture - a small brush used on
a small painting is like a using a giant
brush on a larger painting.
Gifts - giving someone a large
painting is asking for a commitment
on the part of the recipient (the big
space above the sofa) that may not be
entirely welcomed, whereas a small
painting will almost always find a glad
home.
Sales - small paintings sell for less,
bringing them within reach of a
wider audience and encouraging
buyers to contemplate the possibility
of collecting. Because of the
space required, there are more
opportunities for a small painting to
fit in.
• Tradition - Our western tradition
of painting began with small scale
formats, especially in the exquisite
elaboration of letter forms in
Medieval manuscripts. (This offers the
opportunity for a neat, if not entirely
relevant, segue to the observation that
our modern urban graffiti has revived
the art of the decorated letter.)
In any event, shown here are four
sumptuous little paintings by artists young
and old to feast the eyes on.
•
Hubi Whittaker with Bass Guitar @ the “509 Club”
San Francisco, CA, 1992
18
MONEY CAN’T BUY
YOU LOVE - SUPPORT
FOR THE ARTS
In Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third
largest city, on the main plaza where the
municipal offices are housed in beautiful
old colonial buildings, the ground floor of
one of these buildings is set aside for artists. The Salón Gildaro Antezana (photo
lower right) is a beautiful space about
20 feet by 90 feet with vaulted ceilings,
a terrazzo floor and good lighting. The
building itself is adobe with four-footthick walls. The entrance is through big,
venerable double wood doors framed in
stone beneath the colonnade. The foot
traffic passing by is heavy, constant and
diverse - all ages and every level of society.
The deal is simple: Once a year applications are taken and 26 artists are awarded
the space, each for a two week period.
Sometimes two artists will share one time
slot. At the beginning of your two weeks,
a woman from the municipality unlocks
the door and hands you the key. Hanging, opening, promoting, manning and
closing the exhibition is your responsibility. The woman from the municipality
provides janitorial services. Bolivia is the
second poorest country in the Western
Hemisphere.
In Bolivia (and much of the rest
of Latin America, too, I believe) the
primary and secondary school curriculum
frequently includes pictorial components
in homework assignments, and children
become adept and imaginative illustrators.
Whether campesinos in sandals, school
children or society elites, the hundreds of
people who come into the Salón Gildaro
Antezana are sophisticated connoisseurs
of graphic images (compared to us gringos)
and spend a lot of time carefully absorbing
each work. These exhibits generate
enthusiastic coverage by local newspapers
and television. Three times during the
1990s I was fortunate enough to have
shows there - by far my most gratifying
exhibition experiences.
Once on my way back from one of my
volunteer stints in Bolivia, I had a two day
layover over in Lima, Peru. This was before
the end of the Sindero Luminoso terror
reign when Lima had a bad reputation,
and I was a little nervous. All of which
I forgot upon discovering there were 36
special exhibitions of Latin American
paintings by hundreds of painters from all
over South and Central America housed
ad hoc in various business and private
venues around Lima. Many were old
colonial houses with central courtyards.
I ran up a considerable taxi bill, but I
managed to see all 36 in my two days.
The giant gulf between the place of art
in Peru vs. art in the U.S. is summed up
for me by the following political curiosity:
When Alberto Fujimori ran for president
of Peru in 1989 as a populist champion
of the poor, center-right establishment
conservatives selected as a candidate to
run against him Mario Vargas Llosa, an
internationally renowned man of letters
(and 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature
recipient), among whose works is In Praise
of the Stepmother, a rather sympathetic
tale of a stepmother’s pedophilia using
famous works of art as metaphorical
springboards. This would be more or less
the equivalent of the Republicans having
nominated someone like Philip Roth
(Portnoy’s Complaint) for President (an idea
with some merit, perhaps, but like SO
NOT happening!)
19
In the early 1990s while I was house
sitting and painting in the Bay Area,
I played poker once a week with some
down-and-out fellows in the Tenderloin
(red light district of San Francisco).
These guys introduced me to the 509
Club, a small abandoned store front at
509 Ellis Street with an ill matched assortment of folding chairs, a makeshift
stage, microphone, a couple of lights
and an old upright piano. On Tuesday
nights the place would fill up with
people from the neighborhood to watch
a dozen or so performers of all types and
abilities - all free (donations accepted).
Sign-up for the performers seemed
egalitarian - first-come-first-served, I think.
I particularly remember an accomplished
pianist, Brenda Brook, who played piano
bars in the city coming to work out new
arrangements, and Hubi (opposite page).
But the nights I enjoyed the most were
when Mimi, a chunky, middle aged
Chinese lady showed up. She dressed in
a tutu and sang Chinese songs in a high
falsetto while twirling coquettishly around
the stage, adding theatrical emphasis
by banging on the piano with her toes
during pirouettes. While waiting her
turn, you could hear Mimi at the back of
the room giggling nervously in delighted
anticipation of her pending performance.
By conventional measure, Mimi was
mentally “disturbed,” but she was treated
with acceptance and affection by the local
audience of mostly hard luck types. How
many public places would allow someone
like Mimi an opportunity to vent her
creative enthusiasm, and then, without
derision?
These are three examples of “public
support for the arts” that have a place
in my heart partly because they required
interest and enthusiasm more than money.
The U.S. National Endowment for
the Arts conducts an extensive periodic
survey called Public Participation in the
Arts. The most recent survey paints a
discouraging picture of a steady decline in
almost every aspect of adult involvement
in the arts. (Obviously it doesn’t include
people like us.) I can guess there are a
number of reasons for this trend. One that
resonates with me is a lack of accepting
and satisfying venues to exhibit or perform
one’s work. Another is that most art is
rather apart from instead of being a part
of our culture.
Salón Gildaro Antezana, Cochabamba, Bolivia
That’s me on the left (above) with an
exhibition of 42 of my Bolivia paintings at
the Salón Gildaro Antezana in 1994.
Kay’s Garden - Finca las Brisas
Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 2009
Oil on birch plywood. 4½” x 7½” (shown full size)
20
VISITS WITH HUGH & KAY
My old friends of more than 40 years,
Hugh and Kay Force, retired some time
back to the highlands above Matagalpa,
Nicaragua, where they bought a small
rundown coffee farm, Finca las Brisas.
Over the last several years they have greatly
improved the farm, where they now also
harvest bananas, grapefruit, oranges,
lemons, limes and tangerines from the
trees that provide shade for the coffee.
The coffee is picked daily during
December and January, the peak of the
harvest. The ripe coffee berries (roughly
the size and flavor of cherries) are run
through a bicycle powered machine to
remove the fruit. The coffee beans are left
to soak and ferment overnight.
they are running a well disguised
community development project.
Orange - Finca las Brisas
Oil on museum board. 4” x 6”
Coffee - Finca las Brisas
In addition, they have a small herd of
Jersey milk cows. From the milk Kay,
with the help of Marta (shown below) and
Leticia, makes about 20 pounds of fresh
cheese, called cuajada¹, every morning.
The cheese and whey and some milk are
sold to the surrounding community.
The cows contribute manure and
bedding to the compost pile which
fertilizes the coffee, and in return they get
to eat the discarded coffee fruit.
The next day the beans are washed
and spread out on screens so that any
rejects can be spotted and discarded.
The beans are then bagged and hauled
over a jeep road to Matagalpa where they
are consigned to a benificio that will take
on the final drying and grading of the
beans and the “cupping” of the coffee.
Cupping is a stylized ritual like wine
tasting by which the coffee is classified
as to quality and the characteristics of its
flavor according to charts with dozens of
options. The benifico may also serve as the
warehouse and broker for the coffee.
Most of us would consider Hugh and
Kay’s living conditions to be Spartan, but
by rural Nicaraguan standards they are
very comfortable. From my perspective,
21
transport, storage and financing for the
bean harvest.
Here is a local desert recipe that Sarah
and I have adapted from Kay’s notes:
Bananas en Gloria (serves six)
3 large bananas, peeled and quartered
3 T. butter
½ cup cuajada (actually a range of cheeses
can work with this basic recipe - like grated
cheddar, blue and feta)
½ cup cream
Cinnamon to taste
Lightly sauté banana halves in butter
until golden, set aside. Add cream, cheese
and cinnamon to the sauté pan to make
a sauce, return bananas to pan and baste
with the sauce until the bananas are soft
and the sauce is thick.
Tangerine - Finca las Brisas
In Nicaragua jobs are hard to come
by, let alone from considerate employers
like Hugh and Kay. They supply full time
employment to a half-dozen residents of
the surrounding community and seasonal
employment to about 15 coffee pickers.
The cheese and milk they sell contribute
a source of high quality food in an area
where borderline nutrition is the norm. In
addition, Hugh and Kay set an admirable
example of careful husbandry in a fragile
landscape. They also help neighboring
subsistence farmers by supplying
This has become a regular dessert for us.
Our current favorite cheese to make it
with is a blend of Romano, Parmesan and
Asiago.
1
A salted, compressed cottage-type cheese related
to cheeses of Mediteranean origin, including feta
and ricotta. Cuajada is a Spanish version that can be
found throughout Latin America under various names
like queso blanco, queso fresco, and quesillo.
Cowboy’s Delight (Globe Mallow)
Livermore, CO, 2009
22
WHERE TO STICK IT COMPOSITION
Andrews Park View
Livermore, CO, 1995 (private collection)
Oil on burlap. 7½" x 13"
Someone told me once that I have a
knack for composition… well, that and
a couple of bucks might get you a cup’a
coffee. As a tangible “thing” composition
doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
To be a little facetious for a moment,
I recognize that there are various time
honored approaches to composition. For
instance, there’s the “lots of diagonal
lines” approach and the “Golden Section,”
and a bunch of rules about the lightest
light and the darkest dark, not cutting
corners off, never ending a line in a
corner, never dividing the painting in half,
never putting anything in the
center, etc. ad infinitum. For
me it’s a lot more mysterious
than formulas and rules.
I guess I have three basic
approaches: 1) Wave a view
finder around until something
looks interesting, 2) start
painting something at some
place on the canvas and keep
going until I get to the edge, or
3) stick the focus smack dab in
the center of the canvas, divide the canvas
in half or cut off a corner out of pure
cussedness. In any event for me, nothing
works without a bunch of fixing and
tinkering throughout the painting process
until the whole thing falls together as if
by magic with one last stroke... sometimes
more or less... sometimes not.
have an unsuccessful composition yet can
become successful with some fairly minor
(but frequently not obvious) changes is
one of the things that make painting both
frustrating and rewarding.
Fire Plug - Oakland Naval Supply Depot
Oakland, CA, 1992
Oil on linen. 4½" x 7½"
Recalling the old adage “It’s not what
you paint, but how you paint it,” makes
some choices simpler for me - like what
and where to paint. I can plunk myself
down in a comfortable place (usually) and
whack away until something emerges that
works (or not). If the latter, I take it back
to the bedroom, where I keep an easel for
the purpose, and live with it until I figure
something out.
Port-a-Potty
Loveland, CO, 2000
Oil on canvas. 7½" x 10"
The idea of painting as a challenge was
ingrained in me by one of my plein air
painting mentors, Paul Bridenbaugh,
who was so leery of a painting that was
going easily that he would wipe it out
(sometimes repeatedly) and make sure
he started over in a way that made it
more difficult. Another example is Wolf
Kahn, who is said to welcome a bad start
on a painting, saying that it gives him
something to look forward to.1
Dawn from Merchant Island
Stonington, ME 1997
Oil on linen. 6" x 10"
Sunflowers
Livermore, CO, 2009
Spring Garden
Fort Collins, CO, 2003
Oil and pencil on museum board. 4½" x 7½"
This typical experience of getting buried
in the middle of a painting and having
to dig my way out has led me to think
of successful composition as a malleable
thing, frequently susceptible to quite
subtle changes of value, color, line, edge
and texture. That a painting may seem to
23
Mrs. Murray’s Wall
New Haven, CT, 2000
Oil on canvas. 7½" x 10"
Shown here are some examples of
somewhat unconventional compositions
that I think have worked.
1
Sawin, Marticia Wolf Kahn Landscape Painter
New York, 1981, p. 36
Wal,—I jist got tired of openin’ gates!
24
FENCES, GATES
& CATTLE GUARDS
Fences, gates and cattle guards have
played a big role in my life. At times it has
felt like I have done little else but build
and fix fences and open and close gates
without end. The ranch that I managed
back in the 80s had something over 100
miles of barbed wire fences.
Starting to Snow
Livermore, CO, 2000
Oil and pencil on carton. 7½" x 10"
“Bob” wire revolutionized the range livestock industry in the west as soon as it was
introduced in the 1880s. As opposed to
previous methods (stone, split rail, buck,
etc.) barbed wire fences were cheap and
quick to construct, resulting in the rapid
enclosure of much of the west in fenced
pastures. Barbed wire is “quick and easy”
only in a relative sense. In reality it is
The New Line Brace
Livermore, CO, 1994
Oil on carton. 5" x 11½"
nasty, snagledy stuff with a perverse mind
of its own, and dealing with it on a ranch
ranks near the bottom of the job list.
Most ranch gates are not the kind that
swing on hinges but are floppy, awkward
things made of barbed wire and wooden
sticks stretched across an opening in the
fence line. There is a cowboy machismo
associated with how tight this ungainly
contraption can be made and still be
opened by a mere mortal. To open or
close one of these you have to stretch it
even tighter to unlatch (or latch) it by
putting your shoulder against its end
stick and pulling it with one hand toward
the fence post to which it is hooked by
a loop of barbed wire while trying to lift
the wire loop with the other hand - a
cause of bruised shoulders and short
tempers. Closing one of these infernal
devices is often even more frustrating than
opening it.
If someone can be induced to ride
“shotgun” to open and close gates, much
of the tedium of getting to a remote
pasture and back can be alleviated. If your
shotgun victim is a tenderfoot there is
even the possibility for some amusement.
One of a cowboy’s favorite shadenfreude
moments is watching in the rear-view
mirror for the perplexed expression of
a dude upon whom is just dawning the
realization that, though he has finally
managed at last to get the damned thing
closed, he has latched himself on the
wrong side of the gate.
Cattle guards were invented to
relieve the exasperation1 of opening
and closing gates. Usually cattle
guards are constructed by digging a
shallow pit, the width of the road and
about eight feet across, and covering
it with a dozen or so parallel wood or
metal rails set a few inches
25
Cattle Guard I
Livermore, CO, 2000
Oil and pencil on carton. 7½" x 13"
apart, perpendicular to vehicle traffic.
Sometimes a cattle guard is just a series
of white lines painted across the highway
pavement.
The principle of the cattle guard is
based on the optical physiology of the
cow. A cow’s eyes are spaced far apart in
order to give her a wide angle view of her
surroundings - the better to detect any
movement that might betray a predator.
The downside to this arrangement for the
cow is that she can’t bring both eyes to
bear on the same thing at once, in other
words, cows don’t have stereoscopic vision
like we do. This means that cows are very
Widow’s Corral Cattle Guard
Livermore, CO, 1992 (private collection)
poor judges of depth and
distance. The pattern of
alternating dark and light
bars of a cattle guard presents such an unfathomable
hazard to a cow that she
won’t try to cross it. Of
course there are the exceptions, known as “jumpers”
- the occasional cow that has
become adept at the bovine
standing broad jump in her
unending quest for greener grass on the
other side…
1
Stopping at the gate, getting out of the pickup,
opening the gate (while uttering profane oaths),
getting back in the pickup, driving through the gate,
stopping, getting out of the pickup, closing the gate
(more profanity), getting back in the pickup, driving to
the next gate… ad infinitum.
2
Since the great majority of breeding cattle on ranches
are female (15-20 cows to one bull), the term “cow,”
even when applied in the unisex sense, is referred to
using the feminine.
ABOUT THE COMICS (opposite page):
Cow Pokes by Ace Reid reproduced with permission
of Ace Reid Enterprises, Kerrville, Texas.
Ace Reid (1925-1991), born and raised on a west
Texas ranch, remains the cowboy cartoonist. At the
height of his career his cartoons were syndicated
in 400 newspapers. See more of Ace’s work at:
www.cowpokes.com
The Tenderfoot was drawn by Nina Judson, my
daughter, who grew up on our ranch. See Nina’s other
work at: www.ninaruchibis.blogspot.com
Landscape with Forklifts
Paul Bridenbaugh, 1992 (private collection)
Oil on linen. 20” x 30”
26
PAINTING BUDDY
In the early 90s, the ranch I had
been managing sold. At the same time
a friend of mine in San Francisco took
a job teaching English in Mexico and
needed someone to defend his cheap rent
controlled apartment against a conniving
landlord. As a result of this happy
coincidence, I spent the better part of two
years painting in the Bay area. Shortly
after I arrived, I was introduced to a young
painter named Paul Bridenbaugh.
At that time Paul, about 30, was fresh
from New York, where he had earned
an MFA in painting from Columbia
University and worked as an assistant for
established New York artists Jack Levine,
Nam June Paik, Paul Resika and Sidney
Simon.
Paul was an avid plein air painter, bright
and articulate with strong connections in
the contemporary art scene and a terrific
understanding of art history. Paul knew
other artists, the museums, galleries and
gallery owners. He taught part-time at
a community college and ran a small
framing business on the side. He was
looking for a painting buddy…
Paul knew San Francisco well and we
painted in all sorts of interesting and
out-of-the-way places. It was fascinating to
watch him paint. He would achieve what
seemed to me to be stunning and subtle
effects and then suddenly out would
come the paper towels and he would wipe
away what he had just done. He was very
distrustful when a painting went too easily.
Paul was a straightforward, matter of fact
painter who eschewed bravura effects and
other painterly tricks of the trade.
Under Paul’s tutelage and by benefit
of his connections I was introduced to a
broad range of influences that I would
otherwise not have stumbled across. My
painting improved rapidly, and I came to
appreciate the context of plein air painting
in the development of modern art.
Here are five paintings that Paul painted
during the time I was painting with him.
101-280
West Oakland
This is a view (above) of the Oakland
Container Terminal from Treasure Island
in the center of San Francisco Bay. The
shadows in the foreground are cast by
the Bay Bridge just above where we were
painting.
India Basin (below left), 101-280
(US101 and I-280 interchange, above)
and Candlestick (below, the lights of
Candlestick Park can be seen in the upper
left corner) were all painted from Bernal
Heights.
Candlestick
India Basin
Landscape with Forklifts (opposite page)
was painted at Hunter’s Point.
27
Nearly 20 years later, here is a comment
from Paul:
“My primary interest with these early
industrial landscape paintings developed from
a complete fascination I had with the
phenomenal array of shapes and colors in the
world and how they coalesce into sensations
of forms. I remember really learning to see
things as if a tapestry of shapes that could be
taken apart and put back together to make
complex patterns. There was an exploration of
a different kind of ‘direct seeing’ than I had
known before, and was very exciting. Actually,
the subject matter was kind of secondary,
with industrial scenes being something I
had everyday access to, and seemed to be a
more honest and direct way of working with
landscape imagery without using forms that
seemed contrived. Painting landscapes had a lot
to do with not having enough money to be able
to rent a studio as anything else. I could paint
outside which worked out fine. After I was able
to rent a painting studio several years later, my
work started to shift in other directions.
From an outside view, there has been a
gradual development, over a period of many
years, toward a more abstract kind of imagery,
and my paintings these days are obviously
not describing what things look like in the
world. They are coming more from an intuitive
discovery of form, combined with a lesser
amount of visual referencing of the ‘outside
world’. The referencing that is there, comes
more from graphic forms like signs and art,
graffiti, printed matter, billboards, schematic
diagrams, things like that, so in that sense, they
are no longer pictorial.”
To see examples of Paul’s more recent
work visit www.paulbridenbaugh.com
Larkspur (Delphinum alpestre)
Livermore, CO 2010
Oil on museum board. 4" x 6" (shown full size)
28
WILDFLOWER RIG
Every year I tell myself this is the year I’m
going to paint all the different wildflowers
on the ranch as they come out. And each
year I don’t get it done - not even close.
However, this last year (2010) I made a
dent.
The trick was my new “wildflower rig”
consisting of a 5” x 7” pochade box, a
low-slung beach chair with an umbrella
clamped to it. In the evenings after work,
I’d grab my rig and head for the latest
bloom.
For small prairie flowers I’d get my chair
set so the flower would be right between
my feet and my umbrella adjusted to keep
the sun out of my eyes and off my painting
while leaving the flowers in the sun.
The seat of the beach chair is just inches
off the ground, so I can really get down at
flower level. Being so close to the ground
also allows me to spread other junk around
within easy reach. For an old geezer, getting
in and out of the beach chair is enough of a
production that I want to make sure I have
everything I need right at hand the first
time.
Normally I don’t mess with umbrellas,
contenting myself with finding a nice
comfortable shady spot and then deciding
what to paint. But it’s different with a
specific subject, especially one that prefers
full sun.
I used 5” x 7” museum board primed
with gray acrylic gesso. As with most of my
paintings, I left a half inch border for notes,
so the images are 4” x 6”.
In our arid climate, wildflower plants
are extremely sensitive to slight variations
in moisture and temperature (especially in
winter, our driest season), so which species
bloom and their quantity can vary widely
from year to year.
I usually don’t notice Longflower
Beeblossom (below). This delicate little wild
flower is sometimes erroneously referred to
as “Apple Blossom Grass”, a plant of the
same family (Gaura), but a native of Texas
and larger (of course).
Penstemon (Penstemon strictus) &
Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis)
Livermore, CO, 2010
The tops of these Yucca Blossom stalks
(below) have been eaten off. The blooms
that survive the deer will make seed pods
around the end of June. The grass heads
sticking up above the skyline are Needle
and Thread Grass, named after their super
sharp seeds with long thread-like tails.
Sego Lily (Calochortus nuttalli)
Livermore, CO, 2010
I’ve never seen Sego Lilies, the Utah
State Flower, (above) growing in profusion
but they pop up here and there most years
around the 4th of July. The grass heads are
Crested Wheat Grass, a very drought tolerant cool season grass.
Our Rocky Mountain Penstemon (above
right) is a reliable presence year in and year
out. Here it is growing in the shade along
our driveway, intermingled with Yellow
Sweet Clover, a biennial legume.
29
Yucca Blossoms (Yucca glauca)
Livermore, CO, 2010
Longflower Beeblossom (Gaura longiflora)
Livermore, CO 2011
Larkspur (opposite page), one of the
first plants to green up in the spring, is
poisonous to cattle. After a light spring
snow when the young larkspur foliage
may be the only green sticking up above
the snow is when it is at its worst. If the
cattle are calm, they can metabolize some
larkspur, but since it affects their respiratory
system, any sudden activity can cause
collapse followed by death within an hour.
By the time larkspur puts out its
spectacular blooms in June, most of the
danger is past. The tan grass heads shown
against the background trees are those of
Smooth Brome Grass, the major grass in
our irrigated hay meadows.
Rabbit Creek Canyon (1 of 24)
Livermore Valley, CO, 2010
Oil on canvas. 7½" x 13”
PANORAMA
LIVERMORE, CO 2010
OIL ON CANVAS. 7½” X 312” (24 PANELS)
I think of this 24 panel panorama as the
inevitable consequence of my increasing use
of multiple panels to contain the subject
matter of my painting.
In the summer of 2010, I made a halting
start with a couple of dry runs before I
found my footing, and six weeks later I
had a panorama measuring 7½” x 312”
(26 feet). It depicts a 360º view of the
Livermore Valley from the hill behind our
ranch house.
It was unusually impulsive for me to
launch the undertaking without any
planning and little thought. Several panels
into the project, I realized that I had not
Spring Hill (13 of 24)
Calloway Hill (2 of 24)
South 40 (3 of 24)
even been using my viewfinder (an old
standby) and it was not until the last
(northwest) quadrant that I had any firm
idea of, or really thought about, how many
panels it would take to close the circle. I
was a little surprised when it turned out to
be a neat 24, not 23½ or 25.
I started with a view of Livermore
Mountain to the south and then added
panels going erratically in both directions
around the circle. The Livermore Valley is a
basin in the Front Range foothills that lies
on the juncture between the Precambrian
granites to the west and south and the
Fountain, Lyons and Dakota sediments
to the east and north. The valley is cut
through by the North Fork of the Cache
la Poudre River flowing south and fed by
its tributaries: Lone Pine Creek, Rabbit
Creek and Stonewall Creek, all of which
The Zimmerman Place (14 of 24)
supply the valley with irrigation water for
hay meadows. The uplifting of the granites
has left a confused array of bent and twisted
red sandstone that were erroded from the
ancestral Rockies, and grey limestone beds
that were once at the edge of a shallow sea.
Almost every evening after work from
the end of July to the middle of September
found me on the hill above our ranch
house. I have never been keener to get out
and paint day after day. The late afternoon
light remained pretty consistent, but the
shadows changed noticeably as the angle of
the sun moved with summer fading towards
fall, and some of the colors changed as
the late summer drought bleached the last
green out of the prairie grasses, leaving a
contrast with the jade greens of the irrigated
meadows that dot the valley. Late summer
here is a time when the sky generally has
Colorado Lien (15 of 24)
30
Phantom Canyon (4 of 24)
few clouds in the west but with thunder
storms building up in the east.
I focused on the light and land forms,
using rough washes of land colors to
approximate the sky and cloud formations.
After closing the circle of land, I went back
to unify the sky, building on the abstract
patterns suggested by my sky washes and
adding features from memory – including
a bolt of lightning over the prairies in the
east. The developing panorama continued
through most of two lunar cycles and
includes the rise of a full moon.
Until this panorama, I was used to doing
small paintings on one or more panels and
then making adjustments in my studio.
Although I would set up my panorama
panels in progress on the easel in our
bedroom to study as usual, I developed an
aversion to making any adjustments except
Moonrise (16 of 24)
Livermore Main (5 of 24)
Barlow Hill (6 of 24)
on location up on the hill. This was not a
product of conscious consideration, just a
strong gut reaction that I can’t explain or
justify, but very much in keeping with the
intuitive engagement I was experiencing.
It wasn’t that I needed the reference
or that I didn’t already have a plan for
what adjustments I wanted to make, it
was just that I didn’t have any interest in
doing anything to the paintings except on
location. Rainy or overcast evenings would
find me (on the top of the hill) working on
the paintings in my car.
I found myself working on several
panels at a time. For that, I cobbled up an
extension easel for my pochade box that I
could pin in place with a couple of nails so
that I could line up two or three panels side
by side. A new tool that I came to depend
on was a small torpedo level that I used to
Derek’s Place (17 of 24)
Ferree Meadow (7 of 24)
help keep my horizon line straight.
The panels are a polyester/cotton canvas
mounted on 4-ply museum board. The size
of each panel is 8½” x 14”. As with almost
all of my paintings, I left a ½” border for
notes, leaving an image size of 7½” x 13”.
A problem I haven’t solved yet is how to
display a 26 foot long panorama. One idea
I am toying with is to remodel one of our
old-fashioned round metal grain bins as a
gallery so that the panels can be arranged in
a circle…we’ll see.
NOTES:
Panel 1 - Looking west to where Rabbit
Creek flows out of a notch in the Laramie
Mountains. The point of its confluence
with the North Fork of the Cache la Poudre
River can be seen at the far right edge of
Panel 2 where the trees are.
Eagle’s Nest (18 of 24)
Panel 2 - Calloway Hill is named for
William Calloway, a mountain man, who
settled in the valley after roaming the west.
In the early 1860s he hunted game in the
Livermore area to supply meat to the gold
camps west of Denver.
Panel 3 - The South 40 is one of the
valley’s irrigated meadows. It lies along the
edge of the North Fork. You can see hay
bales in the field.
Panel 4 - This shows the mouth of
Phantom Canyon, a seven mile long canyon
through which the North Fork flows.
Panel 5 - The row of trees in the distance
marks the Livermore Main, a major canal
constructed in the late 1870s, which carries
irrigation water from the North Fork east to
farms on the plains.
Panel 6 - Barlow Hill is named for one
of the early families who settled in the area.
Bonner Peak (19 of 24)
31
Steamboat Rock (8 of 24)
Grayback Rid
Livermore Val
Oil on canvas
The large grove of cottonwood trees in
Panel 8 was planted by the Barlows along
the banks of Stonewall Creek about 1900.
Panel 7 - The Ferree Meadow is irrigated
by water from the Livermore Main. The
Ferree family ranched here from 1948 to
1981.
Panel 8 - The red sandstone formation,
Steamboat Rock, was a landmark on the
Overland Trail. Indian trouble during
the construction of the Transcontinental
Railroad forced temporary abandonment
of part of the Oregon Trail, farther north
in Wyoming, and for some time the
Overland Trail was “bumper to bumper”
with re-routed covered wagon traffic headed
for Utah, California and Oregon. The
Overland Trail remained a local wagon
road through the end of the 19th Century
and now marks the route of US287 from
Buffalo Jump (20 of 24)
LaPort
Pan
lightni
would
Cheyen
Pan
called
the fem
Tit,” in
madam
Pan
early ra
diagon
Pan
quarry
Pan
Spring
are pro
ministe
the inf
Livermore M
Livermore Va
Oil on canvas
rayback Ridge (9 of 24)
vermore Valley, CO, 2010
il on canvas. 7½" x 13”
Prairie Thunderstorm (10 of 24)
LaPorte, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming.
Panel 10 - The location of the the
lightning bolt in the thunderstorm
would be somewhere to the southeast of
Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Panels 11 & 12 - This formation is now
called Deadman Butte. Before the dawn of
the feminist era, it was known as “Maggie’s
Tit,” in honor of area ranch hands’ favorite
madam.
Panel 14 - The Zimmermans were an
early ranch family in the area. US 287 cuts
diagonally across the panel.
Panel 15 - Colorado Lein is a limestone
quarry barely visible on the horizon line.
Panel 19 - Bonner Peak and Bonner
Springs, a stage station at its eastern base,
are probably named for a Dr. Bonner who
ministered to the wounds of at least one of
the infamous outlaws who frequented the
ivermore Mountain (21 of 24)
ivermore Valley, CO, 2010
Deadman Butte A (11 of 24)
Deadman Butte B (12 of 24)
area in the 1860s.
Panel 20 - The red sandstone cliff
overlooking the North Fork was a “buffalo
jump” where pre-horse Indians drove
panicked buffalo to their deaths 60 feet
below. This is the same buffalo jump
featured in James Mitchner’s Centennial.
Panel 22 - On the distant horizon lie
the peaks of the Mummy Range in Rocky
Mountain National Park (devoid of snow in
late summer).
Panel 23 - Like Rabbit Creek, Lone Pine
Creek flows out of the Laramie Mountains,
providing irrigation water for the meadows
that line its banks. Its confluence with the
North Fork can be seen at the lower left
corner of Panel 22.
Mummy Range (22 of 24)
Lone Pine (23 of 24)
32
Al’s Place (24 of 24)
- THANKS I want to express my appreciation to all those who helped make this Guerrilla Painter’s Notebook series
possible. First and foremost there are my wife, Sarah, for her generous support and cheerful editing,
and Alicia Davies, a real “crackerjack,” for her skill, enthusiasm and tireless efforts to produce these
documents and arrange their publications. To John and Judith Mattingly for their careful reading and
useful comments. Also to Emma Gross, Nancy Harcourt, and Monica Esposito who, over the years, have
pushed, prodded and otherwise encouraged me to begin putting my disparate essays together in book
form. To my daughters Meredith and Nina and to my first wife, Jeanne, who gave me space to pursue
painting from the beginning.
Among all the painters who have given me good company and thoughtful input over the years, I
particularly want to mention my son, Arthur, along with Chester Arnold, Deborah Bertola, Jim Biggers,
Paul Bridenbaugh, Jane Clark, Dawn Cohen, Doug Erion, Barb Haney, Shaun Horne, Linda Larson,
Christy Martell, Catherine Moreno, Daphne Murray, and Mary White.
Others who have given me much appreciated support and encouragement include Douglas Adams
(deceased), Charles Campbell and the staff of the former Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery in
San Francisco, Lisa Chadwick and the staff of the Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco,
Dr. Mariano Morales Dávila and the Municipality of Cochabamba (Bolivia), Stuart and Beverly
Dennenberg at Dennenberg Fine Arts in West Hollywood (formerly San Francisco), Mark Gottsegen,
Ross Merrill (deceased) and Steve Sears (deceased).
And lastly, my gratitude to all those who responded to the first volume of A Guerrilla Painter’s Notebook
with their generous comments.
For more information, please visit:
www.CarlJudson.com

by Carl Judson unless otherwise noted.

Transcription

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