Living with Art...

Now this is a great story... the last line in the article is the best:

A crack in the floor which forms Tate Modern's latest installation has claimed its first casualties. Three visitors lost their footing and fell into the gap made by Doris Salcedo's art work. They were among more than 12,000 people who viewed the installation, which runs the full 167 metres (548 feet) of the Turbine Hall.

The Tate said the trio did not sustain serious injuries. "We can confirm that three visitors missed their footing and tripped in the Turbine Hall at the opening event. "They were attended to immediately by Tate security staff trained in first aid but there have been no serious injuries. Twelve thousand people visited the installation on the first day and there have been no further incidents," a spokeswoman said.

"Tate staff are monitoring the space carefully to ensure the safety of our visitors. "Tate has a lot of experience handling complex installations and visitor safety. We have thought carefully about visitor safety, working closely with Southwark Council and there are measures in place. There are no plans to barrier off the work at this stage."

Tate staff are on hand with leaflets warning about the dangers of getting too close to the piece. Gallery attendants have also been instructed to give verbal advice to visitors.

Brazilian sculptor Salcedo says the work, entitled Shibboleth, symbolises racial division.
The crack represents the gap between white Europeans and the rest of the world's population. According to Salcedo, the fissure is "bottomless... as deep as humanity"...

However, it appears to be around three feet at its deepest point. - UK Times Online, Oct 10th

Always nice to know the human condition really only rates three feet... - DN

Why Immersion Travel Art?

I recently met my most interesting local, yet, in the southern Midwest… given the fact that I’m originally from this area – that’s saying a lot.

The woman was a teacher in her late fifties, both employed and residing within fifty miles of where she was raised. That in it’s self is not uncommon, I dare say that many of my neighbors have rarely (if ever) made the three-hour-drive north to St. Louis or south to Memphis. However, the person, to whom I refer now, seems to have traveled, though exactly how widely, I do not know. She herself is well educated and her daughter is a writer, currently living in Los Angeles and doing script-work for the television show “Jericho”. None of this is what stood-out in our conversations, though. Instead, I was completely intrigued by her stories of attending the “Negro School” prior to desegregation taking root in the Mississippi Delta region of southern Missouri.

I expected tales of want and discomfort and instead was met with … a happy childhood. While she made distinction that not all students of segregated education had a “fine experience”, she remembered her own experience as boasting a school that offered limitless opportunities for education as it was well-funded with new books, a nice well-kept brick building and only the best support materials (new chalk-boards, desks and such). "We had everything the White School had," she told me. The Negro School was located behind the White School (adjoining properties), with the playgrounds divided by a gravel road. She told me that when one side’s ball would bounce over the line, the group of children on the other side would happily toss it back. It was a surreal discussion on race without any real mention of color or class distinction.

Located in the middle of corn and cotton fields, only a few miles across the Mississippi River, with Dyersburg Tennessee as the nearest neighbor - this pocket of uncommon racial co-habitation continues to exist to some degree, today. The schools are now joined as one, with the former Negro School serving as the district’s Middle School. The interior of the school boasts photographs of the school district’s history, hiding nothing in the shadows. Proudly displaying throughout the halls images of multi-racial graduating classes from their school, over the years. Even now, there continues a small black population mixed intermittently amongst the predominately white classrooms, but the race relations seem nowhere near the strain found in other regions of the country, or even other neighboring sections of southern Missouri.

Why Immersion Travel Art?… for stories and interactions, just like the one above. I could have never heard this story from the mass media, or read about it in a travel brochure provided by the local Chamber of Commerce. Now what do I do with this information, this aspect of “knowing” that exposes intimacy of relationships and turns my mind and actions from tourist to indigenous. – DN

Mass Marketing Dreams

Another great website, click here to view. Interesting to read about others' dreams. Sure some are ridiculous; many are materialistic and consumerist-driven… but then there are those beautiful few that want nothing more than a moment of guileless unrelenting quality… a dream worth something from a purely individual standpoint not based on the skewed perspective of society.

What is the exhibition of art, but a dream to attain acceptance from society? Why else display it? I don’t paint to a mold, do I exhibit towards one? Is it really possible to display work with the same individuality as one creates art? – DN

Looking for art in a technical world...

For a while I’ve read, in silence, the occasional abbreviated words of another. “Nietzsche's Wife (Ecce Mulier)” is probably my favorite blog - minimalist, simple, and indignant of others.

Even the postings in the archive read as if they are indifferent to time, her blog lives in the moment… “Nietzsche's Wife” has quite possibly figured-out how to turn a simple blog into process-oriented art.

Click here to read. – DN

Morris Graves Museum

Opening tomorrow, click here. - DN

Endorsements and Labels of Affection

“Teachers Endorse Hillary” was the headline I read this morning when I sat at my computer, coffee in hand, for my morning news overview. That’s curious, I don’t recall anyone EVER asking me whom I endorsed during my itinerant public school teaching career. I do remember something having to do with political buttons leaning hard to Democrat while I was under the guise of the local teacher’s union in St. Louis (guild of thieves is probably a better description), more than a handful of years ago. Don’t get me wrong… I tend to lean Democrat, despite my disgust with the party and politics in general… but I still don’t like the implication that one has to check their brain at the door when voting, just because a union demands the final say… it seems twice as despicable when you consider that we’re discussing teachers or the molders of minds... relenting their objective right to choice.

Which leads me to the question of “how to endorse a style or genre of art?” I’m sure this is not a unique area of conflict… every artist that is interested in creating work for the sake of the process, must at some point grow tired of pigeon-holing into a series, style, subject…etc. Yet, do we place ourselves into the position of defining our art or do we simply cave to societal pressure?

I would have to say the most common question that accompanies, “so whadya do?”… has to be “what kinda art?”

After all these years, I still have nothing short of a half-assed response when faced with this question. “uhhmmm, I paint a lot, no really a LOT”. But what happens if I start to utilize the kiln in the corner of my studio (you know… the one under the box of travel books)?

Some additional common questions I field:
Is it landscape or abstract (what about when I venture into figures)?
Is it paint or ink (what about when I mix the two... mixed-media)?
Are scrolls still paintings, in the strictest commercial sense of the word, if they’re not on canvas or framed behind glass?
And my favorite: Does it hurt your value if you produce too many paintings in a year (supply and demand)?

By the way, I don’t care for any of the candidates but I dislike Obama the least, so that's how I lean in our current political climate. - DN

Enough is Enough?

Now this link is interesting a little story on a modern Secessionists in the USA and its not exactly whom you would have thought. Click here to read. - DN

Individual Narratives

"Samuel's Drawing, age 4", Sharpie & Watercolor on HP Photopaper

My son has already acquired an interest in working with non-traditional painting media. This painting, along with ten more, was completed a month before his fifth birthday. Since that time he has started an intensive pre-school program that has been wonderful for his social development and maturity, but has done serious damage to his natural artistic technique. That nice three-dimensional figure you see above has been replaced with traditional stick figures with scribbles for bodies. Today, when we work in the studio, we’ll have to practice the process of unlearning what I refer to as… idiot-socialized art (the faux-modesty that occurs when a student joins a group of peers and suddenly prefers to paint or draw like everyone else in order to be accepted as “nothing-special”).

Which brings me around to narratives. Stories about life, seemingly insignificant moments in time, and what happens to dreams when mortality gets in the way. That special desire to be accepted as less than exceptional, particularly in the South and Midwest… Garrison Keillor has used the ideal as the basis of his writing and radio program for nearly forty years. That concept that extols – what’s good enough for one man should be more than enough for a generation.

But I’m alluding to the negative, again; who’s to say mortality can’t emphasis rather than unravel a fantasy of self-confidence and artistic alienation. After all, it’s the richness in the details of existence that make life worth living.

Abstract concepts in a literal world, occasionally, are harshly received. I’ve previously mentioned my admiration for the writings of John Haines. A painter turned poet that wrote every word like the scratch of a minimalist painter searching for the perfect brushstroke. His beautiful genius for detailing metaphors from analogies is a rare find in the most perfect of situations. However, it was even more out of place for an east-coast native with an on-again, off-again romance with mid-twentieth century Alaskan homesteading. Innumerable winters and a couple wives later, he was suddenly old. No longer in the place he loved. Instead he was conducting readings in New York and other university-infatuated cities along his book tours. He learned his lesson and returned to the source of his passion, unfortunately… naturally, though… lives continued while he was away. The best moments seemed to have passed into realms of technology and we only have his poems and prose as a record of that time as a path to relive it. His best poems and stories were the ones derived from chance encounters with locals along lonely hunting excursions and the very occasional all-night storytelling camps with fellow sourdough dreamers in remote shacks reserved as meeting places originally intended for joining men with whiskey.

Humans are social beasts, but that does not mean that we should lose our individuality for the prospect of further association; quite the contrary, it is our individual character that defines our purpose. – DN

New Varnishes

Click the image to see enlargement...


"Casting Stones", Sumi and Acrylic Inks and Paints on Canvas, 12"x30"

My “to varnish or not to varnish” philosophy is cyclic. My scroll paintings are all unvarnished in the sense that I do not add a final sealant to the paintings… yet they are protected in the manner in which I initially mix my painting grounds.

Since recently returning to canvas from a long period spent working primarily on paper, I have begun to research new mediums (and rediscover past ones, as well) for “finishing” my paintings. Today, I finally decided upon re-exploring my previous dabbling in the land of encaustic painting. The work, pictured above, is “pre-varnish”; as soon as I find my errant half-empty jug of Dorland’s Wax medium, I’ll re-stretch (because I stretch flat over wood panel to paint in my destructive fashion and then release from the panel to stretch open over bars)… and seal/polish the painting and finally re-post for inspection. While I know the local viewer will immediately recognize an observable difference, I’m curious how much change will be noticeable from the on-line perspective. - DN

The Number 33

Click image to See MORE!... well actually, just larger.....

"Late Spring, Missouri Storm", Oil on Archival Board, 8"x40"

This is an older piece completed after my childhood home was destroyed by the nearly simultaneous strike of two tornadoes in southern Missouri, a few late springs ago. I was the age my daughter is now, when my father and I spent a spring and summer building a home that seemed luxurious by our standards, during my father’s 33^rd year. He has always claimed number 33 to be his lucky number. It took my own marriage, family and a long time of both to understand why he held that figure to a near holy proportion. Building his family a home was his Mt. Sinai. Only a few months from that age, myself, I wonder what grand plans await my little family and I. - DN

Poison in Motion

Click the image to see the detailed view:

"Burning Field Rows", Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 6"x16"

The sense of movement is a continuous underlying theme in my work. Countering directions and currents of change in typically stable entities marks the compositions of my paintings.

The nearby fields have been burning for over a week, now. My daughter's asthma is reacting with the chemical-heavy smoke that billows unnaturally overhead like dirty-brown mushroom clouds. That type of reaction from a simple field burn cannot be normal. The cotton is halfway through the harvest and the soy was low on production. So its time… time to raze the fields and prepare to start again. Mounds of raw cotton line the county roads running parallel to the interstate, like dollops of cream trailing home. – DN

Desires Without End or Just Without Merit

So if I made alyah to Israel, how long would it take to grow bored? How soon would my wife find me spending my Sunday mornings in a Jerusalem cafe... hidden down some two thousand year old alley, drinking cappucinos, reading the NY Times - focus shifting between the travel and arts sections... and daydream of living somewhere else? Does it end? -DN

Southern Abstraction

You know the routine... click the image to see the enlarged detail...



"Tallit, Southern Fields and Shmita", Sumi and Acrylic Ink and Paint on loose Canvas


Shmita is the law in Torah that states every seventh year the fields must be allowed to rest. According to the Jewish calendar, this is the year (5768).

My creative burnout factor has greatly increased over the past few months, as I find myself overwhelmed with continuous exhibitions and new land to explore and paint. To keep my interest-level and rapid production high, without degrading my level of quality… I have returned to my earlier forays of abstraction based upon the surrounding landscape.

My work has held a certain degree of abstraction to its mast for a number of years, but only occasionally have I driven my art towards a complete series boasting nearly 100% non-representative qualities. Yet, here I am. Attempting to usher in a Modernist art movement that already lived a full-life outside the southern states. While I realize that there have been plenty of other artists that explored the realm of abstraction while working in the South (Robert Rauschenberg and Julian Schnabel – both Texans which doesn’t necessarily constitute Southern; and of course, the artists of Black Mountain College, etc); I have to wonder why in this singular place, the concept of Modernism hasn’t stuck… at all? Imbued by barn paintings on saw-blades and actual old “pieces of wood salvaged from a barn”; I believe I know the answer and it’s hidden somewhere in the traces of a disappearing bible-belt, the slow advancement of higher education and an overall desire to remain socially simplistic in a radically ____________ world (you fill in the blank).

I’m not always sure why I chose a specific location when the need to move arises. Sure, I give myself a laundry list of reasons and rationales, but deep-down… I really only understand that most basic of desires - I need a journey. Part of needing a journey goes hand-in-hand with taking a break from the comfortable to explore that part of the psyche that we don't parade at parties. Rauschenberg probably said it best, though:

"You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist."

Happy Trails (or dark convoluted ones if that is what you need to get your creative juices flowing) - DN

Eclipse

Click the image to see the detailed view.


"Eclipse: Crowley's Ridge Under a Red Moon at 3AM", Sumi and Acrylic Inks and Paint on Canvas

A recent late evening/early morning eclipse created a blood-red moon... as it moved over the nearby rise of Crowley's Ridge. Looking at it during the hours between waining sleep and the faint of wakefulness, I wondered it it was an eclipse or simply G-d peeling a blood orange in the sky. - DN

Cottonfields

"Cottonfields" Acrylic and Sumi Inks and Paints on Canvas

Click on the image to see the larger work. My last posting of new work was not actually of new Missouri-based paintings, so I thought I'd start showing them on a regular basis to prove I am painting here! - DN

Is it just the name... or does it matter that paintings are ...GOOD?

If the two dozen small paintings discovered by Alex Matter five years ago in his deceased parents' storage locker are not by Jackson Pollock, then I'd like to congratulate whoever did make them. Now on view for the first time in a fascinating, much anticipated exhibition called "Pollock Matters" at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art, they are beautiful little pictures… And what if the paintings are never proven to be Pollocks - or proven indisputably not to be Pollocks - will they then become worthless? The best of them are still lovely to look at - or so it seems to me. What matters most in today's market-driven art world, the artist or the art? The object or the brand? – Boston Globe 9/2/2007

How often are artists (and collectors, gallerists, curators, critics...) found fighting for overall personal name recognition as opposed to battling for significance in an individual piece? The process is all that matters, the singular work created during that illuminated moment of lucidity that transfers a person from human to god, from painter to artist. Enlightenment is fleeting. It’s as fickle about leaving as arriving, and it can only be found in the flash of the creative process… not saddled to drudgery of an imperfect life. – DN

New Work

New pieces created specifically for the Morris Graves Exhibition... (among a group of 28 paintings). Click on an image to see the detailed version. - DN

No Such Thing as a Quiet Revolution?

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."--PAUL GAUGUIN

... and then there is always the back-handed inspiration of Graham Greene:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."--GRAHAM GREENE

I have always heard the art world is only a faithful mistress to young artists. I look back at other, more successful, artists I have known that burned-out… “You had a good run, thank God you were young before it passed you by, too bad your youth didn’t allow you to enjoy it.” Or maybe that’s just my jaded opinion of what I saw.

Sunday, I tossed more logs on the fire, barely refreshed after completing, crating and shipping twenty-eight paintings to the Morris Graves Museum, last Friday. I was once again stretching canvas and painting into wet gesso, without the patience to even formulate a coherent thought before I drug my roller and brush over the surface, disfiguring the clean white with abrasive combinations of red, yellow and violet. Starting and finishing a bottle of a French cerulean blue-colored concoction called “Hpnotiq”; like water in the hundred-degree heat matched by true southern humidity. I’m beginning to wonder if my painting process will ever relax to a slower pace. I’ve read that even Pollock couldn’t slow down, he either painted feverishly or he didn’t paint at all. Looking backwards, through the bottom of a bottle, at an unbelievable ten-year-run gone past, it’s said that Pollock didn’t even paint for the final eighteen months of his life.

I often daydream of returning to my Hi-line home in the northern Rockies, spending my days hunting pheasant and evenings quietly painting my distant neighbors from the Blackfeet reservation or half dozen Hutterite colonies. My painting style would either be repugnantly dismissed or unique enough to merit the regular occasion to attain models and practice my craft. Like most opportunities in life, I can only assume that it would fall within some middle ground of acceptance. Someone, just this morning asked, “Do you get bored easily?” “My God, Yes!” I wanted to declare… and here I am later, daydreaming of my northern home and still wondering if it’s possible to slow my near-rabid painterly pace. – DN

Updates

I've been messing around with the layout of this blog as well as another overhaul of the main portfolio website. Thanks for your patience. - DN

Scam or Need an Editor?

So I got this via e-mail, today...

Córdoba, Argentina.

Dear Visual Artist

Daniel North

Found out its work quality, we considered your incorporation in the book "THE AESTHETICS AND THE CONTEMPORARY ART" produced by ATcultura.

Biographies and images of artists ; commentaries by prominents reviewers, messages and essays of Contemporary Art, will be present in this highquality book, big format, it will be distribuited on first universities and museums of the world.

Book will be edited in illustration paper, with photocrom illustrations and in a fancy box, covered by a luxe cloth binding, bilingual ( Spanish and English).

Artists invited to take part of edition, will invite by a selection criteria of quality.

Atcultura is sponsored only formally by the Government and enterprises but solicit not subsidies from they, wherefore ATcultura prefer avoid any possible conditionament, this colaborative project solicit to artists one minimum monetary contribution.

Previous books of ATcultura include artists like Caio Fonseca, Natasha de Wet, Perez Celis, Carole Feuerman, Regina José Galindo, etc. You can see in www.atculturalibro.blogspot.com or in our page www.atcultura.com

If would be interesting participation in this book for you, we require you as soon possible reply to: atcultura@argentina.com with a brief biography for be larged to future, adress and phone number, to be considered one of selectioned artist for receive own proposal.

Best regards.

Dipl. Ricardo Lescano Grosso

Director. ATcultura.

www.atcultura.com

My first instinct was that this originated in Nigeria, but the website was real and the blog was real... so is it an elaborate hoax or amazingly bad editing? - DN

Sometimes, I Do Consider Money as a Motivator...

Lately, I’ve been considering a change in my preferred mediums. A painter at heart I could never easily abandon my palette mixing and kung-fu action painter moves. There is a simple majesty to being able to build flawless compositions with only a myriad of colors and image defining contour sumi-e ink lines.

Yet, I’m also interested in returning to sculpture, most specifically figurative work in clay; a medium I haven’t done much with, professionally, in a decade. Remember an earlier post of my newly acquired kiln… well the guilt of neglect is beginning to set-in… so I’ve been sketching figures for a new series of clay forms. Maybe nothing will come of these small designs, then again maybe I need to review the commission standards for sculptors versus painters in commercial galleries. I know a few of you may be scratching your heads at this point, wondering what commissions have to do with anything, well the industry standard is 50/50 for paintings and 60(artist)/40(gallery) for sculpture. Not huge differences but definitely something to consider for all those little college art students unsure of choosing a 2D or 3D major in Art. – DN

Talents

Sunday was Samuel’s 5^th birthday. He loves baseball and we planned on buying Cardinal’s tickets to take him to his first game on the special day. Then about a month ago he said that he wanted a Superman birthday party with all his friends, a big cake and piñata. He’s never had a big party… these past years we’ve lived too far away for family to attend and he’s always been too young to have many friends since he hasn’t yet been school-age and we have done our level best to abstain from organized religion.

This month, we enrolled him into pre-school two weeks prior to his birthday, just so he’d have a large group of friends to invite. Friday came and went and no one had responded to the RSVP as requested, we did our best to prepare ourselves for the onslaught of tears to come on Sunday. On the 26^th, the house was full, nearby family did what families should do and filled the void left by friends. Not one of the twelve invited children arrived. A few cousins came, but the age difference is drastic. I slowly recalled being told more than once that this nice southern town took it's time accepting new residents. However, the day was not lost, Samuel was glad in his gifts and his younger brother helped him break-open the piñata. Everyone had double helpings of cake and ice cream, so he wouldn’t notice the leftovers.

Later that evening as he prepared for bed, I asked him how he felt about his day. Samuel said that he had fun then paused and said, “It was too bad my friends couldn’t come, I wanted to see my new best friend Keaton, but at least my family is big”.

I’ve come to realize, in fatherhood, that some people are simply born stronger than others and no amount of growth or life-long conflict can match that inborn strength. Knowing this about my son, I realize that I probably learned more from this experience than he; then again... maybe we would have all just been better off if I had purchased the goddamn Cardinal’s tickets. – DN

Just one question, before continuing to the next painting.....

Stories are as important to my work as the finished paintings. Having said that… how much of this “new” art movement is about travel and how much is just a consuming desire to find a good personal narrative? – DN

Minor Artists Living Major Lives

Morris Graves gained a minor notoriety for outrageous pranks such as one in which he filled a baby carriage with rocks, made a trailer for it of toothbrushes, and pushed it into the dining room of the Olympic Hotel, the forerunner of the Four Seasons Olympic. He placed a rock on each of several chairs around a table, and sat down with them to order dinner.

In 1953, he staged the first Northwest art "Happening," although that word still lay several decades in the future. Museum officials, collectors, and art world notables all had expressed a desire to see a house he was building of cinderblock in a wooded area north of Seattle. He and several artist friends sent invitations to everyone on the Seattle Art Museum mailing list (a list surreptitiously obtained) saying, "You or your friends are not invited to the exhibition of Bouquet and Marsh paintings by the 8 best painters in the Northwest to be held on the afternoon and evening of the longest day of the year, the first day of summer, June 21, at Morris Graves' palace in exclusive Woodway Park."

Recipients chose to believe that the invitations meant they were invited. They arrived by droves, some formally dressed, to find the gateway to his house blocked with a table that held the moldy remains of a banquet 10 days old, complete with tipped cups and wine-stains, soaked with the drizzle from an overhead sprinkler. A recording of "dinner music" was interspersed with a recorded pig fight. Graves stayed out of sight, laughing nonstop as he observed the outraged guests through a chink in the cinderblock wall which abutted his gatehouse. - DELORIS TARZAN AMENT (author of Iridescent Light: the Emergence of Northwest Art, University of Washington Press, 2002).

Graves never took society or the formalized business-aspect of the art world too seriously. Though few outside the art world or the Pacific Northwest may recognize his name, Graves’ works are housed in the permanent collections of many of our country’s major museums. There is often a fine line between conceptual art and prank and although I assume that Graves never considered himself a conceptual artist, it’s fairly obvious that his dedication as a “process-oriented” artist overlapped into his daily life. The life of a seemingly “minor” artist is often no less fraught with adventure and dedication than that of any of the critically proclaimed masters. – DN

New Faces

Driving south to the delta lowlands, this morning, I passed a caravan of Mexicans towing empty vehicles. My assumption was that they were hauling auction-purchased vehicles from St. Louis to the deeper reaches of the south for resale at used car lots. It wouldn’t have been even a noticeable occurrence if it had been just the standard one car pulling another via chain as is so often found in the southern Midwest… but this was literally a troupe of seven to eight vehicles dragging that same number of ratty trucks and beater vans down the interstate with little more than a rusty chain and a prayer. The fact that all the drivers were Hispanic in a region once empty of their presence… jolted me.

This place I once called home has changed drastically in the ten years I’ve been away. The corn and bean fields of my youth have been replaced with rice paddies… driving-up the number of mosquito infestations in the region, without the added beauty of the terraced hills found in stereotypical National Geographic images of southeast Asia… few mountains exist in this flattened river bottomland and occasionally I forget the loveliness of the people and the food and the culture and my reasons for living here… and simply dream of once again climbing high and reaching for distant mountain peaks in other places I once called home. Not all change is for the worse, in fact often change is nothing more than a new face on an old routine.

I’m putting the final touches on my scroll paintings for the show at the Morris Graves Art Museum in northern California. Morris Graves, the artist, traveled the world and eventually found his solace in the northwest, painting the last of the evening light as it dangled over the Pacific. Rebuffed by critics for his ink paintings on paper that resembled Asian motifs and adopted-imagery, slammed especially hard for his attempt to create hanging scrolls in place of traditional stretched and framed canvas. I find a kinship with this man, a commonality in practice, though our work may present differing views of society. I feel justified in this next show, a natural progression in my travels… to exhibit in a place named for a fellow traveling painter imbedded in the process of making art and the arrogance to continue painting when not everyone “gets” it. – DN

Shoplifting Greatness

Woody Allen On Ingmar Bergman - "To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man's dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: 'Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can't figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?'" - The New York Times 08/12/07

On occasion, even the most formidable of master artists feel unworthy of the burden brought on by the creative process. Then again, there is always an abundant supply of critics to stomp on one’s life’s work and remind the masses that no one is special…

"Nearly all the obituaries I've read take for granted Mr. Bergman's stature as one of the uncontestable major figures in cinema.... Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist's continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson...." - The New York Times 08/04/07

Sometimes we just have to follow the path of desire to learn how one piece of art can influence the creative process in other artists and their works…

Still selling briskly at 50, "On the Road" "has far outlasted many other cult classics. Part of the reason for the novel's staying power is that popular artists keep referencing it. (A new movie version, directed by Walter Salles, who made 'The Motorcycle Diaries,' is scheduled to go into production early next year.) Everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beastie Boys has been inspired by Kerouac. ... But keeping it on hand can be difficult: among book-world insiders, 'On the Road' is known to be a heavily shoplifted work...." - The New York Times 08/15/07

How often does the critic claim an artwork or artist to be kitsch, when simply the act of deriding the work or person is the essence of the cliché?… the unrefined masses are occasionally more apt to recognize greatness… how many shoplifters are known to work at the New York Times… wait don’t answer that.– DN

Enough

“Day after day the visitors arrive, armies of them, primed to take their expensive plunge into one of the coolest collections of modern Western art in the world. That’s the bottom line: You go to museums to see art; MoMA owns fabulous art.

And a surprising amount of that art, which was once in the vanguard of culture, is about very old-fashioned things, like love and death, and landscapes and seasons, and one season in particular: summer.” – New York Times 7/27/2007

Not long ago, an art critic in Albuquerque mentioned the process of recognizing the change of seasons within the individual locales of my paintings. It was an unconscious effort on my part to paint the seasons; I was painting time and progression of life within a region… that has not changed in my most recent works, since moving to the South. I used to tell my students only one thing mattered in life and that was this: time is more valuable than money.

I live this life as the poor traveling artist, wandering the landscape for any opportunity to cast my line in that long-forgotten stream; cruising the terra firma scanning the perfect spot to set-up my easel for that singular quality plein-air painting moment. I paint when I have nothing to say; I paint when I can’t shut-up about the problems of my world. However, I don’t spend as much time as I should on the logistics of running my life as a business. I’ve read the articles; I’ve heard the lectures – what I need to do to sell in volume instead of quality. Christ, I produce more annual paintings than any other artist I have ever met… so being prolific isn’t a problem… but I’m also that maestro who has skipped an occasional sale because I refuse to send my paintings home with an unappreciative collector. I’ve been repeatedly informed that this will be my downfall. I have a family to raise, I’m often told… as if I could have forgotten the mops of blond and brown hair begging for attention in my studio whilst dreaming aloud of their own lives as adult artists.

If you don’t like the story behind the work… if you find it dreary or offensive… go to the mall and buy a giclee print of some mundane cottage glowing with light and framed with a triple-mat and copper plate displaying a corresponding New Testament passage. I’d rather spend my evening hours swapping stories with a fellow liar over gin and tonics than to waste my time convincing someone that my painting is grand. I’m a painter not a salesman.

It may be near the close of the season, but it is still summer or did you lose track of time? I may no longer be close to my mountains or hidden high-altitude glacial lakes, but I still have my green-eyed little boy that begs for drawing lessons in the evening. The remaining time in this late-summer is running off, but not without me. I have to seek out new early morning drives, there are two paintings in the studio I want to finish and children that need to be shown that time, for it’s own sake, is still rewarding and handsome in the face of ridicule and self-doubt. – DN

Salons

I ran across a call for submissions to a "Realism-only" salon exhibition in New York city. My knee-jerk reaction was... who still hosts or shows in traditional Salons, anymore? I clicked on the website and was slapped with the standard slew of anti-modernism/anti-abstraction slogans. Once again, my initial reaction was to stop reading and relegate the "organization" to the ever-growing pile of "I don't know art, but I know what I like" doctrine.

Then I stopped and noticed something... the images on the site were very nice, very accurate from a technical standpoint.. and even interesting from the perspective of composition... unlike "other" movements I've mentioned in this blog, these hacks actually had talent... in fact maybe they weren't hacks at all.....

The Art Renewal Center is building an encyclopedic collection of essays, biographies and articles by top scholars in the field.

ARC is the Eye of the Storm, at the core, hub and center of a major cultural shift in the art world. With a growing body of experts, we are setting standards to become ARC Approved™ for artists, art schools, systems of training, museum exhibitions and historical scholarship, to bring guidance, direction, goals and reality to an art establishment that has been sailing rudderless for nearly a hundred years.

Additionally, the Art Renewal Center is a non-profit educational organization committed to reviving standards of craftsmanship and excellence. Only by gaining a full command of the skills of the past masters can we create the masters of tomorrow. This is a step forward for our culture. Experimentation and creativity can only succeed and prosper when built on a solid foundation of past accomplishments, with the tools which empower artists to realize their visions.

Nothing has been more restricting and debilitating than the theories of modernism, which eliminated these tools, along with the skills to employ them. We are providing a forum for artists, scholars, collectors and the public to appreciate great art, and to recognize that they're not alone in their suspicions about the emptiness of modern and postmodern art. These suspicions are fully justified by the overwhelming body of evidence and historical facts. – Art Renewal International

On their website there are lists of ARC-approved schools, artists and instructors... this is the main road-block for me, I find it difficult not to question the dominion of of a self-imposed authority or critic. Once again, I doubt I'm hard-lined-enough to ever fit within their rigid structure... as I've mentioned before fundamentalism in any form scares me... I still fall within the camp of 'do what ever you want artistically, but have a masterly discipline and knowledge of the traditional techniques'. In the end it's all subjective. Art, Philosophy, Religion, BBQ (wet vs dry ribs...) - DN

Avoiding New York?

Peter Young’s art is a blast from the past that singes the present. His almost-major career, which flourished during the fashionably mythic late 1960s and early ’70s, has been drifting just out of reach for decades, a tantalizing medley of dotted, stained, gridded and geometric paintings, rarely seen but not forgotten. Now his work has been gathered into his first museum show anywhere and his first solo show in New York in 23 years.

Together these shows reintroduce a maverick Zenned-out hedonist who was also a process-oriented formalist with a sharp painterly intelligence, a genius for color and a penchant for the tribal and spiritual. They also revisit the efforts of an ambitious artist who got to the brink of a big New York abstract-painter career and took a pass, dropping almost completely from view and fading into legend.

Mr. Young was a painter of the 1960s in just about every sense of the word, up to and including the early use of LSD. Born in Pittsburgh in 1940, he grew up precocious near Los Angeles in the Santa Monica Canyon. His parents collected tribal art, as did family friends the painter Lee Mullican and his wife, Luchita. (Their son is the artist Matt Mullican.) By his teenage years Mr. Young had mastered a semblance of an Abstract Expressionist style. After studying art at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) in Los Angeles and Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., he moved to New York in 1960 with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp.

By 1969 he was part of a generation that would tinker incessantly with paintings’ fundamentals and had most of his ducks in a row for a big career. The high point was a two-man show with David Diao at the Leo Castelli Gallery. But when it opened, Mr. Young was on a four-month sojourn in Costa Rica, living among the Boruca Indians, painting on cloth stretched on four sticks tied at the corners. His marriage was over; he had an itch to travel; and his tolerance for the New York world was ebbing. (Upon his return from Costa Rica he retitled two paintings “Capitalist Masterpiece.”)

He roamed about the American Southwest and spent several months in Spain and Morocco. By the time one of his dot paintings made the cover of Artforum in April 1971, he was gone for good. In 1972 he settled more or less permanently in Bisbee, Ariz., where he continues to live and work. – New York Times

Click here to read the entire article.

Occasionally, the methods by which an artist lives a life is equally if not more inspiring than the process by which the artist creates work. Peter Young learned early on that the honest life of a painter is often marred with unpopular choices and career decisions that are initially met with skepticism when viewed through a purely capitalistic lens. He was at the cusp of his mandatory modern artists’ “good ten-year-run”, when he chose to walk away from the hype. Young followed his instincts to travel wherever the painting process took him - galleries and critics be damned. After all these years his work is finally getting it’s due, hopefully history will justify the decisions of his life, as well. If refusing to live and work in New York can work for him, maybe there is still hope for the rest of us wandering travel artists trapped in a "New York-centric" art world. – DN

Travels in America...

I've been following the exploits of a New York Times travel writer for most of the summer. While I wouldn't have chosen all the same stops or turns he's made along his journey... I find solace in knowing of other travelers that still find America among the most interesting of pilgrimages.

Click here to read his stories.

-DN

Till Death Do Us Part... or... The Microsoft Pledge for any Regular User of Windows

The end of June my laptop bit the dust after three years of duct tape, chanting and Tibetan prayer flags. My desktop computer is an eMachines PC that I bought at BestBuy as a back-up computer for $200, six years ago. Just checking my e-mail now requires scheduling an extra half-hour into my day. Somehow, though, that’s not the worst of it… my Sony monitor needs calibration and the software to perform said-such function cost $120-180… so that seems an unnecessary expense for an eight-year-old monitor. Needless to say, I am hanging on by a shoestring until the fall (after the Morris Graves Museum Show) when I plan on purchasing a new laptop.

The calibration on my monitor has led to some washed-out colors in my images when viewed in “normal” monitors and I have caught myself sneaking into friends’ back rooms to check-out the way my website looks on their computer… I’m sure they are confused when they here loud sobbing drift towards the front rooms. Now that my wife is out of grad school (graduated in mid-May YaaaaaaaaaaHooooooooooooooo!); we were wanting to make the leap from crappy Windows-based-PC to MAC, but looking at the price of replacing over $2k in software (Macromedia Studio MX, Photoshop CS, Office, etc)… I may just buy another PC laptop… no matter how much I dread dealing with the latest Microsoft late-term abortion called “Vista”.

To make matters worse, I had just started-up again on the writing of that novel I started five years ago… when the laptop melted down to a glorified paper weight. Writing it out in longhand on yellow legal tablets may sound quaint, but for now it just looks like another hassle, when I should be concentrating on finishing the paintings for my next show. – DN

Forgotten Paintings

Artists are often the worst predictors of which of their works will be singled-out by a collector or gallery. I have had numerous works in the past that sold, after I only reluctantly placed them in an exhibition or on the portfolio website. Equally, I have just as often found myself hawking the same favorite mountain pictures for years on end with little or no recognition.

The below painting is a perfect example of this misplaced affection for a painting no one seems to want… but me.


"Cervantes: Every Man is the Son of His Own Works", Sumi and Acrylic Inks on Paper, 22"x30"

It’s a painting about one’s place in society, often against the rigors of previous hosts. I loved the Cervantes quote and had it in mind when considering how I came to live in the high desert outside Santa Fe, in the shadow of a mountain scarred by former residents and left burnt for the diminutive solace of a man attempting to outrun his own brief history. – DN

Painting in Context

"Madeline's World, Madeline's Lot", Sumi Ink & Acrylic Ink & Paint on Paper, 22"x30"

My young daughter, Maddie Scarlett, has had the unique burden of having a travel artist as a father. The subject of my paintings is as often in reference to the complexities of a travel lifestyle as it is a representation of the residents and lands we encounter. My wife and children exist within every painting just as they are present for each moment of my traveling life.

I don’t have a “problem” with traditional portraiture; so much as I take issue with any form of painting that takes place without a specific context. Great works such as the “Arnolfini and his Bride” by Jan van Eyck garner their importance from the other activity in the composition, besides the actual portrait. Even the Mona Lisa would not have quite the following if the background behind the figure was mundane. Of course critics believed that photography would unhinge the art world a hundred years ago; many traditional figure painters had delegated portraiture to simple boring ¾ view sittings… one has to stop and wonder if rather than painting was this “ignoring of context in portraiture” actually the original birth of the SEARS portrait studio?

Andrew Wyeth’s 60-year-old painting, “Christina’s World”, was the early harbinger for exactly the type of portraiture I find interesting. Obviously, there have been other painters in the last half century that have created this type of “Portraiture in Context”, but it has not become the mainstay staple of Americana, that anyone would have hoped. So there it is… the evolution of an old dream. Another possibility for changing the American artistic frontier in the midst of a middle America obsessed with bad mall paintings, price-gouging giclee faux-paintings and bad law-office portraiture. - DN

Calling all Immersion Travel Art Writers

I dare say my travel art movement needs writers as much as it requires painters. The world is already ripe with travel writers, you say, but let me ask this question: what separates a travel writer in an art movement from any group of travel writers in the Frommers’ section at the local Barnes & Noble? I believe it is the fact that an art movement requires bias to have meaning. If there is no bias, no prejudice of partiality… then there can be no movement. No desire for change, no reason to speak when not spoken to… An artist can create mediocrity without passion… but passion cannot live without bias.

I have previously mentioned works by authors/artists such as William Least Heat-Moon. His ability to take a simple trip and radiate the region’s history and social implications has staggered many a reader since his first book “Blue Highways” broke-out in 1983. The most amazing aspect of his travelogue that continues in “PrairyErth” and “River Horse” is the slight hint of fictionalized reality. While his stories are highly accurate from the point of research and actual events experienced by the author; I know that I have often felt, as a member of his audience, that the stories worked because the approach was slightly manipulated via the addition of symbols and personal revelations. Likewise, Kerouac lived and wrote in the same manner. Stylizing his life around an image of purposeful rebellion in search of enlightenment; then writing in a reflective manner that ritualized the transition from impetuous cross-country driving and train hopping to mountain trekking and drunken meditation. I make these accusations with great admiration… you see, the world is full of human experience, but it takes a truly great artist to draw from these experiences a seemingly inconsequential flash of life-altering significance.

Be it poems or by-lines, novels or short stories humanity requires the written revelations of a dharma bum moving deliberately across the face of the earth. – DN

Prehistoric Landscaping

“Crowley's Ridge: Rose-tinted Glasses”, Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 8”x 21”, $300

Originally titled “Approaching Crowley’s Ridge with Rose-tinted Glasses”, I shortened the name after considering that my recently renewed interest in the area hardly qualifies as a “first-time approach”. Although, only a meaningless rocky hill to anyone else in the world, this ridge is nothing short of the prehistoric vein of life for the entire southeast Missouri region. This seemingly simple ridge, for most is just a beautiful rise from the wetlands to the hills and forest of the southern Midwest. – DN

Death in the Afternoon... and other moments of lucidity

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” - Ernest Hemingway

I remember a moment in school when a group of track athletes, including myself, were supposed to run two miles across town, from the senior high to the junior high in order to attend practice. As usual, a number of us were trying to find someone with a car that could drop us off a few feet from the front gate and thus hide our laziness. We had located one of my fellow runners that actually had a truck to which we planned on using to get from point “A” to “B”. However, in the last few hours before school was to end, his father had hired an artist to drop-by and paint lettering on the hood in some manner of teenage male machismo, that lives on today in enlarged tailpipes and rear spoilers that purposefully offset-the balance of the ride.

The artist strolled-in after the final school bell had rung… probably more than a few hours later than my friend’s father had expected. He nearly fell from the front seat of his van, than took an exuberant amount of time searching his pockets for the perfect brush on which he had been seated just moments before. A Mason jar, with a Ball lid, half-filled with simple black acrylic paint was still sitting on the dashboard where he had placed it for safekeeping, when he slammed the van door caked with a number of pin-hole rust spots. He noticed it a moment later and started the process again in its retrieval.

In the daze of youth he seemed old as dirt and even now, I cannot recall if there was any actual truth to that assumption. In his disheveled state he could have been on slightly older than I am now and I would have been oblivious to his age. An old man among boys, he had been set-up to fail the moment he agreed to the lettering job. While we stood in a semi-circle around the artist, we mocked his obvious three-in-the-afternoon drunkenness and made non-existent bets on how the lettering would turnout. We spewed hate and degradation at his back, while he ignored us behind a haze of stale beer and whiskey. At the time I didn’t think he heard us, now I believe he was simply resigned to ignoring our young delusion of class distinction combined with his undeniable current situation with a ¼” square brush and truck hood. That recognition, despite its sad consequences… may have been the marker of his intelligence in a moment of hotheads and fools.

Where do we hide our inevitable sense of superiority until the perfect moment of weakness and opportunity is recognized thus encouraging one human to reign over another? On a more personal note… what drives an artist to work as a sign painter? How much distance can exist between the spectacle of public shame and the crutch of a lingering cause? At what point does a lingering career become a cause? …or is it the cause that becomes the career? – DN

Don't Trust UPS with Your Personal Information

Although I am still a strong proponent of DHL as my primary shipping carrier… I have found myself bewildered the past few months as their company struggles to update my account address information from New Mexico to Missouri. I have literally called and formally updated my contact/shipping information no less than eight times since March. Last week, as I shipped out a 90lb crate for the Georgia gallery show, I learned that the information was still incorrect… seemingly untouched by my previous attempts to update.

In my anger I did something, I never expected… I opened a UPS shipping account. Today, I learned the true cost of those actions. It is currently 10:02 am, while I write this and I have already received four telemarketer calls from UPS since 8:00am. After the fourth hang-up, I visited a fine little site titled “whocalledus.com” to find out if this was common practice for UPS account holders… seems it is. Click the link to read comments posted by other disgruntled UPS account holders.

It will have to be a huge emergency for me to utilize the services of UPS in the foreseeable future. Oh yeah… and the differences in the cost of shipping my 90lb wood crate measured 50”x41”x12”

UPS estimated delivery 5-8 days: $140
DHL delivered in three days, including the mid-week holiday: $82

Now if only they’d quit mailing my bill all the way to New Mexico… - DN

Portfolio Website Updates

I've made some changes to the portfolio website to speed-up load times, etc... drop me a line if you think it improved (sped-up enough on your computer). Click here to view. - DN

New Works from the Saint Francois Mountains

“The Teacher's Map Home”, Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 10”x 14”, $300


“The Teacher's Map Home, No. 2”, Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 12”x 14”, $300

These maps were inspired by the muddy and wooded banks of waters that caress the Saint Francois Mountains near Sam A. Baker State Park. Samuel Aaron Baker was born in the the mountains of the park that bares his name. He was a teacher in the late 1800's and early 1900's that eventually became Governor of Missouri. I have often stood in wonder of the number of early American leaders that started as educators. As an on-again-off-again teacher, myself, I understand the draw of the classroom. I believe that many of these politicians undoubtedly felt nostalgic for the integrity of teaching and a guilty sense of abandon for the students left behind. After visiting the park, I became particularly intrigued by the fact that every biographical blurb I could find for Samuel Baker started with the phrase "American Teacher". - DN

Work on Exhibit at - ART SANTA FE International

Diptych - "Boxed-In: Under the Sandia"


"Green is for Water Rights"

These two works will be on display in July at ART SANTA FE International. - DN

Works at Gallery RFD in July

Sweetgrass Hills, Prairie Place


Going to the Sun Road


Einstein - Man is Here for the Sake of Other Men

Enjoy. - DN

Busy Summer... gotta remember to create posts!

I am currently coming to the end of two shows. My two-month solo exhibition at Palette Contemporary in New Mexico and a one-month group show of religious work at Gallery RFD in Georgia. Despite these closings, new exhibition opportunities are on the horizon. I am scheduled to show two paintings in mid-July at the prestigous ART SANTA FE International Exhibition; basically, the southwest version of Miami Basil. Collectors and galleries from around the globe will be present, as well as special guest Frank Gehry... so maybe something will come of this opportunity.

I also had my "Immersion Travel Art" movement recognized by the curator of the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Three paintings representative of the movement along with my manifesto was selected by Curator Holly McCullough for display at Gallery RFD in July and August. So maybe something worthwhile could come of this... is this how viable art movements start? - DN

Toddler Philosophy... is this where dreams originate?

At eight-thirty this morning Samuel took his first swig from the egg creme he begged me to make. He claimed he needed something "chocolately" for washing down his oatmeal. He swallowed and turned halfway around in his chair to proclaim, "that's as smooth as a clean chair"; while stroking the back rail of his kitchen highboy-style seat.

My wife and I regularly discuss opportunities - both missed and acquired. She loves her career as a Speech Language Pathologist working in the hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (not so much her previous stints in the schools or private contracting). Though she still wonders if she should have gone on to medical school; as she secretly always desired. Growing-up, she never felt that her family would take her dream seriously - so she kept it to herself... for a decade and a half.

I took my own odd little paths in the past. A round-about-way of getting from there to here. In my family, ideal career opportunities for a "smart guy" (someone college-bound) led to either engineering or business degrees; and anyone that knows me can easily recognize I don't have an interest for either. I originally settled on working towards degrees that would lead to teaching at university level (English, Art, Philosophy - I didn't care which, but it was something I could justify to my parents), I loved self-expression (particularly painting) and attained a degree in studio art. Graduated and worked for a while as a gallery director with the intention of eventually returning to school for an MFA. I worked for a while as a K-12 art instructor, basically worked my way around the west to find my voice as a painter... the desire to be a professor now only an occasional memory. I'm not sure if I really have any regrets, any other path would have interferred with my progress as an artist; well... maybe I wish my wife was a doctor... my salary isn't what one could honestly classify as "exact" or "regular".

"that's as smooth as a clean chair"

My four-year-old son... the philosopher. He makes strangely obscure comments like that on a daily basis. Though I seem to never know exactly where they originate, I can't help but stand in wonder as the statements flow from his mouth and mind. Where will this train of thought take him; what dreams lay under the blanket with a middle-child-toddler actively seeking abstract thoughts? - DN

Contradictions to Create Revisionist Landscape Art

It rained heavily yesterday afternoon, Samuel and I found ourselves trapped in the studio painting whilst the wind blew and the water fell from the sky. He spent the afternoon working back and forth between dabs of acrylic paint, watercolors and Play-Doh. Happily, I put the finishing touches on three small works; but given my tendency to prefer natural light for shooting images of my work… the weather was much too wild for me to photograph the paintings. So there are no images to share, today.

Over the past five years I have never been at a loss for painting ideas. I have always attributed the inspiration to my frequent travel habits; but how much of it really was associated with the unconscious developmental process of creating a unique stylistic approach to recreating the landscape? I am no longer a realist, therefore I’m not widely accepted in their circles. Yet, my undeniable representational painting subjects drive-away the traditional abstractionists, as well. I am by choice a painter, though I deeply admire the work of conceptual artist Andy Goldsworthy. I seem to live and paint as much for contradictions, as because of them. As I create and consider the methodology of my process, my mind questions the true nature of what I hope of accomplishing with these works. How much of my approach to painting is a random excuse to travel and embed myself across the American landscape and how much is a masterful decision to create a “revisionist landscape art movement”? – DN

Sam A Baker State Park

Goliath at the campsite


Samuel the snake charmer


My three on the trail with the naturalist

We spent the weekend at Sam A Baker State Park in the St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri, just north of the bootheel. Last night, I started two small paintings of the region including the St. Francois River and Big Creek. I chose to paint them in a smaller format, because the simple beauty of that place seems to occupy such a diminutive spot on the map.

Hopefully, I’ll have them completed and photographed in time for tomorrow’s blog posting. – DN

Women in Western Art Video

Ran across this video of “Women in Western Art” on YouTube and I found it quite amazing.

Click here to view…

There was a number of praising comments and a few idiots as well, but one statement really stuck with me- “They look beautiful but lonely, aren't they?”

Made me think about my own figurative paintings. – DN

New Kiln ... for a painter

My newest acquisition... A $1300 kiln for $110... in perfect working condition... gotta love yard sales in the South. - DN

Number 4: Map to Samuel's Robin's Egg

"Number 4: Map to Samuel's Robin's Egg", Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 24"x44"

Click the image to see a detailed view of the painting.

A good friend in Santa Fe was enamoured with birds and spent immense amounts of money on quality Nikon digital equipment and vacations with the sole purpose of documenting their flight. It never really occurred to me that he had to leave the desert in order to photograph his muse. We were living in a land with few examples of the familiar birds of my youth: Painted Buntings, Bluebirds, Cardinals, Hummingbirds, and Warblers and Doves. Looking back, my memory of New Mexico birds primarily involved watching Road Runners drift between vehicles in the mall parking lot.

One of the more amazing realizations discovered in my recent move was the manner in which my children share my love for the simplicity of trees with leaves. My daughter and youngest son enjoy the freedom of climbing. More than once I have whistled into the backyard for my daughter and from the mid-top of a tree halfway across the small pasture-like space heard a warble in return. However my middle child, Samuel, has become entranced with the lives of the birds he helps to feed around our home. High winds frequently accompany Missouri summer storms; and Samuel stays busy collecting and replacing fallen nests and eggs. It is quite beautiful to watch a rough and tumble four-year-old boy, whom is accustomed to torturing his pre-teen sister, tenderly take care of small creatures. – DN

Map to the Stinging Lizards

"Map to the Stinging Lizards", Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 14"x26"

Southwest Missouri is home to the Ozark Mountains and a culture that is more closely aligned to Appalachian than traditional Southern or Midwest society. In addition to the already strange mixture of wildlife that inhabits the mountains: black bears, cougars, crawfish and armadillos; the region is also rampant with scorpions. I first learned this many years ago, while preparing to fill a dry Jacuzzi at a B&B cottage overlooking Table Rock Lake. At the time, my wife was pregnant with our first child and nearly stepped on a cluster of the smallish arachnids in a moment she will never let me forget. She made a beeline to complain to the B&B host only to be rebuffed by the statement “their only stinging lizards, Hon”.

Our recent return excursions to the Ozarks have served as a reminder of the local dialectical eccentricities of all communities. The term “stinging lizard” in southwest Missouri applies to any creature that crawls and stings/bites; just as every flying insect in the southeast section of Missouri is classified as a “tree bug” (particularly if they end-up in your house, due to an open window or door).

Click the above image to see a more detailed view of the painting and its multiple layers. – DN

Review

Click here to read the recent review of my latest New Mexico exhibit at Palette Contemporary in Albuquerque. - DN

Impulse

The daily lives of action painters inadvertently reflect their studio methodology. Painting purely on impulse requires a total commitment to the Zen-like release of the mind; if you create in that manner long enough… the time in the studio becomes a neo-reality that invades and eventually replaces the manner in which one approaches life in the outside world.

Sadly, I must admit that my ignorant teenage mind had little interest in any traditions or beliefs beyond the narrow scope of my own southern Missouri home. This place was somewhere to endure until the moment I could leave, with few concerns for reconciling the impact of its unique culture on the later years of my life.

It was my slowly acquired impulsive approach to living that allowed me to spend yesterday traveling the marshy bottomlands of the river’s northern delta. I bounced across gravel roads and blue highways (not listed in the online services of Google Maps or even Mapquest) intermingled between the towns of Caruthersville, Hayti, Dyersburg and New Madrid. Searching for that perfect taste of barbecue with slaw. Waiting for my moment to interact with locals.

I see this land much differently, now, than I did even ten years ago. Glancing out a car window while cruising across strips of highway connecting corn and cotton; I wonder at the white flowered fields still picked by hand. The people of the Mississippi Delta regularly contend with floods, tornadoes, immense poverty and a history steeped in longstanding traditions of racism. Suddenly, now, these residents are rarely far from my thoughts.

Occasionally, even I consider the moment of retirement; but in a manner different from most. I simply see retirement as the years spent creating the final paintings of a specific place. I argued, a few months ago, with my friend Hank regarding locations where we could retire our two families, together. I pushed for Alaska and the like… but he was adamant to return to a homestead within the Missouri Bootheel. I couldn’t quite grasp his desire to travel home. His declared love of this region puzzled me for some time until ultimately it became the leading influence in my recent urgency to explore the Southern states… and I’m better creatively, for returning here. – DN

Following the Mississippi to Cottonwood Point

“Following the Mississippi to Cottonwood Point”, Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 13”x 48”, $600

The necessity of constant relocation is proven by the manner in which my work drastically adapts to each new region. I began the series of map paintings, in the last few months of my Santa Fe residency; however their true evolutionary style did not matriculate until jolted by the move east. Despite my own insular knowledge of my studio methods and inspiration, prior to the last relocation I questioned how long the map series would be able to continue… it had not occurred to me that the works would simply further abstract to harmonize with the region.

I’ve been infatuated with maps for longer than I can remember. Almost fourteen years ago, I first saw the lovely independent film, “Map of the Human Heart”. Though he was onscreen for only a brief moment, the “mapmaker” character played by John Cusack captivated me. The idea that a place is beyond simple landmarks and rock formations lends ones’ self to a new level of introspection that relies heavily upon recognition of the residents of the outlying community.

To me, Cottonwood Point is no more important as a destination than a random point along any route that I have traveled. It’s a place I passed as I followed the river along highway 164, boasting a few farms and homes. To others, though, it is a life I may never recognize. – DN

Lake Jumping in the Ozarks

"Lake Jumping in the Ozarks", Sumi & Acrylic Inks and Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 20"x30"

My parent’s Ozark Mountain cabin rests on the banks of Bull Shoals Lake in southwestern Missouri along the Arkansas border. In the mid-1950’s a series of Dams were constructed along the powerful White River. The man-made lakes created in the dams’ wake (Bull Shoals Lake, Table Rock Lake, Beaver Lake and Lake Taneycomo), immediately developed into a major tourist destination for residents of the Southern and Midwest states. - DN

Delta Bottoms

"Delta Bottoms", Sumi & Acrylic Inks & Acrylic Paint on Canvas, 14"x24"

Neighbored with nearby Crowley’s Ridge, the bootheel region of Missouri is primarily filled-in marsh surrounding the Mississippi River. Some scientists consider Crowley’s Ridge a former island between the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers; while other researchers believe the strange 500 ft rise in the river lowlands is a result of the New Madrid Seismic Fault Zone. Personally, I’ve only been concerned with scouting the length of these rolling hills for the best topographic view of the northern-most end of the Mississippi Delta.

When the annual summer floods are held-back, the richness of this region’s farmland is unmatched in the Midwest. Maybe that is why the residents ignore national ridicule when they refuse the regular buy-out options of the federal government. – DN