Hazy American Gothic

I was on a road trip a few years ago that took me west through the entire state of Iowa where I discovered the state is divided into two horizontal stripes. The bottom half is green, and the top half is blue, with occasional dark shapes and textures interrupting the horizon like cattle, trees, and farm building silhouettes. Two-track dirt roads intersected with the narrow county highway that passed through the small town I was in. It included a two-pump gas station, one unleaded, one diesel, a small general store where I bought a green and yellow t-shirt that said ‘kiss a corn grower today’, a garage structure servicing large trucks and farm machinery, a huge pile of irrigation equipment that was disappearing into tall grass, and a blacksmith shop. I could hear a sledgehammer banging iron and saw an orange glow with occasional sparks flying out of the door. Much of the ground surrounding these places was packed dirt, stained with oil, gasoline, and other industrial fluids.

After refueling, I took one of the two-track roads out into a field with all my windows open. I stopped, got out and was surrounded by late summer corn way over my head. It was unsettling, like when I get lost in a maze and think I’ll never find my way out, or when I can’t immediately locate the car in a multilevel parking ramp because I forgot where I parked. I imagined Iris Dement singing Our Town, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arm because the melancholy was thick. I thought about home and my family, but they weren’t anywhere near me, so I got back in the car and tried to drive away from the discomfort, but couldn’t because then I thought about the painting American Gothic.

My knowledge of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic has been incorrect from the start. I never bothered to learn the full story behind the painting. My American Art history professor must have spoken about it, but I don’t remember what he said, and I’ve made huge assumptions about what I thought the painting depicted. I assumed Wood somehow discovered this married couple on their farm one day while out exploring and asked them if he could sketch them. They agreed to pose for him, but he’d have to come back later. So, he showed up to sketch them at the specified time but had to wait. He probably sat on their front porch until they were finished with their afternoon bible study at the kitchen table. It was hot, humid, and quiet except for the cicadas and the mumbling he could hear through the screen door.

None of that happened though. It isn’t a portrait of a husband and wife at all, it depicts a father and daughter. Wood came across this house randomly with a fellow artist and felt moved to draw it. Then later asked his family dentist and his sister to pose for him. They weren’t even in the same room. They were sketched separately. That’s how he constructed his painting. He wasn't documenting an existing situation. He assembled separate elements and combined them to form this open-ended story about fictional people in Iowa.

Regardless of Grant Woods intent, or my assumptions, the painting makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because the pitchfork automatically implies poking, or stabbing. It also makes me think of ‘children of the corn’ and these two look like they could be involved somehow, controlling the children without words, just coded eye movements—sending out the ‘corn’ herds to track down trespassers that stray into their fields. Someone might have pulled over, gotten out to stretch their legs and entered the rows of corn to find shade one hot summer afternoon. They thought they were far enough away from the farmhouse that they wouldn’t be noticed, but they miscalculated how easy it is to see movement in the distance on most Iowa farms. The children were summoned and they congregated quickly and rushed from the barn into the fields almost like a single organism. Locating the unaware intruders without even making their presence known, they stopped abruptly like a roadrunner. They quietly encircled their prey and emerged from the corn in slow motion, blinking simultaneously and silent.

Songs :: Our Town and Leaning on the Everlasting Arm by Iris DeMent, and Revelator by Gillian Welch

© C. Davidson

Tomah(awk)

Tomah Train Station :: Photographer Unknown

Apple Picking :: 1967

When the train approached the station thirty-seven years ago I was excited. I was at most of the stops we made crossing the country because I’d never been to any of those places. We were in Wisconsin and I missed the conductor’s announcement, but I saw the station sign next to the tracks a half mile out and it said Tomah. I thought the sign was wrong even though I only saw it through part of a moving train window. I assumed it was supposed to read Tomahawk, with the ‘awk’ letters missing. My grandmother, Florence Scott, grew up in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, and I wanted it to be Tomahawk. I even started an ink drawing about it the next day titled Tomah while we where in Ohio en route to Rhode Island. Eight years later I drove by the Interstate 94 exit sign to Tomah on my way to Chicago from Minneapolis. I’d been mistaken for years. If laptops, Wi-Fi and Google had existed while I was on the train in 1983, I might have discovered my assumption was wrong, but those things didn’t exist then.

Whenever I imagine her hometown and her childhood with her sisters Georgia and Belle, it’s mostly fiction. I don’t remember most of her history there, but I know what Wisconsin feels like because we live near it and spend time there. I know what a small town with a lake nearby feels like too because I’ve lived in similar towns and watched TV shows like The Walton’s and the opening to the Andy Griffith Show when I was a kid. Maybe she had experiences like that. My parents told me that she was strong, direct, and didn’t suffer fools. I remember her hospitality and grace, like when she made me poached eggs for breakfast, how she managed family during holiday dinners and Easter egg hunts, and when my cousin and I picked apples from her tree on Saturday and were rewarded with root beer floats from A&W. I remember other moments too, but never how my grandmother felt, or how her childhood and teen years shaped her.

She visited me in a dream when I was an adult and long after she died. She wore a distinctive blue and white floral-patterned dress that I remembered from my childhood. When I told my mom about the dream, she remembered that dress too. My grandmother and I were in a small dimly lit room. We looked at each other and after a minute, she walked over and gently touched my arm. I can still feel her hand and and remember how the hazy light warmed and brightened slightly when she told me “everything is going to be alright.”

Songs :: Tell Me All the Things You Do and The Way I Feel by Fleetwood Mac, White Lily by Laurie Anderson and Here by David Byrne

© C. Davidson

Conversion

Recycleables

Debris

Relief

Hope

Twenty-five years after moving in, I’m moving out — in the center of a summer blast furnace, the virus, endless police brutality and lynching’s right before our very eyes in broad daylight. It feels like the right time, a long overdue time. Shedding old things and old stories, trying to pay attention to new things and new stories out of necessity, and out of my own embedded complicity. It’s unsettling and unnerving. It’s shocking.

I’ve been pondering this move for years, but always found reasons not to, like I don’t have the time, or I have too many unfinished projects, or where am I going to find something else this affordable? Sometimes when I postpone taking action and avoid making overdue decisions, they’re made for me, whether I’m ready or not. Change and transitions are always a challenge. I know lots of people who embrace both of those things and flourish — who don’t hesitate to move from one home to another home, or even from one state to another state every few years — significant ‘into the unknown’ moves — and even career changes every couple of years, for years on end. It’s almost unfathomable. My daughter is the opposite of me in this regard too — even though she appreciates the nest, she’s mostly a mover and an adapter, she’s a nomad. I feel like a different species sometimes. In my work, I’m willing to be uncomfortable and in uncharted territory, but with my home, my family and my lifestyle, I’m not as willing. I want a solid anchor to a place and my patterns, like this space has been for decades.

Unfortunately, my crap is an avalanche — mountains of paper, job files, specs, paper, estimates, correspondence, typical design debris, drawers full of press sheets from 1995 through last year, paper samples two decades old, cables and hard drives, art supplies like paint, brushes, and fluids, raw canvas, paper, stretchers, computers, scanners, books, paper, project samples, office supplies, postcards I never sent, memos I never sent, copies of letters I wish I hadn’t sent, old resentments triggered by long lost meeting notes from deranged editors, copies of first emails that turned into lifelong friendships, paper, an old bag of holiday nuts, mops, cleaning supplies, in-process paintings and drawings, book research, bundles of wheat, hardware, software, manuals, tools, paper, furniture and dust. I’ve rented this space longer than I lived in my parents’ home growing-up — longer than my daughter is old. It holds lots of good memories, hard memories, some dark hazy years, and tenuous transitions — sifting through physical and emotional debris to determine what’s saved, what’s shredded, what’s recycled, and what I want to cradle in my hands again like some timeless relic and then reminisce about it quietly and endlessly in the weeks and months ahead — like a collection of handmade cards and affirming notes my wife made for me. Sometimes I find another drawing by my daughter or an illustrated letter from when she was four years old, asking me to come home so we can be together as a family, including our cat, as soon as possible. Sometimes I couldn’t come home because of a challenging deadline, and sometimes I didn’t because I was lost and grieving, and didn’t want her to feel the full force of it.

Almost everything needs to be touched and reviewed. Occasionally I can grab an entire box of old, client book manuscripts from decades ago, or ancient financial records and toss them without review, but that’s the exception. If shoveling it all out was an option, or setting it all on fire without thinking was possible, I’d have done it years ago. If I go that route though, I’ll miss all of the sweet nuggets that make it rewarding, that provide inspiration and hope like a treasure hunt. So I wade through it for weeks and when I eventually look-up from what I’m sorting through in my lap like I have blinders on, through my scowl and see what’s left, I want to give-up and call building management and tell them I need another month, I’ll pay, but tell the new tenant I just can’t finish on time. Then call our family doctor for a psychotherapist referral, someone who can provide a deal on a bundle of appointments because I have a lot to unpack. Those things won’t make any of it go away though, so I forged ahead. There’s no shortcut.

“The best way out is always through.” Robert Frost

“If you get rid of the demons and the other disturbing things, if you get rid of them, then the angels fly off too.” Joni Mitchell

© C. Davidson

Songs :: The Perfect Boy by The Cure, Side Tracked by Dave Mason, and Proudest Monkey by Dave Matthews Band

 

Four Owls

Gibson Flats

Minneapolis :: A couple of months ago my wife heard an owl while she walked our dog near the Mississippi River. When they got home, she was excited and hoped next time she might even see it. More recently we walked him together and ended up in the same area. Just as I was telling her that it would have been my mother’s birthday, she touched my shoulder and suddenly an owl burst out of the trees from the river bluffs. A crow and a falcon dive bombed it and the three of them wrestled mid-flight directly overhead and landed forty feet up a pine tree close to where we were stood. After ten minutes hassling the owl, the crow and falcon gave up, flew out of the tree, picked on each other briefly and disappeared north into the river gorge. The owl perched silently until my wife began to hoot.

Great Falls :: The following fall I was in my hometown for a few days. The day before I returned to Minnesota, I drove to Highland Cemetery on the edge of town to visit the family plot. Whenever I visit the cemetery, I always pay my respects to Charlie Russell’s grave too which is nearby. As I walked, I heard a noise in the distance which slowly grew closer, louder and ended high in an enormous pine tree not far from where I stood. I assumed it was a bird, but it was oddly loud which made it alarming. Any noise in a cemetery, as slight as it may be, is unsettling. It might be a ghost, or a corpse clawing its way out of the ground then levitating towards me like a vampire.

I stared into the trees where the sound ended. If I hadn’t heard it and searched for the location of the noise, I never would have seen it. It was hard to tell what kind of bird it was because it blended in with the enormous pine trees. I grabbed my phone and zoomed in on it with the camera. It was still murky and hard to distinguish, but once its’ head rotated in that distinct way, I realized it was an owl. We stared at each other for ten minutes before it flew south towards the mountains.

Dutton :: The next day I ate breakfast with my sister, packed my gear, and began the long drive home. I looked forward to this leg of the trip because I planned to take Interstate 15 North to Dutton and then east along the hi-line. I hadn’t driven this route in decades. I was anxious to stop in Dutton because my dad’s firm designed a church there in the 1960’s. I’d only seen photos of it and read articles about it. It had won numerous AIA awards, and I’d admired it since I was in grade school. The shape of the building felt a bit radical for this small farm community located in the middle of the wheat country. While the design was contemporary and forward looking, it also reflected the vernacular of barns and other agricultural buildings.

I leaned against the car in front of the church, with the doors and rear hatch wide open and ate a snack. After a while I noticed a dark shape underneath the shaded eave high up on the eastern wall. It looked like something was on the downspout. I walked closer and saw the head of an owl rotate towards me. It was big. I looked closer and noticed a second owl on the other gutter downspout. I couldn’t believe I was seeing two more owls in less than twenty-four hours for a total of three.

All these sightings felt specific and personal, like messengers from the other side during challenging times—breaking through and keeping watch. When I googled owl symbolism, the information was a little dark. Most of it focused on death, but I read further, and it explained that death means more than ‘the end’, it also means transition and change—from one thing to another thing, maybe even from one time and space to another time and space. They’re often invisible but lately I’d seen and heard them arrive.

Songs :: More Than This by Roxy Music, Journey Through The Past by Neil Young, and Don’t Give Up by Peter Gabriel

© C. Davidson

Escape Hatch

Minnehaha Creek

Who knew that in March 2020, I’d have a self-refreshing browser window open and docked twenty-four hours a day, with seven online store tabs all spring loaded with alerts, dings, prompts and hand signals telling me that our favorite brands of toilet paper, disinfectant wipes, disinfectant cleaners, hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol might be available for order and delivery. There haven’t been any dings, or hand signals. Everything I look for online is out of stock and its whereabouts is unknown. No one’s even sure if these products are made anymore. I’m not completely certain what day it is.

We usually make a once a week journey, maybe twice, to a grocery store, a big-box store, a hardware store, or a farmer’s market, to get the things we need to keep things going; milk, eggs, rice, flour, meat, vegetables, ginger ale, mouse traps, and zen party mix. My goal is to get what I need and escape as stealthily as possible to avoid any potential stampeding, or trampling. No matter where and what we’re shopping for, we always check the paper products aisle, the cleaners and personal care aisles to make absolutely sure that the shelves are still empty, like during the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse.

A few Saturday’s ago, my morning started out just fine and by early afternoon I’d morphed into a tightly wound stressed ball of stress; worn down by virus concerns, the never-ending, dangerous, orange clown stick show, more horrific police brutality and white-supremacy crimes, and a simmering fear about our daughter who’s sheltered with six college roommates in Brooklyn — the center of the biggest pandemic crisis in the country. It was scaring me and it came out sideways. I wasn’t doing fine. I was melting down and I started to project all of it on to my wife.

So, I took our dog for a long walk into the Minnehaha Creek gorge located below Minnehaha Falls not far from our house. It’s heavily wooded, has dense ground cover in some areas, meandering trails and a park service road on one side. I mistakenly walked the service road for too long and was shocked at the amount of people I encountered, without masks. I understood that it was a beautiful day and we’d all been sheltering for over two weeks, but I was spoiled. My wife and I had continued to recreate a few times a week since the whole thing began, and it had been mostly empty in the parks, but not that Saturday. So, I crossed the creek on one of the beautiful WPA built stone bridges, and onto a closed trail that hugged the steep bluffs on the opposite side. It was closed because there was significant winter erosion and parts of the trail had slid into the creek — even on that trail there were people. Even with soft filtered light, a deep blue sky and the soothing sound of the creek rapids, I wasn’t calmed. I still felt vulnerable, claustrophobic and annoyed.

After fifteen minutes, I sat down on a tree stump and considered the options. We could turn around and quickly leave the way we came in, back through people and go somewhere less busy; pull up my mask and continue, through even more people, to the river; or find a different way out, with no people. Our dog was fine, but I had to escape. I looked up and scanned the bluffs for a simple route. Eventually, I found a path I thought would work and we started to climb. I kept him on a short lead just in case something happened, slid or gave way. We did kick some rocks and debris loose and I noticed that there were downed trees shifting in the soft ground around us. We climbed quickly like we were being chased and exited out of the top of the gorge and into a different part of the park, into the sun, without people.

— — — — — — —

“Any more of this and the hull will start to buckle!” :: Starbuck – Battle Star Galactica

— — — — — — —

Song :: Another Day in America by Laurie Anderson

© C. Davidson

Hammer Time

Hammer :: Oil and Latex on Canvas :: 48” x 48” :: 1981

Once I drove from Minneapolis to Bend in a cargo van loaded with artwork because everything was going to be installed in a show. I had four boxes of framed ink drawings, three five-foot square wrapped canvases, and a couple of smaller paintings. The three larger canvases could only fit diagonally in the space, so it looked a little inefficient, but they fit, with room for a couple of smaller paintings, some miscellaneous tools and traveling gear tucked into the leftover spaces. On my drive west, I stopped at my parents’ house in Montana and stayed overnight to pick-up Hammer, a four-foot square painting which we also planned to hang if the space could accommodate it.

After I painted it in college and before I moved from Montana a few years later, I stored It in my parents’ basement along with other artwork and boxes of stuff. During art school, Hammer always sat off to the side somewhere. It always seemed to be a bit of an outlier for some reason. Not that my other work was cohesive, but this one seemed even more different. I can’t explain why. It just felt different. I was attached to it though so whatever it was, I knew it was something I needed to pay attention to.

After my initial show, the gallery stored my work for six months and included a piece or two in subsequent group shows that they mounted. During one of the shows, Hammer was purchased by a man named John. I never met him, and I wasn’t involved in the transaction in any way, but I did cash his check, so I know that it happened. I got his contact information from my freinds, the gallery owners, and eventually wrote to him. He lived in Portland. I thanked him and let him know how happy I was that he purchased it and gave it new life. I didn’t receive a response, so I still don’t really know its fate, or John’s status, but I hope they’re fine.

Songs :: Moods for Moderns by Elvis Costello, Once Upon a Time In the West by Dire Straits, and Two Soldiers by David Byrne

© C. Davidson

Everything

Pablo :: Image – Time Life Pictures-Getty Images

Above Montana Avenue

Pablo draws a bull in mid-air with a flashlight like he’s a matador. I only knew a little about him and his work as a painter and a sculptor before I went to college. I was aware of only his most famous pieces, like Guernica and The Old Guitarist — paintings everyone was familiar with. Then I took art history courses which provided context and dug much deeper and around that same time I came across this photo.

When I saw it my view of him changed and my view of art changed even more. That discovery, along with other stuff I was exposed to, studying, trying, and connecting to pushed me to trust my own instincts in my work. I was painting, photographing, drawing, dabbleing in video and performance art with friends, and was introduced to modern and postmodern typography and graphic design. Everything seemed to be blown wide open and happening at once.

Then one night, I was sitting on the back doorstep of my friend’s house on Montana Avenue smoking cigarettes. It was clear, moonless, and music filled the house for hours and drifted into the air outside where I was fueled by mushrooms and beer. Everything was tingling, electric, connected, and I was smiling and felt part of it. I could hear night critters foraging through the leaves and nearby winter hedge. Frequent falling stars and slow-moving satellites passed overhead. All the signals and all of the positive voices began to merge. Everything was vibrating and now even magic was a factor.

For Pablo

Songs :: Good Times Roll by The Cars, Wild West End by Dire Straits, Peace of Mind and Ride My Llama by Neil Young, and Have You Seen the Stars Tonite by Jefferson Starship and Paul Kanter

© C. Davidson

"That Dog Floats" :: [Supplemental]

Chaz Scouting Near the Mississippi River

Full Blast Near Rice Creek

Airborne Outside Our Honeycomb Hideout

© C. Davidson

Pursuit of Happiness :: [Supplemental]

Songs :: Indian Summer by Poco, Fight the Power by Public Enemy, and Southern Cross by The Ozark Mountain Daredevils

© C. Davidson

I Almost Had a Nervous Breakdown

A Selection of the ‘Appropriate’ Gouache Containers from 1984

When I was in grad school, most of my time was consumed with required courses, thesis work, grocery shopping at Star Market, laundry on Capitol Hill, and adventures when I could. The undergraduate curriculum was extensive and it was a great opportunity to take a class when I could. The first one I took was a winter session color theory class my first year. Winter session was a five week condensed semester between fall and spring semesters.

Our first assignment was to create a primary and secondary color wheel by hand painting individual colors on paper and then assembling them. The next couple of assignments isolated specific colors, like compliments, and presented them as pairings to demonstrate various color relationships like simultaneous contrast, and value through black and white comparisons. For our final project, we picked an object to translate in color and in black and white. Unlike the previous assignments, it didn’t require painting on separate pieces paper, cutting the swatches out, and then dry mounting them. This assignment had us to paint directly onto a single surface.

I picked a conk shell. The professor asked if I was sure I wanted to work with this object because of its complexity. I assured her it would be fine. I broke it down into approximately 22 colors for the color version and another 20 or so for the black and white version. There are very few distinct color breaks because it’s just a smear of color from one to another. I started by creating two identical line drawings of the shell within a 10 x 10 square format in pencil. Once I had the composition determined, I began to mix paint.

I used small, shallow, aluminum pans about the size and depth of a hockey puck to hold each color. After I finished, I covered each container in cellophane. I don’t remember exactly what happened immediately after that, why I left, or where I went, but it must have been a few days. When I returned, I peeled off the cellophane and discovered that most of the color were partially dry and mostly unusable. I almost had a nervous breakdown. I had to start completely over with the exception of only a few that survived. When I spoke with the professor to let her know what had happened and how I was now way behind schedule, she listened, nodded and gently let me know that a different type of container would have been a better way to go—like the ones she recommended on the supplies list. I bought them and started over. I remixed all of the colors and gray values. Days flew by and I eventually ran out of time. I didn’t finish either piece completely and she had to evaluate them on what I had. It was a disaster. Thirty-five years later I still have that hazy category of ‘school dreams’ referencing those five weeks during periods of stress and self doubt—reliving the horror among the dry and cracked gouache pucks.

Songs :: Take Five by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, She’s Gone by Hall & Oates, and Once In a Lifetime by Talking Heads

For Aki

© C. Davidson

Stretchers or Strainers

About ten years ago a friend told me during a phone conversation that I was using the term ‘stretcher’ incorrectly. We were talking about painting and I mentioned I was excited because I had four newly built stretchers — a stretcher being the wooden frame that canvas, or linen, or whatever, is stretched over. He said, “the proper term for what you built is a ‘strainer’. Technically stretchers have expandable corner joints and strainers corners are fixed.” Adjustable corners allow for the expansion and contraction of the canvas and the wood in humid, or less humid, environments. Sometimes hardware is built into each corner of the frame and at other times thin wood shims are inserted into the mitered corner joints to expand the frame. Regardless of the technique, they’re like unicorns because I’ve had a number of painting professors in my life and none of them ever used the word strainer. They all called them stretchers, even if what we built were technically strainers. I googled the term recently too and read a number of different articles about them — it all seemed a little hazy to me. Plus the word strainer is confusing anyway—strain what? So the take away for me is that even though there’s a difference, most people say stretchers, including most painters when referring to both types of frames. However, I did see an actual ‘stretcher’ in an art supply store once, on display like it was a trophy, or a rare artifact from Italy, mounted on a stick and basking in its own technical glory. I’ve never seen a painting in the real world that used expandable corner joints, in museum storage or a gallery, or even in any documentaries about painters.

Maybe if you’re a painter in a tropical climate like Cambodia during the rainy season and then have to ship your paintings to the high dry desert for an exhibition, you might detect a change in the surface tension of the canvas—maybe then a stretcher is a good idea. Maybe if you’re commissioned to make a painting of a significant historical event for the Smithsonian, like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the painting is immense and it needs to last forever—maybe then a stretcher is required. Maybe if you airbrush highly detailed western landscape imagery on linen and also forge your own hardware from scratch in your garage because the novelty is the most important thing to you—maybe then a stretcher seems necessary. Maybe if you’re a genius like Gerhard Richter, Susan Rothenberg, Georgia O’Keefe, Julian Schnabel, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, or a myriad of other amazing painters and you have assistants to build things, and your paintings are purchased by collectors for hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, then maybe you use actual ‘stretchers’. That isn’t most painters though; it’s certainly not me. Stretchers with expandable joints are a technical fetish. I’m not that interested in how you hand forged the expansion hardware for your stretcher, or that you milled expandable dovetailed miter joints. That’s cool and everything; I don’t know how to hand forge anything and I’m far to impatient to mill dovetail joints. I’m more interested in the other side; the painted side.

So until the day that a museum curator, or an expert conservator, pulls me aside and tells me otherwise, every frame is a stretcher, even if the corners are overbuilt, overscrewed, overnailed and slathered with super glue.

© C. Davidson

Prairie Forward

Folded Canvas

Near Augusta, Montana

I have a neatly folded pile of heavy cotton canvas and imagine unfolding it and attaching it to a wall. I won’t need to build a frame because I’ll gesso it on the wall, paint it on the wall, and display it in the same way. I’ll need to re-arrange my current studio space to accommodate it or rent the corner of a warehouse somewhere else. Once it’s unfolded, it’ll be close to nine feet by eighteen feet. I purchased the bulk canvas years ago and used half of it for four large, stretched canvases. I’ll use what’s left to paint something big. It will incorporate huge view of Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota—a horizon that’s filled with sagebrush, cattle, or wheat. It’s impossible to predict what it will become but I like thinking about it.

I imagine a space that I can walk into, completely disoriented because I can’t locate myself in the foreground, or the background. The illusion might shift what other people think they’re seeing too. It might feel like an overwhelming moment on one of the countless road trips I’ve taken during the day and at night—in the hot dust of August, or crisp clear nights in winter. At some point on every trip, I pull the vehicle over to the side of the road, or into an adjacent field and linger for a while. If it’s dark, I stare into the blanket of stars. Sometimes during the day, I open the tailgate and sit with my lunch, or dinner. I might even have food left that my wife prepared, and a thermos of hot coffee. If I’m in the middle of nowhere, there will be crickets, grasshoppers and meadowlarks surrounding me. If I’m lucky, the air will be still and heavy with sage and sweet grass where I can just drift.

Songs :: Break My Heart Sweetly by John Moreland, and Plains (Eastern Montana Blues) by George Winston

© C. Davidson

Grind My Stone

Occasionally somebody would blurt out, “I need to go grind my stone.” “We told you the lithography class was going to be a pain in the ass.” Whenever I walked through the lithography lab, I’d look over at the presses and work tables, and see someone scowling while they slowly ground their stone. Eventually though, I’d see a beautiful print someone had completed weeks later, and if I was lucky, I’d see them peel their paper from their stone. Then they’d get to reprint it and reprint it again.

My friend made lithographic prints. He was a print maker and a ceramicist. Sometimes his prints defied the hard stone thy came from because his images were soft. Another friend was mostly an intaglio print maker. He used found photographic material and created black and white photo-montages which he then exposed to light sensitive film, exposed the films onto a photo-sensitive aluminum plate and etched it in an acid bath. He also drew directly onto the metal plate to scratch-out, or add details. Eventually, he used the plate to make prints onto thick deckled paper. He had a background in painting and his prints reflected that. They were beautiful and dense. Sometimes they were political, sometimes they were bleak domestic images filled with melancholy. You’d often find him sitting on a stool at one of the long tables in the central print lab. He was usually humped over his plate, preparing it, or manipulating the films he used to expose his plates. His ear buds were usually in and likely listening to Lou Reed or David Bowie. He’d look up and give me a friendly nod if I was just passing through, or if we wanted to talk I’d sit for a bit and we’d talk about images.

One evening I was up in the painting studio on the second floor and had it to myself. During the weeknights you’d often share the space with a couple of other folks, but after midnight, or on a Friday and Saturday night, you could count on being alone. Sometimes I’d be in the painting studio, or the photo lab, a friend would be in the printmaking studio, another might be in the sculpture studio, or the ceramics studio. It felt like we owned the art building. The way students should feel.

I was sitting alone staring at a blank white canvas. I had just finished applying the last coat of gesso an hour earlier, and was waiting for it to dry. My friend walked in and greeted me. After smoking on the roof outside the studio windows, we came back in and sat and talked for awhile. While we sat there, he scanned a few of my paintings that were around and then settled on the large blank canvas I was about to work on. “I don’t know how you do it.” “Do what?” I said. “How you’re able to stare at that white surface and just start painting without a specific plan”. I asked him why. “Because I’m uncomfortable with the immediacy of it, that’s why I make prints. I have a plan and the process takes a long time before the image is printable so I can just ease into it.” I understood what he said and explained that I’m way too impatient. I’m most comfortable with something I can immediately react to. That’s why I use house paint along with traditional paints. House paint allowed me to obliterate areas of paintings I didn’t like on the cheap. His way of working was far more methodical. That conversation was huge for me. I’d never heard anyone else reveal themselves about making art in that way, about our common fear and about how for both of us, the emotional part of the process had the biggest impact on what we made and how we made it.

For Ed and Dave

Songs :: Bottoming Out by Lou Reed, Without You by David Bowie, and the entire Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps albums

© C. Davidson

Four Little Generosities

Wanderlust-1982

All of The Above-Open Studio Crawl

Until I launched this site, most of my finished work was rarely seen by someone other than myself. Occasionally a piece might be in an exhibition, or exist online, but that's the exception. So unless people see my work during an annual studio crawl, it's mostly unseen so I don't really have a sense of how people see it. Once in a while though, I experience someone's response directly.

One—During my first year of undergraduate school I painted a lot at home outside of my regular coursework, because focused studio courses weren’t offered until sophomore year. I entered one of those paintings the following spring to an Art in the Park juried exhibition in my hometown. It was a mixed-media piece on paper. I don't recall if I saw the show, or attended any events connected to it, but after it was over my parents collected the piece for me. Eventually, my mom called to say that a neighbor who lived down the block from them had seen it in the exhibition and asked if it was for sale. She said that she stood looking at it for a long time and wanted to have it in her house. I’d never heard a response like that about my work, especially from someone I didn’t know. My mom told her she’d ask me. When we spoke about it, I got the feeling that my folks liked it and wanted it so it’s been hanging on that living room wall ever since. For a few years afterwards, when I was stayed at my parents house, sometimes I’d see that neighbor drive down the street and we’d wave to each other.

Two—A female tenant who lived in the same duplex as my brother and sister-in-law above Bernices’ Bakery, walked into their apartment and saw the painting I’d given to them called Wanderlust. At some point during her visit, she said, "I want to make love to that painting." It must have been shocking. I was flattered. No one had ever said something that provocative about something I've made. It woild have been exciting to see her make love to my painting, but how would that even work? I have no idea and she obviously liked it. Her reaction is as good as it gets.

Three—During an ‘open studio crawl’, I heard someone enter my space during a relatively quiet time on a Saturday afternoon. I was in the back working so I looked around the corner to greet whoever it was. A woman was standing alone in front of one of my paintings called Full of Birds. I didn’t say anything and after a bit she quietly left. Awhile later, I heard someone walk in and found the same woman standing in front of it again. This time she stayed longer, so I finally approached her, introduced myself and asked her if she had any questions. Her eyes were full of tears and she hesitated to talk at first. I asked if she was alright, if she needed anything, and told me she was fine. Her son had been very sick and this painting brought it all up and soothed her at the same time. We stood together for a bit in silence, we thanked each other, and she walked down the hall.

Four—A young couple was looking at my work during a different ‘open studio crawl’ and spent most of their time in front of my ink drawings. They’re 11” x 8.5” and float within 20” x 16” frames. I noticed them and asked if they had any questions and they asked me how I made the photographs. They said they enjoyed looking at photographs and taking pictures themselves. They couldn't figure out what kind of prints they were, what kind of paper I used, and how they were made. I wasn’t following what they were saying because they aren't photographs, and then I realized that they thought my drawings were photographs. "Oh, these are ink drawings—ball point pen drawings" I said. Then they seemed confused, so I pointed to all of the used Bic pens that I had on display. This random encounter led to a long conversation about perception and art.

Songs :: I Will Follow and October by U2, How Soon is Now by The Smiths and Tales of Kilimanjaro by Santana

© C. Davidson

My Head Almost Exploded at the Van Gogh Museum

Wheat Field With Crows – 1890 – Oil on Canvas – 50.5 x 103cm – :: Image – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Canal

Cheese Shop

Van Gogh Museum Lobby

Vincent Van Gogh created most of his work over a ten-year period — all of those amazing pieces, including his stylistic transitions, within a single decade. Not to mention that a huge hunk of his most famous works were created within his last year, like Starry Night. I don’t remember those facts from my art history classes in college, but I read it on a gallery didactic panel and in a gift shop book. I’ve always been a fan of his. My parents bought me a book of his work either for Christmas, or my birthday, when I was in seventh grade. I don’t remember if they did because I’d mentioned him, or if they wanted to introduce me to his work. Either way, the book was inspirational and shocking, not because it mentioned the story of his bandaged ear, or because of his emotional struggles, but because he painted wheat and wheat fields, and wrote about wheat fields, and I understood wheat fields.

Almost forty-five years later just a week before Christmas, my wife and I left for the Van Gogh Museum from our rented apartment in Amsterdam. It was a cool, gray, drizzling day. We walked next to and over the canals which reminded me of the movie Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. We saw dreamy Dutch architecture, thoughtful design, bread and cheese bathed in the honey light of deli storefronts, and bicyclists were everywhere. I’d imagined visiting Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum for a long time, but I didn’t imagine that it would feel this good.

It was off-season and the museum was still busy. Sometimes we’d need to take our turn to stand in front of certain works, like the The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, or Wheat Field With Crows. It’s hard to remember the full experience because I was overwhelmed. There’s a lot to absorb and process in the museum, including the texture of his paint, and which brush strokes are underneath and which are on top.

Seeing his work in person, along with the other Impressionists whose paintings, drawings, and stories are also exhibited, placed all of it in a bigger context. My art history knowledge is average at best. We wandered through the museum for hours before finally needing to leave and find a place to eat lunch, grab our luggage, take a train to the airport, and fly to Italy where we were meeting our daughter. In one of the final galleries, I came across a few of his paintings that looked to be part of a series. All of them were landscapes and focused on wheat fields. I alternated between sitting on a gallery bench in front of them, and standing as close as I could to inspect their surfaces before a guard would appear. I remembered I had an unfinished painting sitting on my easel about the view of a wheat field through moving curtains in a window. I got goosebumps and felt even more connected as I saw my wife walking by Sunflowers that hung on a deep blue wall in slow motion.

For Jeenee and Seeley

Songs :: Amsterdam by Mary Gauthier, Solo by Hanah,

© C. Davidson

The Same Hat

James Lloyd Huffman :: 1960’s

My grandfather plowing the fields of the Huffman homestead near Highwood, Montana

I’ve been working on a painting for over four years. Not daily, or even monthly, instead, I go through concentrated periods when I do and then I don’t. I usually have other paintings in progress too, many I’ve finished and even a few have been exhibited during this time, but this one sits on a couple of five gallon buckets and leans against the wall. I try to ignore it, but it's five feet square so it's difficult to overlook. I currently call it Hat, Boat, Plow, because that’s what the images seem to be about, but usually it’s just the The Heaviest Painting I've Ever Done. It has so many layers that someday I’ll probably need to remove the canvas from the frame in order to transport it more easily. During these years, it’s been many different things with different intentions, and each time most of it gets painted out to white. I can’t ever figure out what it’s supposed to be and I’m never happy with what it is. Sometimes it’s an albatross. Sometimes it’s a source of anxiety. Sometimes it feels like an opportunity. Whatever my emotional response, I'm still undecided.

Typically when I sit and stand in front of it, looking at it, over-analyzing it, bombarded by all of the chatter, I try not to think and just paint but it mostly turns out to be a dead end. Thinking and painting never mix and for some reason I can’t stop thinking. Then one night I had an epiphany. Maybe I wasn't supposed to figure it out and finish it. Maybe it’s supposed to be an ongoing experiment where I can just try things without expectations. I'm a little more comfortable with that idea lately, just keeping on with it and not sabotaging it.

Last fall in the early morning hours, I was cleaning up when I glanced at the painting and out of the corner of my eye noticed the wrapped package of old artwork nearby leaning against my flat files. I had brought the work back the previous summer from Montana. It contained a few projects I did in high school during 1976, 1977 or 1978. One had been hanging on my old bedroom wall and a few others were stored in my dad's studio. I'm pretty sure these are the very last artworks left at my childhood home, except for the few that my sister owns. After I saw the package, I unwrapped it and pulled everything out. I leaned one of the pieces up against the canvas and sat in front of it. It's a black ink drawing on a piece of 36" x 30" white illustration board. There’s a montage of a wheat field, a fence line, a windmill, my grandfather on his horse drawn plow and a large head and shoulders portrait of him wearing his gray, felt hat. The portrait was copied from a classic photograph someone took of him during the late sixties. The drawing was completed for a class assignment about storytelling. It was an homage to him with all of the images blending into one another like a kind of retro movie-poster. Then I looked at my unfinished painting which is big enough to fill your field of vision when you're close enough, and realized it's the hat — it's the same hat! It felt like the forty-year-old drawing could have been a study for the painting — both about farming and Montana. At that moment everything seemed to merge and make sense, reminding me once again I don’t need to think.

For the Huffmans

© C. Davidson

Shotgun

View fullsize

Riding Shotgun :: 2011

I was driving east through North Dakota the day after Christmas. It was dark, cold, the road was snow packed and in a blizzard when my friend and ex-sister-in-law called. I answered, said hello and once she said “Hi!”, I asked if she would hold on for just a minute. I muted my phone, the hairs went up on the back of my neck, and my eyes filled with tears. I couldn't believe it was her of all people calling me at that moment. I got back on and she asked me how I was, where I was and said that she'd been wanting to talk with me since my mother’s funeral almost two months earlier. Her call felt like divine intervention. We caught up with each others activities and then she simply, and warmly listened to my grief.

I’d spent a few days in Montana during the Christmas holiday with some members of my family, while my wife and daughter were in Florida to be with her family. I drove to Missoula purposely avoiding my hometown, specifically my mom and dad's house. It would feel uncomfortable and still, like a funeral home filled with types of flowers my mom wouldn't have liked. Like when certain music was chosen for her service that had no real connection to her. The music was more about the people who chose it than it being for my mom, like the Scottish dirge. She wasn't Scottish, or the Springsteen song I asked to be included. i don’t remember her once saying she was a fan of the Boss. It’s a great song, but that was about me, not her. The house might feel like those parlors filled with deep sadness, so I drove to Missoula where some of my siblings either lived or were visiting. We went out to dinner one night and I visited with some nephews and nieces the following day before heading home.

I looked forward to the return trip too because highway driving is always therapy—my shoulders relax and I feel lighter. Seeing family was good, but the drive was the main reason I went—it’s the mulling, the thinking, the re-thinking, the re-mulling, the crumbling, the talking out loud, the looking, and the picture taking that heals. Maybe a little like the Cat Stevens song On the Road to Find Out. After my sister-in-law and I said goodbye, I drove out of the lead edge of the storm where the interstate was dry, and I took the photograph Riding Shotgun with my mom sitting next to me.

For Mom and Janet

Songs :: On the Road to Find Out by Cat Stevens, Joanne by Lady Gaga and Dear Mama by 2Pac

© C. Davidson

Interpreting Wink

View fullsize

Wink :: 1980-1981

When I think back, I realize that many of my paintings from college were figurative — the human figure. I didn't think of myself as a figurative painter then, or do I now, but there were often abstract figures in my work and sometimes they were the focus of the painting. I'm not particularly good at drawing the figure and rarely have that in mind. I did participate in a life drawing class a couple of years ago though — once a week in the evening for about eight weeks, with maybe 10-15 other folk. They took donations at the door to pay the facilitator and the model. I drew men and women on large pads of newsprint with charcoal, graphite and chalk. During the course of the two-hour session we'd get to draw ten to twelve poses, with a range of 1 to 30 minutes. Over the course of the session, I came out with a couple of drawings that were OK and the rest weren’t.

Whenever I've played Pictionary over the years and was required to draw a figure, human or animal, they were chaotic scribbles that took me forever. My teammates usually just stared at the drawing and then at me in disbelief. "I'd need to be a clairvoyant to guess what you're drawing." I was better at drawing things like wind. The figures my father drew were crisp and clear. He always captured the action quickly and precisely. "It's a person raking the yard, um… it's a person watering the lawn!" “Yes!”

Wink was a painting I did in undergraduate school. Somehow it turned into a head-and-shoulders thing. It wasn't a very good painting, but I treated the figure in a way I never had before, so I'd always held on to it for posterity. I shipped it home from my parents' basement in Montana years ago. It’d been in storage for at least twenty-five years. Once it arrived here, I unpacked it and leaned it against a wall in our living room. It remained there for a couple of weeks before my wife said anything. Eventually she asked me what the painting was about. I was surprised by her question. I wasn't surprised because she asked a question, but because of the question she asked. I assumed the image was so obvious to everyone that it would be hard to interpret it any other way. In fact that was the primary reason I disliked it. It felt limiting. When I told her what it was she said she still didn't really see it. Maybe. Kinda? I was relieved. It kind of changed everything. It reminded me to relax about what I think I'm painting because I often don’t know and I can't usually control what it becomes anyway. Painting is the point.

— — — — — — —

"I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it." Frank Gehry

— — — — — — —

Songs :: Moods for Moderns by Elvis Costello, Runaway and Home by Bonnie Raitt

© C. Davidson

Hal

Someone’s Always Leaving :: 1982-1983

Hal was one of my painting professors in undergraduate school. He was born In New York and arrived in Montana from the Bay Area where he grew up. He was handsome, tan, friendly and soft-spoken. I think he had been a surfer, too. His large paintings and drawings were aggressive and full of action. They were bright, complex, crowded and spacial. They were loaded and appeared completely abstract at first glance, but the longer and deeper you looked, the more figurative they became. He casually told me once that "there's no difference between abstraction and representation. It's only a matter of how the elements are assembled and how they relate to each other that shifts a piece one way or the other."

One Friday afternoon during Spring quarter, I met with him in the empty painting studio where I had set up a few canvasses. I sat on the base of a wooden easel leg and he sat next to me in a hard-backed chair. I don't remember exactly how long we sat there before either of us said anything, but It felt like a long time. I started to feel a little nervous and felt pretty certain that he hated them and was just searching for a gentle way to tell me. He finally said, "how's your love life?" I was surprised, even a little shocked, and eventually responded with "what love life?" "That makes sense," he said. I felt totally exposed and confused. They weren't figurative, or sexual, and didn't feel erotic to me in any way. None of that was what I’d been thinking about while I worked on them, but once he said it, I tried to look through that lens. It wasn't about literal figures, or symbols — it was about what he felt in front of it. That’s what painting was about for me then and now, and I still have to remind myself of that today. Nothing more was said about my lack of a love life and so we continued to talk as if nothing had shifted.

For Hal

© C. Davidson