Summer #8 The Yellow House, 17" x 21", oil canvas, 2010
This week's post focuses on landscape painter Rackstraw Downes. He's very different from me but he's good. I became aware of his work in 1992. This month while watching my niece and nephews in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I was able to trade off with my husband to run to the Aldrich Museum of Art, conveniently located in the same town. An intimate exhibit of Downes' paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks in cases awaited. [Two other Rackstraw Downes' exhibits are concurrently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York and at the Betty Cunningham Gallery in Chelsea.]
You must click on these links to see examples of his work to follow along.
The paintings are panoramic views of the underneath of the Westside Highway painted from direct observation in 2008-2009. Downes says he likes to be left alone to paint so if you see him, just keep walking. In a sketchbook, Downes writes that he gets annoyed with the changing weather. Light effects everything, after all. Downes isn't after an amplified, enveloping view like I do. He wants to see everything, to put it all into form. He wants to take it all in, process it, be present in it. In doing this he makes use of perspective: arcs and vectors structure the deep space, constructing the construction of the underpass. The horizon is stretched. I look to the left, straight, and right, seeing the other end in peripheral vision. There is a turn of the head in the gaze; the painting demands a slow scan (and then more of your attention). Bikers are painted as whole people, not shirts and pants painted separately. I couldn't care less about painting cars, but it matters to Downes and he makes me look. They aren't as dreamy as my visions, but they are still a dream as the picture is artifice. An angled stop sign becomes oval, striped like a buoy. Bike wheels function like the circles of barbed wire painted in another area. There is a glimpse of a building between trees, a poetic bit of painting; it's all poetry despite being concrete. In fact, he paints pictures of concrete.
Many painters ascribe to this kind of description, a factual world to ground us. What makes Rackstraw Downes more than amateurs who don't paint as well as they think they do? It has to do with the degree of perception, care, patience, skill in translating sight into paint, experience, and discipline.
I have some thoughts on what he does. Change of color temperature and light gives form and distinction to each piece. Orange, plastic construction fence is woven with the spaces in between its holes. The degree of thickness of paint is important - too thin, it would most likely be too dry, less personal, while too thick it would get clogged, loose a degree of legibility that is so much a part of his clear vision.
Treetops are made of small pieces like Vuillard but not as regular a pattern. They are fuller but sometimes fall flat, seemingly intentional. There is more space, more of a rustle, than in Vuillard. Again, as seen in Vuillard and positively delicious to painters, are shiny horizontal colored stripes with lines oily, like I like. There are also light, thin lines defining sections and what's between, simultaneously views and pieces of paint, many of which could be paintings on their own, if larger. I see the framing of spaces between sections of trees and leaves, made central in my hands, in my paintings.
As for the drawings, they are pinned to the walls, unframed. I've drifted away from frames and this is another professional example. Pieces of paper are taped together to make a longer drawing surface for the panoramas. Squiggly fibers in the paper remind one of the leaves in the paintings.
I couldn't stop looking; the pictures are full. My dots are here to fill you.
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