10/7/97 ...Landscapes

Gunning season is upon us here in the boonies, and the banging of small arms shakes the air. This month it’s ducks. Dawn and dusk sailing becomes a military exercise. The bay reeds are full of gunning floats and skulking figure in cammy. Next month it’s deer, and the dogs are kept close to the house. The sports take over the out of doors. There’s a flicker of dayglow orange out on the perimeter. Blamblablam.

Who am I to complain? I’ve been out stalking the scenery with my hunting kit for more than a year now. Trying to bag the perfect landscape. “Sketch hunting.” That’s what Robert Henri called it. Going out to capture images that offer themselves to us. Like jacking deer. We put our lights on them and the startled prey freeze. Wait to be taken.

The art chase is more intense this week, as the woods are in riot: exploding in color after the first frosts. Friday night our squashes were touched, their broad green leaves collapsed into brown shrivels. The frost is on the pumpkin. And the hardwoods in flame. I feel compelled to corner a bit of the brief display each day. Get it down quick.

This annual Fauve exhibition startles us into awareness. The scrolling scenery we habitually ignore jumps out in iridescent dazzles, or entices our eyes with a crazyquilt of mutating colors. The mix of speciation is color-coded for our enlightenment. The subtle purplebrown ashes are my current favorites. I hadn’t realized how many there are hereabout. And all the stages of maple transformation, from rich yellow-green through orangy-yellow to brilliant scarlet, are a treat for the eye, and a challenge for wet-in-wet wizardry.

We were in the high West this time last year, and are grateful that Maine is putting on a particularly exuberant show this fall to make up for missed color therapy. It’s been a remarkable leafing season all round. Wet spring, hot dry summer turning damp in September, and now this bask of Indian Summer after a frost. The grass is jumping again. A mixed up year in the garden, with broccoli early and late, gobs of salad, lots of peppers (which we never get), but few spuds, no dill and hardly any beans, until now. Now all the given-up-for-lost causes are rushing to bear fruit. And the fruits of the field and woods are rank. Apples everywhere. You need to wear a hardhat under the oaks. I took the dogs out into the swamp last week to eyeball the early colors, and the grasses and shrubs were so thick it took me an hour to bushwhack to the riverside. Luxuriant effusions everywhere. Everything is nesting high. The fuzzybears have thick coats. Looks like deep snow this winter, my plowman tells me with a broad grin.

And yes, the fall scurry begins. That nip in the air hounds you into neglected chores. Firewood and furnace filters, stripping and bedding, trying to find the boat trailer in the puckerbrush. But I’m still entranced by this hand-eye ritual, and am likely to wander off with my artkit over my shoulder, when herbs need harvesting, or some such. And I’m beginning to wonder just what’s so enticing about the local scenes I’m busy recording. What is it about LANDSCAPE that wants to be painted?

At this point I’ve done 70-80 of these local cartoonscapes. Pen and ink sketches with watercolor washes. Enough so I can see patterns developing. I’m amused to notice that they have the same whimsical quality as my carvings. Even as a novice in this medium a distinct style carries over. So style, the expression of personality, doesn’t depend on technical mastery. Lucky thing, as the technique is to make you weep. I’ve got a long way to go with watercolors.

But they work. Enough so you can see through the surface to the subjects. And they are what puzzle me. Why this angle? Why that view? Although artmaking can suffer from too much self-analysis, I have to wonder what’s going on here.

Initially I thought I was just continuing the road ritual. A painting a day to record a passage, to capture a sense of place, to illustrate a journal. I would record Bowdoinham. The forces of progress seem to be busily deconstructing this small town, and I wanted to catch a few fleeting views before it was all improved. My first hometown scene was down at the town landing, and they were clear-cutting the trees while I was hurriedly slapping on colors. So this was some sort of historicizing.

Do we make the flow of events HISTORY by documenting incidents? Already I have conjured a contemporary “History of Bowdoinham” in these cartoons. I generally lug a stack of them around in my kit, let kibitzers shuffle the deck, and smooze. The locals tell me tales to go with the views. They see the pictures as memorials.. or memories. Pieces of the local story. About planting wild rice in the bay, or that car falling on Danny. These are illustrations to a local yarn. Is that how we see the landscape?

As usual, I’ve gone to the library to find pieces of the puzzle, or new ways to look at it. It’s taken me three tries to get my nose into LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY by Simon Schama, a much touted (and little read) opus, but my current need has finally cracked the codex. Schama contends that we can’t see landscape without all the cultural (and/or psychological) connotations we bring to it. Our memories. Personal and cultural. The forest isn’t just trees. While a few of my artist friends obviously are examining the trees.. composition and technique, the painterly effects.. in these toons (and making me very nervous), everyone else is looking at the subjects portrayed. And they are seeing THEIR forest. Even the naive kid looking over my shoulder wants to tell me “that’s MY church.” So we see through representational images to our memories beyond? My local sample would confirm that hypothesis.

But I don’t know these stories, or many of them, so why do I pick the scenes I do? Certainly there is a narrative impetus. It runs through all my work. I learned to ask “what’s the story” at my father’s knee. So the storyteller/journalist is always whispering in my ear when I’m sketch hunting. Some subjects simply beg to tell you about something. You know there’s a story here. And generally it’s about the doings of men. We shape the world in our passing, and the twist is telling. That bit of old fence, a piece of farm machinery, the pentimenti of an old sign on the wall.

I find the manscape irresistible. In fact I’m hard put to draw “scenery” without some human artifact in the frame. The woods alone bore me. Give me a skidder and some stumps. The trick this week is to find man-scenes.. humanated foregrounds.. with all that color behind them. People’s houses generally don’t grab me either, despite their humanity. (Which is too bad, as I’ve had numerous requests to paint them.) A house has to have some elusive quality to draw my eye. Something beyond its domesticity. I find public buildings more enticing, more laden with communal memory, perhaps. But what that secret ingredient is, which compels me to record THIS view, remains undefined.

Yesterday morning I waited until the gunfire slackened and the sun was high before venturing onto the bay. Indian Summer drifted in with the new moon, and I’ve promised myself to carpe diem in the boating department. Make sawdust in the cool of the day. Now the temperature is in the 70s, only the slightest breeze, so I take my kit, and the dogs, a thermos of tea, and a wide eye down to Jimmy’s dock.

Bagel is losing the use of his hindquarters, but he’s heartbroken when not invited, so I have to lift and carry him aboard now. He can’t balance himself to walk fore and aft, and is deaf to the point of frustration. Getting him and CC across the rafted fleet and into our tipsy skiff at Jimmy’s is a comedy of errors, and Jimmy comes down onto the float for the entertainment. It’s good to have a social role.

The river trees have gone into color since the last time I was out, and the question once again is: which view to paint? I cast the mooring and run downriver with the tide, at half throttle. Like a movie zooming back, I feel my peripheral vision widen out, colors quivering at the edges. Mmmmm. I hunger for those saturated reds and yellows, but it’s mostly motley. There’s no one cluster of trees that says “Me, me.” I can’t simply pick a patch of nature and say, “Here.”

The river and bay are a continuing challenge. The scene is a channel between woodland walls that opens onto thin-stretched horizontals. Flat expanses of marsh grasses with a treeline on the horizon. At low tide, like now, even the trees are hidden behind the reeds. We found the high prairie too intimidating to record, precisely because of this vertical compression. I’m in awe of Karl Bodmer, who caught the horizontal so effortlessly. I seem to need massive subjects in the foreground before I can deal with far sightedness. The toons I’ve done of bay and river all have boats or buildings in them.

Today I’m breathless with the view, and can’t find a handle to grab it with. The hardwoods make ribbons of brilliance way off over the marshes and fields. A flock of grackles expands and wheels, pours into the woods. Herons leapfrog along our way. A seal hunches over and submerges. Big tide, and the herons are standing on the sand bars, marking the channel in the wide expanse of blue-brown water. It’s thrilling and exasperating, this soaking up color and not having a bucket to squeeze it into.

I’d like to tell the bay, but the details are too fine, too dispersed, too flat. We motor all the way to Chops, and pass into the lower Kennebec. There are some rocky islets I’d like to draw down here, but when they come in sight there isn’t a touch of color on them.. except green. So I come about, and throttle down, hanging in the tide.

Well, there is Chops Point itself. The trees are in turn, if not super-saturated, there’s the school building on the shore (Chops Point is a self-contained Christian Community), and the soaring power pylon standing high above. If I can find an angle that shows the cross bars of the tower and lets us look around the point and across the bay... I’m circling sharpie, shifting the dogs, rousting out the anchor, judging drift. Splash..there. It fetches up. Let out some slack. Secure the rode. It’s time to paint.

Composition isn’t a primary motivation, at least consciously. I’m not out Cezanning the scene. The sequence seems to be find the subject, the angle, then juggle framing and composition. When I look at a painting afterwards, the composition may speak to me formally.. was that what drew me to this subject? Or was that serendipitous? Or an intuitive sense of composition at play around a chosen subject? I can’t say. At the instant when I begin a drawing I’m too intent to sit in the observer’s seat. This one has the looming vertical pylon pulling against the horizontal bay. Was that the intent?

Once again I’m surprised at the intensity of colors in what I’d thought was a rather bland display. The more I look at them, the more dramatic the color shifts are along this bit of shore. Henri says the purpose of painting is NOT to make pictures. The intent is to enter an altered state of intense awareness, the attainment of a state of being, he says, in which condition we create things which echo that state. It’s art because it partakes of, and conveys, a deeper seeing. Certainly the ardent attention we lavish on a subject while painting it makes it luminous for us, if not numinous. Just look at those oranges against the ash. Do we find the transcendent in the subject? Or awaken transcendence with our intent? Or find the other in ourselves, and let it out in the confines of our creations? Well, maybe. I’m not sure I can see Henri’s otherness in the landscape, yet. Maybe if I stopped drawing power poles and fire hydrants..?

I’m certainly not seeking a perfect rendering, even of this pylon. I hear some painters say they want to paint only what’s in the frame.. but everything in the frame.. while others accuse them of being perverse in their inclusiveness, not chucking out the irrelevant... phone poles, power lines.. etc. I sometimes think phone poles are the subject in my paintings. I love’em. The built landscape is part of the story.. if not part of the picture. I’m not above pulling elements into the frame to compose the tale, either. Stretching or squashing the world to fit my frame. We put together what we see in our heads anyway, don’t we? Whole images out of fleeting glimpses. Only the eight-year-olds say, “Gee, Mister, you got that bit wrong.” We seem to lose our literal mindedness about what we see as we get older. I edit out one clump of trees at Chops Point, so there’s room for a glimpse of the bay.

Where is the frame, anyhow? That’s a defining difference between sculpture and landscape for me. Sculpture has an edge. The landscape is unbounded. Any framing is arbitrary. And memory is not a camera. We pan and stare, focus in and out, and remember a composite image, or the telling fragments. At least I do. What’s fun about the other guy’s painting is that we get to see how HE sees the world. What are the significant forms for him. How does he frame the view?

The kids have come out onto the balcony of the schoolhouse, and are waving and yoohooing me. Weird old guy with a couple of yellow dogs anchored in the tiderace.. the water now rollicking in standing waves as the flood rises. Their teacher comes out, “You must have a pretty good anchor,” he shouts.

“Hope I can break it out,” I socialize. Sharpie is rocking merrily, and I hadn’t even noticed, just jabbing away with my daubs in time to the rhythm.

The effects of light? The interplay of color.. out there, or on the paper? Are they motives? They’re beyond my mastery, if not my ken. I’m just learning to see them, let alone manipulate their semblance. I see forms and contours. I’m told you can’t perceive forms without seeing the play of light. OK. Except my view of things in the world is tactile. I feel their mass before I notice their color. Do my paintings reflect this bias toward the tangible? Is my stuff thingyer? Less impressionistic? Is my craving for that hard black inkline the urge to separate stuff into lumps? Probably.

Certainly I’m shaping the objects on the page. Lining their contours. But that’s all craft. Color and line.. methods for creating an illusion. An illusion of place. First you have to see the place, then find the ingredients that can convey what you see. So you need a vision before you can apply what craft you’ve mastered. So Henri tells us. But I’m having trouble identifying my vision, before or after the fact. What is it I’m seeing in these local scenes? Maybe I’ll just have to keep painting until I figure out what it is I’m seeing. I usually get this art stuff backwards. That’s enough on this toonscape. I stow the kit.

The anchor breaks out easily, and we backslide through Chops into the bay. Still not enough wind to sail home, so I crank the 10 horse breeze, and idle back to Bowdoinham. Another daytoon in the bag, and still uncertain what I’m doing.

Any answers out there?