Watercolor and Gouache. 2018 - 2019
EARLY PAINTINGS
The impetus for this project began over a decade ago. I wanted re-examine painting after a long spell as a sculptor. My first forays into this were the Late Woodland period effigy mounds on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in Northeast Iowa. I visualized overlapping and reconfiguring the geometry of these Pre-historic bear and bird shaped forms to produce geometric abstractions. My hope was that these paintings might produce a vocabulary of contemporary pictographs that would evoke a sense of archeological, kinesthetic memory and place.
I produced these early paintings at an easel in oil. In addition to the effigy mounds, I also worked from the petroglyphs at Lava Beds National Monument in California and the bison, horse, and reindeer forms I had sketched in the Paleolithic caves at Font de Gaume in France. Later, I began experimenting with watercolor and gouache to produce geometric abstractions of the petroglyphs at Grimes Point Archeological Area in Northern Nevada.
ROAD TRIP
Kathy and I planned a big 2018 road trip. The primary landmarks for this trip would be a backpack into the cliff dwellings at Keet Seel and a search for pottery at the Hopi Mesas in Northern Arizona, a search for Kathy's family history in Silver City, New Mexico, and culminating at the geo-glyphs at the Blythe Intaglios on the California side of the Colorado River. The Blythe Intaglios are giant human and animal figures etched into the desert surface. In my 20's, I had seen a picture in a book somewhere. So, even though I had grown up in Southern California and been aware of the Intaglios my entire adult life, I had never visited them. The Intaglios became a priority and I knew before ever visiting the site that they would become the source for my next big project.
We had already done a lot by the time we got to Blythe. The 8.5-mile one-way backpack into Keet Seel was intense in 103-degree heat. To exacerbate this, there is no potable water so I was carrying 3.5 gallons in my pack and Kathy was carrying 1.5 gallons in hers. The Hopi Mesas were profoundly moving but it can be emotional navigating the hospitality of a community living so close to the socio-economic edge no matter how resilient and welcoming. We subjected our poor car to the horrible, rocky 17-mile road into Chaco Canyon. And it was a long drive from Silver City, New Mexico to Blythe, California.
THE INTAGLIOS
We arrived in Blythe in the early evening and found our hotel surprisingly modern and comfortable. Yet there was plenty of light left to make our first search for the Intaglios. As we left town, I noted the lush green of the irrigated agriculture. I learned later that there is a controversy in Blythe because Saudi Arabia has purchased agricultural land with historic water rights. The Intaglios are approximately 15 miles north of Blythe between the Big Maria Mts. and the Colorado River. The Intaglios are in three separate groupings perched on barren, hilly plateaus surrounded by broad plains of desert scrub. They were within an easy hike of each other and easy to locate largely because the BLM had to protect them with chain-link fence from being vandalized by off-road vehicles. However this took nothing away from their enormity or presence. They are too big to fully comprehend from the ground and in fact were only discovered in 1932 when a pilot flew over. We walked around the three units and took photographs as the gorgeous, dusky sky turned towards night over the Colorado River.
We returned to the Intaglios the next morning and the change in the hues of the landscape could not have been more striking. What had been charcoal, rust, sage greens and lavender the previous evening was now glaring, blanched beige, yellowish olive and robins-egg blue. We took more photographs and then headed north on U.S. highway 95 along the Colorado River between Blythe and Needles. I got what I needed for my painting project and the fact that we had visited the Intaglios made the aerial photographs fair game to work from.
BACK IN THE STUDIO
We drove home to our house in Reno that same day. We talked our way out of a ticket in Tonopah, narrowly averted an accident in Yerington and dropped into Reno as the lights of the downtown casinos were coming on.
Once I settled back into the studio, I began really looking at the Intaglios and made my first thumbnail designs for paintings in a graph journal with ballpoint pen. I immediately discovered that it was not going to be easy. In fact, my early attempts were so unusable I wondered if my idea was going to work at all. I spent three or four days staring at aerial photos of the human figures with their long, slender, gangly arms and legs. Gradually, I started to identify isolated shapes I thought I could use and made multiple small adjustments in the line or arrangements of darks and lights. At a point, the tiny adjustments became meaningless and I realized it was time to start a painting.
GOUACHE AND SPACE
In my earlier paintings, I had begun experimenting with an additional passage of geometry in gouache, an opaque watercolor. My friend Phyllis Shafer was doing some really lovely plein-air landscapes in gouache and between these and Picasso's allegorical paintings in the medium; I was inspired to explore it.
I was committed to using the gouache technique on the Blythe paintings. However I was not as certain I wanted to use the shapes from the Intaglios to accomplish this. At one point I considered the straight lines of the chain-link fence. I suppose someone would regard this as anthropological but it did not seem to evoke the spirit I hoped.
Then one day I was perusing the NASA website. I had long been enchanted with the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity and sometimes printed out the panoramas with their graphic, jagged black border. On the day mentioned, I stumbled upon the pages of traverse maps. Layered over aerial photos of Mars topography was a network of lines and angles that indicated the Rover's path. To me they immediately looked like modern pictographs. I knew I was stretching but it was not difficult to construct a narrative logic for their inclusion with the Intaglios. Both the Intaglios and the traverse maps are viewed from above in mid air. The entire proposition seemed like a rare, intrinsic opportunity to capture an enormous span of physical distance and space and also capture a span of time from the Pre-historic to the futuristic present. The gouache passages in the Blythe paintings can be directly traced to specific portions of the traverse maps.
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