Belzoni

Back in February, my good friend John Whelan joined me for a long weekend and we took a painting road trip. We had drawn and painted together since we first met in 1977 in Aix-en-Provence. After Katrina, he generously came down to help me with some repairs to my garage and we visited New Orleans as it was getting back on its feet. He came one more time and we enjoyed ourselves in New Orleans and painted a few scenes on Horn Island. But he had never visited the rest of Mississippi so I took him on a painting trip through the Delta. John and I share an enthusiasm for what he describes tongue-in-cheek as industrial disease. I knew what would be one of our stops, the Farmers Storage Terminal in Belzoni.

Like two peas in a pod, we set up on the roadside in front of this scene. True to the Ashcan School ethic, John pulled up a big rubbish can to use as a shelf. We went after this scene with abandon. This was among the happiest mornings I’ve had recently. Passers-by were struck by not one but two painters at work on this industrial site and that led to some great encounters between the local folks and us. What in hell is going on?

I started this scene in washed-out pencil, thinned it out with turps, and then used purple, yellow, and green in tribute to Mardi Gras. I went very faint and thinned out on the colors. It was such a stretched-out scene that I used two panels side by side. I really enjoyed the foreground in this one. By the time we had to move on, I had a good beginning.

We spent the night in Leland with friends and the next morning on the patio, I added more, leaning into the purple. This was preposterous to me but also perfect. The sky seemed especially in tune with the threatening weather.

In April, I took this with me to Trust and worked on it some more. Here is where it finished up.

The next step was to prepare a single large canvas for a return engagement. In July, I drew it out on a 24 x 48 in the Trust studio and made plans to go back.

To my surprise, when I got there, the large “circus tent” on the right had been retracted, exposing the central poles. At first, I was disappointed and then I began to zero in on the strangeness of these towers with their furled cloth bunched up high. So I went with what was there. I arrived in the early morning and worked with a simple palette. I had listened to Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit on the way over and he talked about making big piles of 4 or 5 colors to start a painting with. So I used a pad of peel-off palette paper to do that. I did extremely pale cerulean blue and zinc white, with hints of yellow for the sky, and ultramarine blue with zinc white for the structures. I was out of my normal tube and had to use an older one that turned out to be very rich and dark - nice!

I used a single green for the middle ground and some red and a dash of yellow, heavily diluted with zinc white for the road. As I worked that out, there were a few small puddles from a recent rain so I put in the reflections. That instantly worked for me. I added a few dark areas in alizarin crimson which later caused me a little heartburn.

I came back one week later and did some additional work. My main goal was to get things in more accurate proportion and to unify the color scheme of the structures. Generally, I left the foreground and middle ground alone. I took this back to Trust with me to work on the details and eliminate the glitches. This was the work of several mornings, but it generally flowed without hitches. Here is how it ended up. I like it as much as the original study, even though they are very different. This one has a tranquil mood in common with the Algiers and recent Max Patch scene.

More Max

As much as I like the first big fall scene I did of Max Patch, it was primarily a studio effort, due to the strong winds at the time I first tried to paint there. I wanted to do more perceptual painting. Over the past 2 weeks, I went up there two more times, first doing a more squared-off version and then a large horizontal format. The first version began with a reddish-brown ground on a 24 x 30 canvas. The conditions were nearly perfect, breezy without getting out of control, gorgeous light, and very few interruptions from hikers and lookers-on. One day I may do a pure monochrome version like the one below just to see what happens.

This piece took a vivid expressionistic direction and I had just enough sense to let it come out and not “fix” it afterward. It shows the energy of the conditions on site, including the strong wind and the mid-day light and it departs from the actual colors thanks to the warm tones of the underpainting. I was very happy when both Christina and two painter friends gave it a strong vote of confidence. I enjoyed the foreground work, the blackberry bushes, and the timothy grass.

Still, that cautious, conservative, protestant voice in my head wouldn’t let this riot go unanswered. “Isn’t all that just a bunch of easy fireworks? Have you regressed? Prove to me you can paint that soft, delicate gradation of receding blue ridge mountains.” I pulled out a couple of panels and did a pano view with a traditional palette to prove to myself that I could render those mountains as they were. I got the basic image down and then spent some time on the gradations and then worked on some thinned-out layers, almost glazing to see what would happen. I liked what I got and put it aside. More or less, I had made the point to myself, even if that foreground was still too lemony.

This pano version was a studio exercise to understand the contours of the scene and the color challenges. I wanted to do a pano scene on site. So a few days later I prepped a 24 x 48 canvas with a reddish acrylic undercoat and set out the next day. I also took a smaller panel as a backup plan. This time I got out there about 2-3 hours earlier and there still were low-lying clouds nestled among the mountains. The light was cool and soft. There were more hikers this time around but I was happy to be left alone. I really liked how the blue lines stood out against that rose-red background. I started with the sky and worked up from the horizon line. Then I worked my way around from right to left and ultimately managed to minimize the fussiness. I used paint that I mixed up in large batches to cover the general area and didn’t bother too much with details. I was working with two palettes, the first was my traditional palette where I could scoop up what I needed without going to tubes and the second was a paper palette for mixing batches of color. This way I could get to a clean surface and also spread out the mixing for larger quantities, then tear it off and do another batch.

This was about a five-hour session on my feet. Toward the end, I slipped back into detail work on the foreground and got discouraged. Here is where the backup canvas came in handy. I put the big one aside and poured all that impulse for fauvist color, detail and decoration into the back-up panel. I turned 180º toward the top of Max Patch and quickly knocked out a sort of sequel to the first scene a few weeks before. It was a good way to purge myself of those impulses.

I got both of these home and took stock of them. I really liked the softness and the almost flat quality of the big scene. The nestled clouds and the closest ridges needed a little more work. The other scene was more than I could understand. I spent some time tinkering with it but I’m not convinced I improved it. Here is the final state of both of these pieces. Overall I am very happy with how this path unfolded.

Riverbend

I had been working on a Natchez scene for a while and got it where I thought I wanted it. Then, after I returned to a New Orleans scene this month to better depict the bridge, I pulled out all the river paintings to look at them together. I always had reservations about the Natchez scene, so I started with a rework of the sky to better capture the mysterious atmosphere of that town. When I got that done, I still felt like the composition was somehow empty, and so on impulse, I sketched in two figures at the top of the landing, Derrick and Rip. It was Rip who afforded me the chance to paint the scene by inviting me to attend a ceremony in Natchez where Derrick would receive an award. We stayed at the wonderful Eidelweiss B&B, right above Natchez Under Hill.

Once I sketched them in, I wavered over whether the figures would be a good idea. As I came closer to their likenesses, that uncertainty faded away. I used a Mahl stick to steady my hand for the fine detail. The initial facial expressions were mask-like but in time I was able to capture some of their joy over receiving the award. All this was done with fine-tip brushes. Derrick is holding the award and Rip is holding the key to the structure which his construction company rebuilt.

After it was over I was happy with the result but I had this odd feeling from seeing that portion of the painting empty for over a year and a half. Part of me wasn’t sure if the figures “belonged” in the scene. In the perverse emotional world of an artist, filling what previously had seemed too empty somehow now seemed wrong. After sitting with this version for a little while and getting Christina’s reaction, I decided the addition was the right move. I thought the figures as painted fit into the overall treatment of the scene and the color scheme worked. I also liked the meta aspect of a couple of guys sharing a moment in what might be a tourist snapshot, except it’s an oil painting.

I also thought about Natchez’s history as a slave trading center and this particular landing’s role as a portal to unload Black men, women, and children for auction. For a spell, I imagined through this painting that there were ghostly ancestral witnesses to a Mississippi in which a Black man built and owned broadcast media, real estate, and construction businesses and his cousin received a prestigious award for preserving a Black-owned historic building. But I don’t yet feel comfortable with the magic realism necessary to visualize ideas like this. Natchez’s own Noah Saterstrom fluently does this kind of time and space travel (and his personal history is tied to Eidelweiss). This thread of imagination also made me recall the extraordinary George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

I also generally had been scolding myself for doing landscapes with no people, so including Derrick and Rip in this scene was a step in the right direction. For those of you who read this post, I’ll share both versions to decide for yourself. For my part, these men belong here and many more people hover nearby in my imagination.

Piety Wharf

From a little detail came a whole new painting. Two and a half years ago I painted Winter Barge in the midst of the COVID lockdown. The Crescent City Connection, a modest detail on the horizon, was shown in toothpick simplification. I later did pretty detailed paintings of the bridge over the Mississippi in Natchez and Memphis. When I pulled them all out to look at them I realized that the New Orleans bridge was not up to par compared to the other two.

In March I went to Crescent Park to do a small down-river study after visiting it with my fellow painter John Whelan. Then this month I decided to do a full painting of the West Bank from the Piety Wharf. Before going over, I sketched out the bridge’s general proportions and the buildings behind the levee in red and gray acrylic. Parts of the underpainting had the out-of-focus look of an old discolored daguerreotype.

I left Gulfport before dawn so that I could paint that delicate early morning New Orleans light. I went over two mornings in a row and brought the painting back to do the struts and beams of the truss bridge in the studio. It was a great experience. I believe I captured plenty of perceptual painting at the scene and was able to finish the necessary but tedious bridge detail in the controlled setting of the studio.

The quality of the light can sharply change how this piece looks, much more than is usual with paintings. The photo above is how it looks under basic studio light. The video clip below is shot in early morning light and leans hard into the blues.

A bit of progress

Over the lockdown I tended to spend more time in the studio than in front of the scene I was working on. After returning from NC this past fall, I spent more time on site. This produced progress in the quality of the painting in the past few scenes I have completed in Fort Morgan. I am happy with both of these. In both cases I started with tonal studies and then came back to the scene to finish them on site instead of in the studio. I have two more to complete, including one of Ft. Morgan itself, and a view of the bay through pine trees.

Max Patch

For several years I have attempted views of Max Patch, mostly on small canvases. it’s such an immersive site, a 360º view of Appalachian mountains in NC and TN. The Appalachian Trail passes across this high meadow. Lugging the gear up here is an ordeal and then there’s the wind. But what a view.

In July, I brought fellow painter John Whelan up here and we worked from this site, looking (I believe) into Tennessee. Everything was green and without ready paths for me to generate perspective. I knocked out a crude study of the mountains on two panels and put it aside.

Back at the studio, I transferred the scene to a 3 by 4 canvas using graphite and then some turps to create soft gray passages that I overlaid that with an ochre orange wash. And there things sat until mid October.

I went up to Max Patch on perhaps the peak fall leaf interval lugging all the gear but it was simply too windy to set up a large canvas so I took a few reference photos to get started and soaked up those extraordinary mountain gusts.

Working from a mixture of memory and reference photos, I started to fill in the scene, hoping for another chance to get up there. I focused upon the mountains and sky.

Almost from the start, I was responding to those strong gusts from the hike up there. It was really exciting to play with the orange, yellow, and blue and it took a lot of time to refine. I set it aside for the rest of October and finished the Hot Springs bridge scene. When I picked it back up I was already trying to carve some perspective into this foreground with some green triangular shapes. I made easier headway on the upper half and, in an exception to my usual approach, I worked from the top down to the middle of the canvas, leaving the bottom for last. Here are a few examples of that progress.

So what I was searching for, without knowing it, was a ground - a bed on which to complete the foreground. I ended up using turps to erase things and get as close back to the third version as I could. Then from there I carefully studied the video and reference photos to create a foreground. Even then, I found myself hampered by the journalist-illustrator mindset, so I turned the canvas and reference image upside down and started from the midline up to create the bed of the meadow without knowing how it would end up. Happily, this approach freed me up to make strokes and add direction that allowed me to suggest a level of detail and movement that I couldn’t do with the scene right side up. It worked a little like contour drawing by interrupting my habitual impulses and focusing me on what was in front of me on the canvas. I needed to give the ground beneath the foliage a structure and direction that was strong enough without pushing ahead of what came before or would come next . Eventually, I got there after a series of reworking and overpainting to soften the sharper directional shadows. And once that foreground was in place, I began timidly to put in the wheat-colored stalks on the meadow and add the hay beds into the foreground. Once this was underway, it was a lot of fun. This is when it came together for me. This was done almost wet on wet so that it cut into the bed in places. I then went back into the midpoint and made some adjustments such as stressing the downslope on the right and reworking various details in the left-hand mountains and the distance. Finally, I added a layer to the sky to make it look more complete. And that’s how I got here.

NC beginnings

While in NC last month I began several pieces and finished one, a view of Hot Springs. Here are the first fruits, most of them still ripening, of this new chapter in life. Some of these were begun during a visit from my artist friend and architect John Whelan. This continues a painting friendship that stretches back 45 years to Provence, France.

I took John to see a number of sites over this weekend and we managed to paint some scenes at the French Broad River bridge in Hot Springs and at Max Patch. We also went to Paint Rock where some time ago I finished a landscape after several arduous reworkings. I was happy that John enjoyed seeing my version of this scene after we climbed up there together.

JW on Max Patch