Snowfall

Snowfall, 48 x 48 inches, oil on canvas.

We had lots of snow this past winter. Lots. I eventually get tired of dealing with it- well, the cold, more than the snow. It was bitter cold for weeks on end. But all that aside, I love the look of it. The feel of it. Snowshoeing. Cross country skiing. The dogs' happiness with it. But most of all I love the effect it has on the land.

I spent much of the winter thinking about how I put paint down. Mark making is a very popular topic in painting the past decade or so, and I suppose on some level that's what I am meaning. But to me, that makes it seem too specific, the marks too precious, to have their own identity. I'm concerned about the lay of the paint, the texture and surface, not as individual expression of marks, but as a intuitive representation of what the experience of being in that place, at that moment, feels like. I don't want it to be that conscious an effort, no more so than the dreamy feeling I have when I am outside and find something I want to paint. So in the moment it's even closer than intuition.

But then I guess it's a combination of marks. Of colors Of paint.

I'm still thinking about it.

The texture of nature

My friend Dave Dorsey writes an excellent column on his painting and viewing of the art world. I felt honored to merit inclusion amidst all the work he looks at and writes about at represent.

Deep in the heart of Texas

Occasionally I get to see a painting in its new home. Gibson's Barn lives in a beautiful spot, deep in the heart of Texas.

For scale

One of the biggest reasons I moved the studio a couple years ago was for space. The work is getting ever larger, and I didn't have enough room to either set it up at an easel, to get back from it enough to see, or even more problematic, to photograph it. In the space I'm in now I have a white wall- well it was just a plasterboard wall until my son Todd got after it with a big roller and buckets of paint- large enough to install a gallery hanging system. And my old friend, the multi-talented Tim White- helped me figure out how to light the large landscape work I am doing. But the scale is still hard to convey, so I decided to put my studio mate to work.

Grand Prismatic Hot Spring, Yellowstone National Park, oil on canvas, 30 x 120 inches.
With Uly, 120 lbs of good company.

Trespass, 48 x 120 inches, oil on canvas, curio cabinet.

Along Kebler Pass, 48 x 100 inches, oil on canvas, curio cabinet.

First storm of the season.

First Storm of the Season, 11 x 11 inches, oil on panel.

I didn't want to go out. I wasn't expecting this weather yet- I was living in the fantasy of having another month of fall. But today we woke up to 14 º. I put off the walk til noon, when it had risen to a balmy 18º. And the wind had kicked up.

It would have felt a lot warmer at 7 in the morning.

But my first rule of living with dogs is, A tired dog is a good dog.

Rule 2? A not tired dog is a serious pain in the ass.

So layered up in wool, down, and whatever else seemed like it might work, we headed out. Of course my two companions were wearing their summer outfits. Their beards didn't ice up, their faces didn't freeze, their toes weren't numb. And they were not the least bit excited when I'd had enough and turned for home.

And then, for me, the walk paid off. Well, in addition to the aforementioned tired dogs. The sun, trying to push through the storm, slipping in and out. I don't paint very directly much anymore. My work has evolved into a very indirect process of layer after layer, applied over days and weeks, often into months.

But today I got home and went right at it. It was fun, and made the 45 minutes of freezing my….. of being cold, seem even more worthwhile.

These two. 45 minutes was nothing. Another half hour of all-star wrestling finally did them in.

dia de los muerta...

Things are showing up in the studio lately. Mainly me. Time to get back on the horse. More to come soon.

Studio artifact

Some color is starting to show up on top of all the white gesso. Just in time for spring.

Prep continues

Two 24 x 34, three 30 x 30, two 32 x 40, two 48 x 48, and two 48 x 60. Canvases leaning everywhere, gesso on everything I wear into the studio.

And painting in between. Some things should start coming together in the next week or so.

Prep work

With a big pile of stretcher bars, it was time to get busy stretching. After stretching, each canvas gets two coats of Golden GAC 100, a multi-purpose acrylic polymer. In this case, its purpose is to isolate the canvas from the destructive qualities of the paint, which can really degrade canvas or linen over time. Over two coats of the polymer, I brush on three coats of Golden Gesso. The gesso is also acrylic based, so it bonds well with the the GAC 100, but it is porous as apposed to the shielding quality of the earlier layers, so the paint soaks in and binds to it.  A safe, secure, archival ground to build a painting on.  I can usually juggle 3 or four big canvases at a time, moving them around the studio, propped and drying, waiting for another layer. Each is dated after the last coat, so I know that it's dried sufficiently over a couple weeks to provide a dry and stable surface.

64th Rochester-Fingerlakes Exhibition

Hot Summer Sky, 48 x 66 inches, oil on canvas.

Later this week I'll drop off the painting above at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, for its 64th Rochester-Fingerlakes exhibit. Hot Summer Sky was accepted into the show, and I was asked to provide a statement to go along with it.

An artist's statement is one of the biggest pains in the ass you can imagine having to write. Always concerns over being honest, and at the same time hoping you hit the mark in what those making judgments are hoping and expecting to read, to have the right artistic gravitas. Yet not be sounding like a pompous ass.

Or, comfortably plopped into middle-age, you can hopefully leave those concerns behind, all but the honesty.

So, here's what I wrote:


Hot Summer Sky

15 years ago I stood in the beautiful, vaulted space of a massive hay barn in eastern Oregon. I was there with my wife, Darby Knox, to introduce her to my extended family, my mother's aunts and uncles. I stood next to her, in this place I'd visited frequently while growing up in the Pacific Northwest. I'd played there as a child, and was left misty eyed over the life I'd missed, in this gorgeous country, amongst people I loved and admired so much. Darby said quietly, Why don't you paint any barns? They are spectacular.

I kind of scoffed at the idea. They're kitschy, I replied, maybe the most over-exposed subject in American painting.

She gave me a bump and a smile, and said, They don't have to be.

And that's where it started for me, a new body of work. Trying to take a common subject and make it something new. To turn a subject of sweet nostalgia and American pie into something contemporary and iconic, representational to an extent, but imbued with the energy and surface of expressionism. 

For me they are monuments to people like my aunts and uncles, men and women who greeted the day the same way they did their nephew, with smothering hugs, bone crushing handshakes, and enthusiasm for the life at hand.

As for kitsch, as a good friend of mine says of his prodigious storytelling, The facts are just the jumping off point.

This week's walks, things seen.

We walk every day, for an hour or so, sometimes much more. Keeps the dogs fit, and me mellow. If I told you about everything we saw, everything I thought about... I'd never get anything done.

But here's a few things from this week.

Once in a while we come across something a bit unnerving- a track the size of my hand.

But then I remember it's ok- he's with me.

And just this morning, for the second time this week, and enormous flock of snow geese. I quite counting at 240. There were ultimately well over 1000.

And just as we got back home, a juvenile bald eagle slid overhead.

Pretty good start to the season.

Trailing Wile

First full day of spring. A week ago it was mid-40's and sunny. When I took the dogs out the birds seemed deafening. After months of wind as the loudest narrator of our walks, the volume was startling. And fun.

And then Monday night, we got two inches of slush dumped on us. As Finn, Uly and I headed out the sound track was back to a variation on winter- the cold, slow, tinkling of sleet. And the crunch of slush under foot.

Before long we found tracks of someone else.

We hear coyotes all the time, at least several times each week. Last winter there was a cat fight under our bedroom window. I went out to break it up, and found a coyote, buried to his waist in the hedge, trying to get at our 9 lb sociopathic spidermonkey of a cat, Max. The coyote seemed to disappear, vaporize before my eyes. Then I heard him meet up with the rest of his group in the dark, and they yipped their way out into the fields behind us.

Max was spastic with adrenalin for a few minutes, but eventually no worse for wear.

On Tuesday we came across the tracks in the snow, and after a moment, I compared them to our own. They were fresh in the soft slushy ground covering, not degraded much at all. Finn and Uly were on them immediately, noses to the ground, then looking to me, then back to the tracks. And off we went.

We hear them all the time, but see them rarely. Darby and I stood and watched one last year for 15 minutes. It didn't move, just stared at us. The dogs couldn't see him because of their lower sightline. We just stood and stared right back, eventually moving on, feeling as if we had interrupted him long enough.


A couple years before that I came face to face with one in a blizzard. The dogs were trailing behind me. I was walking head down, just trying to keep moving and get the dogs worn out. They never seem to care that the weather is nasty, and need the exercise to keep them from getting too wound up. Tired dog is a good dog. And I was enjoying the blizzard, plowing along with my head down. Just as I turned east over a culvert, I sensed something ahead of me. He must have done the same thing, because just as my head came up, so did his, and we locked on each other about 15 ft apart. I'm sure if the visibility had been much more then the 25 feet we had that afternoon he would never have let it happen.

We stared for a moment, frozen. I heard the dogs' collars tinkling behind me, turned to cut them off before a chase. But when I glanced back ahead, there was no need, the coyote had vanished. With the wind and heavy snow, the dogs didn't even nose the tracks.

But on Tuesday, they were beside themselves. Uly racing all over, checking the twin tracks of the first trail, then bounding over to a third pair that was raggedly paralleling the first. Finn moved with power and purpose, forgetting her age. It made me remember her 5 years ago- possibly the most athletic animal I've ever seen. And they were so busy going forward coming back, Uly circling between the two paths, I stayed right with them. I clicked a couple pictures, then glanced up at the woods ahead. Movement. Wait.... there again. The single coyote, looking dark in the damp woods. And then to the right, the pair. And they froze, looking over their shoulders our way.

Uly bounded forward, and they were gone.

Vapor.

Notes from Bristol Bay

A little over a dozen years ago, I received a grant from the Genesee Valley County Council on the Arts. My project was to paddle the Genesee River, and produce a sketchbook about the trip. The project had an unintended effect- I realized I didn't like my work. Didn't like is probably the wrong description- maybe didn't care about. The downside was that at 40, to be faced with the realization that you don't like the result of your efforts is pretty tough to take. It is my job. The upside is it set me on the path of trying to figure out how to change course.

So I went back to my favorite book, Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez. It was reading the book for the first time in my late 20's that made me more serious about my outdoor interests, canoe trips in particular. Spending extended periods in wild country was suddenly given a legitimacy, at least in my mind- no longer just goofing off. Returning to it at 40 helped me start thinking more seriously about the why of my painting. Why am I compelled to paint? Why landscape? I've always been happier when there is a reason that I can make sense of. 

So for several years I persued the idea of the memory of landscape. The idea grew and evolved, and eventually ended up taking a somewhat different direction, which resulted in some new, large format pieces that I exhibited at SUNY Geneseo. 

Trespass, oil on canvas, 48 x 144 inches.

The Artifact of Landscape came down two years ago this month. I was happy about the show, happy in terms of feeling that what I had set out to do had been successful, bringing some of the tactile feel of a a landscape into an indoor space, a gallery setting. Part of that was the scale of the work, part the way I had pushed to paint, with the intention of the layers of paint reflecting the textures of a place, that tactile feeling of moving though an area. Or it did to me, and that's really all I can ask.

Lamar Valley Erratics, YNP, 48 x 144 inches

But then I was faced with where to take it, this new direction. The idea had at least partially evolved in  Yellowstone National Park.  The park is 2000 miles from our home in South Lima, less than convenient. I'm nowhere near done exploring the park, and painting the landscape there, but I needed an area closer to home. Someplace it might be easier to access to build upon this new body of work. Darby and I talked about our area, the Finger Lakes of western NY, a good possibility. Or the Adirondacks, where I've done canoe trips for years, and we've taken family vacations. But then an opportunity dropped in my lap, too good to pass up. Well, Darby convinced me it was too good to pass up.

My friend Bob White is a sporting artist, specializing in fishing and hunting images that reflect his life as a fishing guide and lifelong hunter. In the fall of 2010, I was reading Bob White's Studio News. You can subscribe for updates on his work, goings on and general nailing-the-shit-out-of-life type life. So there I was reading about his summer's latest bit of awesomeness, doing an artist's residency at Bristol Bay Lodge, where he also guides. It was inspiring, looked like  a blast, and left me with my head in my hands. Darby said, What's up? And I described what I'd read about Bob's trip, and said, I just don't even know how to ever make that happen. 

So jump forward about 6 months, I check the morning'e email, and there's a note from Bob. It said essentially, Steve and I decided the residency was pretty cool, so we want to expand it. Wanna come up and paint for a week? Oh, and you can fish all you want to. We are inviting you, CD Clarke and Jeff Kennedy.

Obvious SPAM. Ha, this stuff doesn't happen to me.

Turns out it does, when Bob drops it in my lap. But it took Darby to drop me on my head. She got home, me head in hands again, and said, What's up? I told her about the offer, then said I don't think I can make it work schedule-wise. She looked at me. Didn't bat an eye, then laughed and said, You're going, it's perfect for what you are trying to do. A little less convenient than the Adirondacks, but its perfect. Write back, say yes. You're going. No…nope….zip….zipit….. you're going.

So, I wrote back to Bob. But I didn't say yes. At first. First I said something along the lines of, You know, BW, this isn't really the kind of work I do. You, Chris, and Jeff, you guys are sporting artists and you all do plein aire painting. Me, not so much. I quit working that way about 12 years ago. 

( A little aside here-  I am no longer interested in plein aire painting, in the doing of it. I still love to look at the pleine air work of others, my friend Brian Eppley's in particular. But me not being interested is typical and kind of funny, as plein aire painting has really taken off in the art market over the last 8 or 10 years. Years ago my friend Quisp accused me of being a slave to my contrary-ness. I though a minute, and said, No, I'm a slave to my independence. My independence more often than not puts me out of step with what is going on else where. While I was paddling the Genesse River, all those years before, I had realized I was painting plein aire, not because I wanted to, but because I thought that was what I was supposed to be doing to be an artist. But it leaves me irritated, with work I that I don't feel addresses my interests in the land, and feeling like I had missed out on other things I could be doing outside, other things I could be seeing. So I quit doing it, just in time to miss the building wave of popularity. Life).

But in response to my protest, Bob said, I don't care. 

I said I may not have anything to show for months, even a year or two after, if at all. 

Bob said, I don't care, I just want you to be part of it. 

I said, What about Steve? (that would be Steve Laurent, the manager of Bristol Bay Lodge, and a talented photographer as well). 

Bob said, He won't care, he's all-in on this.

So I guess I was out of excuses to not take advantage of the greatest opportunity to fall in my lap. Despite always making things more difficult than they need to be, I was in.

After doing a show on Long Island, two in Colorado, and another in Seattle, early last August I headed for Alaksa.

In Anchorage, I spent the day fishing with my friend Jerry Balboni. We might have had a beer or two as well. Late in the day he and his wife Anna dropped me at the hotel where I was supposed to meet Jeff- whom I hadn't known previously. I stepped into the lobby and immediately recognized him, an old friend I just hadn't met yet. We may have had a couple more beers while we visited about the upcoming week.

First thing in the morning, we grabbed the shuttle to the airport and we were headed to Dillingham.

I hadn't been in Alaska in 13 years. I hadn't forgotten how beautiful it is, but I think I'd forgotten the feeling of vastness. 

As we made the flight to Dillingham, Jeff and I were like kids, excitedly pointing out things we thought the other might have missed. That was a pattern that would continue all week.

We landed in Dillingham. I was in lala land. Flying over that landscape, thinking about what was in store for the week, I forgot I was supposed to be looking for Bob. Fortunately he found us, and I had an unexpected surprise- the chance to say a quick hello to photographer and publisher Tosh Brown, someone who I had previously known only over the internet. He had been doing a residency at the lodge the previous week, and assured us that we were in for a good time.

Over the next several weeks I'll tell you about the week, the work we did, and where for me, I think it is going. As I had explained to Bob, my work has evolved to a point of not being real direct. After several months of percolating, it's coming to the surface.

Busy fall season.....

Here's where I started.

I'm totally swiping an idea from my friend David Oleski. He's off in Thailand, he'll never know.OK, so he'll know. In fact he encouraged it. I'm not as bad as I'd like to think. Several weeks ago I started 30 paintings. They are small, either 6 x 8 inches or 7 x 7 inches. They will be available starting November 25th. One per day, for 30 days. Details to follow.

In between working on these 30 paintings, I've been chasing steelhead. My favorite fish in my favorite season. The river has been stingy this year. I can't believe I've gotten any work done at all.

Here's where I am at as of Friday. Close on a few.

Along Pennsylvania Backroad

Along a Pennsylvania Backroad, oil on panel, 9 x 12 inches.

With the snowstorm of the season dropping down on us, this study takes me back to a late afternoon last summer.

WInter arrived...

this past week, with a quick dump of heart-attack snow, and the arrival of some favorite winter neighbors.


I love to watch the Short-Eared owls, often arriving as a pair, arcing crazily around the fields. Staying low and close to the ground, they'll wheel acrobatically and drop on something small and unseen in the distance.


Darby prefers the Harrier hawks, with their slow, gracefully rocking flight, also low and quiet above the winter turned field.


The cold is sudden, and not altogether welcome, but I've already found a painting in the harsh arrival. Something small, but atmospheric, should be done in a couple more days.

Last show of the season.

My friend David Oleski stopped by my booth at the Bethesda Row Art Festival weekend before last. He was having fun with a tiny HD video camera, about the size of an iPod, and I thought it would be fun share what he got.

Cathedral

Cathedral, 36 x 36 inches, oil on canvas.

Wow. Been six weeks since I posted. OK, don't go thinking I've been laying around, just watching television. I drove to Denver for the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, then flew home for 10 days, then flew back for a show in Jackson, eight days in Yellowstone, then drove to Crested Butte, Colorado for a show, then to Portland, Oregon to fly home again. So any sittin' I was doing was behind the wheel of the Jug.

There was some great fishing, hiking, and visiting with friends and family. And somehow in the middle of that there were some advances in my painting I am really excited about, changes that will enable me to move in a new direction.

So it won't be six weeks before the next post. A couple/week til I'm back on the road for Labor Day. Catching up on my gowin's on.

Dusk on a Northern River

Dusk on a Northern River (Missinaibi), 8 x 12 inches, oil on panel.

My nephew Christopher emailed last night, wanting to know if I had any information on the Missinaibi River. He is thinking about about a summer canoe trip, and thought he remembered that I had paddled it. Wasn't that the mosquito pants trip?, he asked.

Most startling to me was that I had just that day finished painting it.

I spent some time over the last couple weeks rearranging the studio. In my previous studio, a neighbor who spent weeks turning her studio into a lovely clubhouse, said to me, It looks like you walked in the door, dropped the stuff in your hands and started working. I did. And I did the same thing again when I moved out to Kim and Jerry's farm. And even after I rearranged, I'm not sure you could tell, but hopefully the light and layout will be a little better for both painting and printmaking, and tripping over the dogs will be a bit less frequent.

And when I'm rearranging, in addition to blowing all kinds of time reading magazines that I hadn't finished (hey, mostly art magazines- ok, ok, some were fly fishing and paddling, oh and a book or two), I come across unfinished projects. The painting above was one of them. Started quite awhile ago- a couple years- finished yesterday, only a few hours before Christopher emailed.

And yes, it was the mosquito pants trip.

A Veil of Light

Red Barn, Golden Light, 16 x 20 inches, oil on linen.

As we drove home from my folks place last fall, we went past this barn in the beautiful light of a fall evening. I loved the light peaking through the partially opened door on the backside, and the overall peaceful feeling of the place. A one minute sketch and we were gone.

The next week at the studio, I roughed out what I remembered, and started painting. Layer over layer over the next several days. But I had several pieces going, trying to get finished up for an upcoming show, and I lost focus. At some point I set the piece aside, not quite finished. Over the next couple months, I pulled the painting out several times, set it on the easel to work on it.............. and left it alone. Something wasn't quite where I wanted it, but I kept mining my memories, trying to remember what it was I had seen. It wasn't holding together. Finally, I set it aside, halfway to the burn pile.

How many times do we have to learn the same lesson? A painting is a painting, not the "thing," the subject of the painting. Color, form, value, design, surface, line - the elements of the image relate amongst themselves first and foremost. That they combine to represent the subject is secondary, or possibly irrelevant. I think the scene may have been too strong in my mind, tied to the last visit of the year with my folks, Darby and the kids. The memory may have been too loaded.

Or, I am one of the worlds truly sloooooooow studies. Anyway, I was working on several of the Small Works pieces this week, and as I scumbled a glaze of gold over a small piece, the barn painting popped into my head. I think I've been subconsciously puzzling over the piece all along. And there was my answer. Years ago, while apprenticing to Richard Beale, he had taught me the importance of what he referred to as a Mother Wash, a single wash of color, layered over the entire painting, tying things together with a unifying tone. Robert Genn frequently employs a similar idea in many of his pieces, and refers to it often in his weekly newsletter.

The painting needed a unifying tone, and I pulled out the painting and laid a semi-transparent, sorta scumbled, gradation of gold over much of the image. Essentially a golden veil settled over the landscape, tying all the separate elements of the piece together in a wash of warm light.

And I had another reason to be grateful to Richard Beale, for passing on many lessons I may not have been ready to hear at the time, but somehow absorbed. He was instrumental in helping to set me on the path to what I do today, and I still use much of what I learned from him. At least the stuff that I remember.

And he was patient with my slow study.