Spring Break!

Soon... some Desert Solitaire. Currently preparing by reading up on Cold Splinters, the Non-Technical Canyon Guide to the Colorado Plateau,  gathering supplies, and making playlists. Music of choice for long drives in the West this Spring will be:

• Phosphorescent, "Muchacho" 
• Morriconez, "Cloud of Dust Cry of Death"
• Songs: Ohia, "Magnolia  Electric Co"
• Music from Saharan Cellphones
• Handsome Furs, Plague Park (every road trip)
• Neil Young
• Javelin, Hi Beams
• Charlie Parr
• Jack Rose
• Daniel Bachman
• M. Sage

and probably several episodes of Mysterious Universe, The Extraenvironmentalist, 99% Invisible, This American Life, and Radiolab podcasts.

 Photo from Natural Bridges National Monument from last year - taken by me.

Remington's "The Winter Campaign"

Frederic Remington, The Winter Campaign, Oil on Canvas, 1909

A review of this work written on December 11, 1909 says, "The Winter Campaign - a group of soldiers squatting about a fire, with their horses huddling close to them to keep warm - expresses, as only Remington can the oneness of feeling of animals and men in the face of nature's menace of death.

Indeed, in all of Remington's pictures the shadow of death seems not far away. If the actors in his vivid scenes are not threatened by death in terrible combat, they are menaced by it in the form of famine thirst or cold. One sees the death's-head through the skin of the lean faces of his Indians, cowboys and soldiers; his figures are clothed and desperately active skeletons, and even about his animals there is strong suggestion of the nearness of the moment when their bones will lie bleatching in the desert."

From Frederic Remington, "The Color of Night." Image from flickr user unforth.

In Search of A Lost Icon

I'm currently reading "American Buffalo; In Search of a Lost Icon" by Steven Rinella and it is fascinating. I don't want to give too much away about the book but I would definitely recommend it - it can be enjoyed for the adventurous aspects of the writers life and travels as well as the historical background of the animal and its relationship to man.

While doing some supplemental research on the history of these animals I came across this article at Cryptomundo - "The Wood Bison Discovery Story" -

"The largest land animal in Canada, the wood bison [shown above], had been disappearing from all over North America for centuries when the last animals were officially declared extinct in 1940. Then in 1957, a wonderful discovery occurred. During a regular air patrol, federal wildlife officers flying over a remote part of the Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, spotted a small, isolated herd of two hundred wood bison. They had gone completely unnoticed for decades – and had kept physically and genetically separate from their cousins, the plains bison, so familiar to Americans as the buffalo. The wood bison were found about one hundred miles from a new road being built from Alberta to the arctic circle and within fifty miles of a mission station that had existed for a hundred years. Inspection of these animals showed that they were indeed the last remaining pure wood bison (Bison athabascae), an enormous Ice Age species not known to exist in a pure strain anywhere else in the world."

Writer Loren Coleman goes on to say,

"This animal tale is one the late Ivan T. Sanderson and I have both used to demonstrate the simple fact that large animals can remain hidden in North America, quite near humans, relatively speaking." In a way, this goes back to my post called "Some Mystery Left" - written about the mysterious appearance of a mountain lion in the Chicago area.

woods bison
Beautiful photo originally uploaded by rootrider

Three from the Western Exhibit at the Denver Art Museum

"The Open Range"

"War Bridle" by Frederic Remington

"Stampede"

If you live in Denver and you still haven't checked out the recently reopened 7th floor of the Denver Art Museum you're missing out. It is dedicated to Western art - a genre I've really begun to appreciate since moving West. I shot photos of these three pieces on my visit Tuesday.

While I don't always relate to the subject matter in a lot of Western painting, many of the artists are exceptional painters - especially in their ability to capture different atmospheric and lighting conditions. Take these three for instance;

• "The Open Range" displays the clear, often blinding sun that is typical of the West. If you look carefully you'll notice that there are no real dark color values- even the shadows on the ground are bleached by the sun.
  
• Remington's pieces also portrays a high-noon sun gleaming against the backs of the two white shirted cowboys.
• The "Stampede" on the other hand carefully composes the work with more detail in the foreground and soft, looser brush-strokes in the background - adding to the action and the depth of the image. It is almost entirely monochrome and his handling of subtle value variations is amazing.

Airless: Wallace Stegner on The American West as Living Space

photo by Nathan Abels

I'm reading Wallace Stegner's The American West as Living Space from 1988 -taken from a series of lectures made in 1986. It is a really informative book. I've been writing down a lot of quotes or experts from it and I wanted to share this one in particular:

"...the rootlessness that expresses energy and a thirst for the new and an aspiration toward freedom and personal fulfillment has just as often been a curse. Migrants deprive themselves of the physical and spiritual bonds that develop within a place and a society. Our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy. It has cut off individuals and families and communities from memory and the continuum of time. It has left at least some of us with a kind of spiritual pellagra, a deficiency disease, a hungering for the ties of a rich and stable order. Not only is the American home a launching pad, as Margaret Mead said; the American community, especially in the West, is an overnight camp. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. Freedom, when found, can turn out to be airless and unsustaining. Especially in the West, what we have instead of place is space. Place is more than half memory, shared memory. Rarely do Westerners stay long enough at one stop to share much of anything."

Old West Hipster Art?

George Catlin (1796-1872), this one is probably from the 1830s.

Doesn't this look just like something you might see in Juxtapoz or on FecalFace right now? If only he had drawn the buffalo and wolves on a blank piece of paper...

case in point: Maya.Bird on flickr

Patti Hallock's "Greetings from the West"

photo by Patti Hallock

I am not the only one that is getting the out-West fever lately - fellow artist and friend here in Denver area Patti Hallock is working on a excellent series of photographs that present the West in all of its real and artificial/mythological splendor. Patti says that the series is an, " examination of the myth of the American West through the landscape, Wild West-themed amusements and Hollywood Western movie making." I love these photos and I'm really looking forward to being in a show with her this late-summer/early-fall. Check out all of her photos, because this isn't her only series -and they are all fantastic.

Westerns

A funny comment was made to me a few days ago when I was told by my wife, "I didn't think that when we moved out to Colorado you would start listening to soundtracks from old Westerns"...I didn't either - but it is true. Lately I have been listening to a lot of Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and watching "There Will Be Blood" (great soundtrack too) and "No Country for Old Men" a few too many times. It's hard not to get a little swept up in the spirit of the West out here. And in light of this, here are a few great movie posters from old Westerns:

Poster art by Averardo Ciriello - from MovieposterDB
Poster by Averardo Ciriello

This will be me and my wife by this time next year.

William Jacob Hays

William Jacob Hays, "Herd of Buffalo", Oil on Canvas, 1862
Source: Coogan Photo

I visited the Denver Art Museum yesterday to see the "Inspiring Impressionism" show and wandered through the rest of the museum as well. One of my favorite paintings at the Museum is the piece pictured above, in which the buffalo are literally disappearing into the background - painted at a time in US history when the animals were disappearing from the landscape. Over time I think the Denver Art Museum will become to me what the Chicago Art Institute was for many years - a place that gets better with repeated visits. Visiting the Joseph Cornell collection and Henri Matisse's "Bathers by a River" at the Art Institute in Chicago were never missed - almost like seeing an old friend. I'm sure "Herd of Buffalo" will be among several pieces that I'll make a special point of seeing when I'm at the Denver Art Museum in the future - new old friends if you will.

Henri Matisse, "Bathers by a River", Oil on Canvas, 1909, 1913, 1916, 260x390 cm

Inspiration: Remington's Nocturnes

Frederic S. Remington (1861–1909) "The Old Stage-Coach of the Plains", 1901, Oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas



I've been digging into Frederic Remington's nocturne/night paintings again recently. I had the great fortune to see an entire exhibition of his night time paintings a few years ago. His use of color in this series is fascinating - unusual blue-greens, subtle golden-taupe-greens, and vibrant blues - frequently contrasted with the rich oranges of candle or firelight. I highly recommend the book devoted to these works called "Frederic Remington: The Color of Night" by Nancy Anderson. Even if western art isn't your subject matter of choice, I think there is a lot to be learned from the palette of Remington. The more I flip through this book, the more intrigued I've become with these paintings. My next body of work for the exhibition in June will surely be influenced by Remington's coloring.