A Day in the Life of one Artist

Marsden Hartley, Still Life, 1912, oil on composition board at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe.

Today Cathy and I went up to Santa Fe to see the Marsen Hartley exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art.  I have always liked Hartley’s work, but the only work I had seen in the flesh, paint and canvas, was his Portrait of a German Officer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  I was only familiar with his work through reproductions in books.  Seeing the fifty-four works spanning his life was exciting - exciting if you are a painter or not.  I was not disappointed.  The painted surfaces were lively and rich, the images powerful. 

As I looked my way through the exhibit, it occured to me: it seems that the same images appear over and over again in all the texts about an artist.  The authors of these texts seem to use the same image source, a single museum, a single collection for their texts.  The limited number of images gives the impression the reproduced art works are canonical, the best and most characteristic images of a particular artist.  That is not the case at all.  Of the work in the exhibit I had seen only one or two images reproduced before - one of the Dog Town paintings and Ablemar(?) the Drowned.  Each of these two works are part of a whole series Hartley painted to flesh out what he wanted to say on the subject.  The paintings are complete in themselves, but it’s like reading one chapter of a book with many chapters.  With digital imagery readily at hand, why couldn’t a museum present the image context in which the exhibited painted appears?  It would be easier to understand the painting if it were an image in a paragraph of images rather than a solitary image. 

Hartley had a life long preoccupation with Cezanne, and several paintings growing out of that preoccupation are in the exhibit.  I’m puzzled by Hartley’s concern with Cezanne.  When Hartley is being Hartley, there is none of the structured surface to be seen in Cezanne.  Is this an example of an artist afraid his highly charged emotional approach may get out of hand, out of control?  Does he try to temper his charged, emotional vision with the discipline of painterly structure?  Hartley’s images of New Mexico offer an example.  When he works in front of the New Mexico landscape, we get a New Mexico landscape.  When he later paints the New Mexico landscape from memory or based on work done on the scene, we get Marsden Hartley at his best.  The image has been “Hartleized.”

This is an exhibit not to be missed.

Computer simulation of a Bernalillo station windscreen, etched glass, 60″ x 88″

Bernalillo is a very small town a few miles north of Albuquerque.  It was founded in the early 1800’s.  When I first started scouting around Bernalillo for images I quickly discovered that just about any building constructed before 1950 was built of adobe, mud formed into bricks, or terrones, squarish shapes of mud scraped directly from the Rio Grande river banks.  All the older commercial buildings covered with modern materials have adobe construction underneath.  I used this as a theme for all the windscreens for the Bernalillo Rail Runner passenger platform.  The screens form a commnentary on local adobe construction through the years.  Pure adobe construction is post and lintel, which is typical for Bernalillo.  I also found adobe arches, adobe on granite block foundations, and adobe and concrete.

Computer simulation of one of six windscreen designs for the Albuquerque Transportation Center station

I have spent the better part of the last three days manipulating the computer files for the screen designs putting them in a format from which photo positive stencils can be produced for the sandblasters.  That means reversing the image and making a negative of it, because the sandblaster works from the black areas, not the white, and because the sandblasted side of the glass is away from the track.  I made the images from the other side.  Three of the stations are on the opposite side of the track from the rest.  I didn’t get that news until late March, after I had finished all the images.  Since the stations are not symetrical and since some of the images relate in special ways to the others on the same platform, I needed to adjust which side of the image was “front.”  If this sounds very confusing, it is.  I am proceeding very carefully and very slowly.  My night mare is to be standing on a platform with six 350 lb. pieces of glass and having to say, “No, guys that’s not right.  Move that piece of glass down the platform 150 ft. and move that other one over here.” 

My back aches from sitting at the computer.

But, we’re close.  The contractor expects to install the first set July 17th and two more in the weeks following.  The whole city waits impatiently.  The ride is free for the first two months.  If I had a laptop, I could make an entry from a moving passenger car.

The image above is from an enormous oil fired steam engine (4-8-4), which a bunch of volunteers are restoring here in town.

Sketchbook page, pencil 8 x 11

Everything is allowed in art.  That’s why artists are so dangerous.

A technical note here, I prefer using pencil and graphite to draw in my sketchbooks, and I draw on facing pages.  That allows for smudging and transfers when I draw on the next page.  That accounts for the flowers and stray marks in the cheek area.  The marks weren‘t part of the original drawing.  They were part of the drawing on the next page.  These kinds of accidents are very useful.  However, they are not totally arbitrary, because they happen in the context of my personal art process. They have a relatedness because all the marks and imagery are mine.

charcoal on paper, 40″ x 30″

The drawing with the tack from a few days ago.  I had a sketchbook drawing with a tack on chair like this, but without the tulips, from quite a while ago.  I drew the tack on a separate piece of paper, then taped it on the drawing.  I had to cover one of the background tulips so that it would show clearly.  There may be three paintings here: empty chair; chair with tack; and chair with goose.  That brings a smile on the verbal level.  The empty chair often serves as symbol for the absent king or lord.  The goose, as I recall, is an ancient Egyptian symbol for chaos.  The tack is a grade school prank (not mine, someone else’s, but I remember my fourth grade horror and awe - horror that anyone would put a tack on the teacher’s chair and cause injury - awe that anyone could be so reckless to act without considering the consequences.

The orientation of the tulips needs more thought.

charcoal drawing, 40″ x 30″

This is a preparatory drawing from a few days ago.  Originally the chair was empty.  I like that.  Then, I put a few things on the chair like this drawing of a goose based on coloring book images to see what else I could get.  I had used the goose several years ago in another painting series.  The chair by itself looked fine in its position.  Most of the tulips bend to the right.  Originally the left leaning back of the chair countered that movement.  I also reversed some of the tulips in the upper right.  Now, the goose shape, which I taped on the drawing, requires that the goose-chair image be reversed and the reversed image moved to the right. The upward looking goose directs the eye out of the composition, which doesn’t work.  The answer would be to redraw the goose looking out at the viewer.  I also could put something at the top for the goose to look at, but then the field of tulips would have to be altered.  That would lead to another, different composition.

Yes.  I did put an enormous tack on the chair, and that worked.

Windscreen design for Paseo del Norte/Journal Center commuter stop.  7 ft 4in long.

This is another design to be etched on a glass windscreen.  Yesterday Tony Sylvester from MRCOG e-mailed me that they have found a coating to spray on the etched surface to help thwart vandalism. 

Last night I was looking at the government websites detailing projects calling for artists.  Bernalillo County is running another one for the Mid Region Council of Governments.  It could be a real opportunity to work more closely in my style.  I’ll give details after the deadline, July 28.

charcoal on paper, 44 x 30

A drawing from a couple days ago.

etched glass design for Rail Runner passenger station Paseo del Norte/Journal Center

This is one of six images for a Rail Runner passenger station in north Albuquerque.  I developed all the images, fifty four, for this project from digital photos I took in the neighborhoods of each station.  I met with representatives from each of the nine communities the commuter rail serves.  For this particular station, community representatives suggested cotton wood trees, which flank the Rio Grande river, water, horses and vinyards (a subject already taken by another community.)  I went with the cotton wood trunks, working close to get texture.  I had to make sure the image did not completely obscure the view through the glass for saftey reasons.  No hiding places.  I made each image of two or more digital photos to simplify the final image and add continuity to all six images.  In the photo below, white areas will be etched and black areas left clear.  The full scale image will be about 36″ high.  The length is about7′ 4″, which makes the tree trunk life size.  Three heavy vertical supports are behind the vertical etched areas.  (Hurricane force winds occur here.  Gusts to 40 or 50 miles per hour are fairly common, particularly in spring.) A metal bench covers the lower portion of the windscreen where there is an adobe texture etched on the glass (not shown.)  The windscreen-posts-bench configuration was a design given as was the medium of glass etching.

 Yesterday I went up to Etchmaster (www.etchmaster.com) to see the first completed windscreen panel for the New Mexico Rail Runner commuter rail service (www.nmrailrunner.com/).  The Mid Region Council of Governments of New Mexico commissioned me to create fifty four designs to be etched on the windscreen (windbreak) panels for all nine passenger platforms.  There are six panels at each station.  Each panel is 5″ x 7″4′.  Norm Dobbins of Etchmaster had made a sample etching of part of one panel last January, but this was the first whole panel.  I’ll post one of the panel designs later.

 Etchmaster is located in the boonies a few miles south of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  There is a “movie” ranch nearby that hosts movie productions.  In the distance I passed what looked like an old courthouse where there had only been juniper and sparse grass before.  Near the road a movie crew had built a replica of the Mineshaft Cafe in Madrid, surrounded the place with old motorcylces, then burned it to the gound, cycles and all.  When I went on to Madrid, the place was jammed with movie production crews.  The old ball park looked like an Interstate 40 truck stop with all the parked trailers for the movie crew.  Now I knew why the Madrid Summer Blues Festival had been moved to St. John’s College in Santa Fe.  Banners over the two lane road through Madird declared, “Madrid Chile Festival” ,and the movie company had gussied up the decaying town for the benefit of whatever future film will feature the “Madrid Chile Festival in Madrid County.”  There is neither a real Madrid Chile Festival nor a Madrid County. (Pronounced MA’ drid.)  My gallery is at the south end of town, free of movie props, but not free of maligant movie effects.  Mel and Diana, my dealers, were not happy.  The movie production has made the whole town, a popular tourist attraction, nearly inaccesible to that cash spending breed.  No sales.  Diana is on the town council.  She understood the movie crew was to be in town only five weeks.  They had been there six weeks and the end was not in sight.