Here are the work in progress photos so far:

Canvas unbound after second application of dye

After second binding, third application of dye and discharge in select areas.

Stretched and primed. This is 8"x14"x1"

Today’s paint job.

Google Earth Street view.

The site is on the horizon looking northeast when you top a rise traveling towards State Route 23 on Lake Street in Wise, VA. Every day at different times of day this looks different when I drive this route. Every day my feelings are juxtaposed between visual delight and something else I don’t really have words to describe.

Here are some more Google Earth screencaps zooming in on the site:

And a NYT article about mountaintop removal that has a photo of the site from a completely different view:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/us/23coal.html?_r=1&em&ex=1188014400&oref=slogin

Here’s the initial shirring – the canvas was tucked over and under the hose and electrical cord and a running stitch was pulled tight. This took some time and a lot of pushing canvas pleats and pulling the thread (dental floss)… and more painful reminders that I really should use a thimble… especially difficult in the hairpin turns. I had a few things in mind for these, and I wanted to see if I could use this technique to get a strong rhythmic pattern through some meandering curves.

I dyed on one side and along the shirring with a relatively strong fuchsia, and a dilute green on the other first. I decided the fuchsia was far to intense and went over the whole of both pieces with the green a few minutes into the process. The fuchsia “strikes”, or binds to the fibers in the chemical reaction with the soda ash I prepared the canvas with, faster than the turquoise or yellow I used to mix the green. So even though this looks very dark, I knew I would end up with something closer to a red violet on the majority of the piece, especially on the ridges of the folds with the green traveling into the valleys before setting up in the fibers.

I waited about 30 minutes, poured the excess dye out of the container holding the canvases and went back over the tops of the shirring with a very strong fuchsia. Most of the other colors have run off into the recesses of the canvas at this point while most of what is visible is a magenta color.

Everything set overnight until dry, then I removed the stitching. I splattered some thiourea dioxide solution on the smaller piece before heat setting with an iron. here are the resulting two canvases.

the smaller canvas became this painting
Mines Wines Oil 16″x16″

The second is still in process. I went over to the winery earlier this week to sketch and got some very rough work done because I was sharing my attention with one of the owner’s dogs. Once I started petting him, he was very persistent in keeping me from doing much serious work – OK because the sketches are to help me to commit things to memory, I won’t refer to them directly while I paint. Here’s the sketch and an overlay on the canvas. I digitally desaturated the colors a bit because the gesso I prime with is more translucent than transparent and tones things down a bit.

The canvas is queued up for paint with several other works in progress.

4.125″x6.5″, oil pencil and oil pastel on illustration board.

I still have no idea what kind of tree this seedpod is from, though I feel like I should and this is a casualty of my failing memory. Anxiously awaiting leaves on the tree it came from. I may start the seeds growing like the Black Locust and Mimosa seeds I collected in the fall… which are doing fine and were the subject of some more photo experimentation recently…

…and goodbye Olympus.

I will sequester and abuse the DSLR for my next photos.

Here are the last ones that I have worked on from the (so I have been told, obsolete) Olympus point and shoot -

It has also been quite some time since I participated in a show like this, or put together a series of work in this manner. Getting back “on the horse” so to speak took a lot of my energy and time… just like I remember it, and I was glad to expend the effort.

I am not going to post photos of the works I am displaying in the show because I have mixed feelings about that at the moment. The work is very much about the physical object and processes involved in painting, and I am not sure I am ready to give it a full virtual showing at this time. However I will post some of the process images.

The show, “New Appalachian Geographies” is on view at Gallery 121 in the Gilliam Center for the Arts, University of Virginia’s College at Wise in Wise, Virginia through March 28. Artists showing work are J.J. Cromer, Suzanne Adams-Ramsey, Ray Stratton, David Constable, Misty Stratton, Marlana Williams, Chuck Clisso, Caroline Baker and James Veenstra.

SHOW STATEMENT:
“New Appalachian Geographies” is not a comprehensive
survey of central Appalachia’s physical and human geography. This
exhibit acts instead as a group of snapshots. And like any group of
snapshots the perspectives are idiosyncratic and very personal and
necessarily fixed in a particular time (right now).

A broad intention, however, unifies every artist in “New Appalachian
Geographies.” In his or her own way, each artist is interested in
exploring the daily ambiguities and contradictions of living in central
Appalachia today. At the heart of this exploration is a shared desire
for a more examined and critical love of our home and land.

My personal statement:

When given the theme “New Appalachian Geographies” to work with, my mind immediately connected the process by which the land is changed through extracting natural resources to the process I subject my canvasses to. This act of stripping away and then building up, in a way defies the nature of the land as much as it is tied to the essential characteristics of the terrain. Similarly, the character of the canvas as fabric is contradicted in the act of stretching, sizing, priming and covering with paint; although its inherent qualities of flexibility and light weight are what make it an appropriate support for painting. Because my canvas is already heavily sized, I must remove this through scouring first just as the land must be prepared by removal of trees and topsoil before surface mining can commence. The land is worked into new forms, allowing for the path of runoff to be redirected. My canvasses are folded and wrinkled to direct the flow of dye to the desired result, forming the structure for the painting to be built upon.

I found it important to present the landscape as I have committed it to my memory because it is being changed drastically and quickly relative to the natural cycle of things. The way part of the landscape looks today may be very different to the way it will look a short time in the future so that in portraying it as it sits in my mind’s eye has more permanence to me than using photo reference or sketching on site. Each of the locations in the paintings are site specific on the major route (US Route 23) from my home (Cocoon), south towards Wise, VA between State Route 823 and State Route 624 (Facsimile), and north towards Pikeville, KY at the Caney Highway (Temple).

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As I was working on the paintings, I struggled a bit at first as to how I wanted to handle recreating these landscapes that I see repeatedly, marking slow change, usually as I am driving past on the highway. The first step, folding the canvas and preparing for dye, was actually the most planned and least spontaneous because I had to create specific valleys and ridges for the fluid dye to travel through that would create the structure for the rest of the work. The physical act involved always feels heavily important to me when I make these dyed under-paintings. If the results aren’t appropriate for the work, I set it aside and wait until I see something else that fits for a different painting and start over. Fortunately, this one came out just as I had planned. This was the result for the Caney Highway location:

This massive “earthwork” cuts sharply downward, as though a giant chisel has been inserted into and pried open the mountain, allowing its guts to spill into the valley below. I needed to make sure to depict the dramatic downward thrust in the foundations of the painting.

Here is an impromptu work in progress photo of the same work:

The Route 283 location is one I see almost daily from several vantage points. I wanted to capture the essence of the location as it is now in the beginning stages of reclamations- a recovering patient of a sort. I took mental snapshots for several weeks before laying down a sketch using software on my iPad. This is the first time I used the technology as an honest to goodness sketchbook study. I wanted to see if the act of virtual painting, with it’s ease of use and forgiving, clean nature, would be as helpful as a traditional sketch on paper with dry media. The process was a convenience for me (I was able to walk through my mental impressions and get it down during the hour I wait for my daughter at her gymnastics class)… and more helpful than I thought it would be. I did refer to this digital sketch sparingly in the production of the final work, but mostly added the physical memory (much better on the tablet interface using “fingerpainting method” to me than other digital media has been so far) of laying down the colors to the visual memories I had collected. I may repeat this process of sketching in the future rather than just using the iPad as an entertainment venue for my artistic urges as I have for the most part so far.

Here is the resulting sketch:

Again, I’m not yet sure how I feel about the melding of these technologies with my processes, but I do imagine that they will emerge there as a matter of course at this point (I can’t get away from the tech… as much as I sort of miss the Luddite in me that insisted on sticking with my ribbon typewriter through the early ’90′s).

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The work I submitted to this show became more personal as I went on with it, and I have decided to continue working with similar landscapes. Currently in process, a recycled pre-primed canvas (I have not experimented with pre-primed canvas and the dye before). I do like the dimension of control the stiffer gesso adds to the folding process, and the detail I was able to get. This work in progress photo shows the beginnings of the oil glazes over the un-gessoed side of the canvas:

The results on the gesso side (now the back side of the painting) are interesting as well, but I think to subtle for my purposes as of yet:

4″ x 6 1/2″ pod drawn slightly smaller than scale. oil pencil on illustration board. round 1. thinking about some oil pastel for round 2 maybe.

I should know what tree this is from… but it escapes me right now. I do not like that I am getting rusty with remembering such things.

“I share Maury’s opinion, and I was able to study the phenomenon in the very midst, where vessels rarely penetrate. Above us floated products of all kinds, heaped up among these brownish plants; trunks of trees torn from the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, and floated by the Amazon or the Mississippi; numerous wrecks, remains of keels or ships’ bottoms, side planks stove in, and so weighted with shells and barnacles, that they could not again rise to the surface. And time will one day justify Maury’s other opinion, that these substances thus accumulated for ages, will become petrified by the action of the water, and will then form inexhaustible coal mines- a precious reserve prepared by farseeing Nature for the moment when men shall have exhausted the mines of continents.”

I assumed after reading this that in modern times the Sargasso must be full of plastic debris, like the more famously known North Pacific trash vortex… And it is as are the other three major ocean gyres on our planet. Of course this led me to thinking that somehow a version of Maury’s predicted “coal mines” at sea could actually be a possibility… And at least at a derivative level, power can be generated from all that plastic.. Fascinating when science fiction authors think up, even as long ago as over a century, stuff that actually comes about like some kind of surreal prediction… Well, almost. So far the only thing produced from all this waste and the action of the water is a toxic soup. Maybe in this case the better future caster is George Carlin…

… “if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic…asshole.”

That’s right, folks. “The Planet Is Fine”… And no, we are not getting some “inexhaustible … Precious reserve” out of it, we’re just going to get poisoned… And eventually mutate into Morlocks… or even giant crab creatures. (After we fight off the blasted Martians!)

This made me think of a much slower process, an organic gyre on land that I used to look at in it’s intricate complexity. The rental property I lived at somewhat recently had these giant, hundred year old beech trees. The gnarled roots had broken the “lawn” (not lawn under the massive shaded spaces under those trees) up into a series of spiraled nooks which collected organic matter that in the central part of each small basin had become a deep brown slurry to feed the tree. I took some photos of these that I hadn’t used and were some of the few that actually survived my recent hard drive disaster. Seemed to be the perfect subject matter for EBSQ Roots, Bulbs and Rhisomes Exhibit

However, this is such a detailed undertaking, I don’t know if I will be able to finish in time for the deadline. I snapped a photo of the w.I.p. after the first go at it, though it has progressed much farther at this point than shown here.

Speaking of undertakings… I was able to post all of this from my iPad, so I have made some progress interfacing with my tech… At this rate my decendents may wind up being Cylons instead of giant crab creatures.