Corpus Christie, TX

 So I discovered Padre Island a few years ago. The South Texas Museum there has a big painting of mine.

I was going to dip way cold snow in Houston so I wanted to paint while I could and get out of there.

The wind again and with this 40' cold -- I hunkered down beside car and actually with sun was not bad.

Martin Lake near Cecelia, Louisiana

 Martin Lake was suggested to me by someone at a rest stop. Many of these swamps one needs a boat to get into.

One year there were so many birds nesting. Roseate Spoonbills and Herons of every kind. Since the last Hurricane I haven't seen any of that.

The "swamp" was rather sad on approach. Grey in the winter. There are a lot of unwelcoming types fishing and such. Big pick ups with large gas exhaust. I was thinking maybe the good days were gone.

I was leaving when I thought no, I want to keep this continuity.

I went back and painted  besides being cold in the 40's-- it all went pretty well. Funny a big family group of hispanic people came by and made nice sounds-- as they passed, made me feel comfortable.

The recent news playing out, local good ole boys, and migrant types. Weird me sitting there painting-- they leave me alone as they dont really have much of an idea what I am doing.

Florida, Gulf Islands Nat Seashore

Pensacola is a developed strip as one would find anywhere now, adjacent to the sea. But there is a preserved bit I guess, a 4 mile strip which is still rather pristine, though plagued by hurricanes.

It was going to drop in temp and rain. I had planned to arrive in a good spell of weather, and hit it right, though the temp differences made it too windy to paint on the beach. Also where I usually paint it was inundated with people walking, hands in their jackets, against the wind, striding the beach, instead of happily camped out in the sun --leaving me alone. So I didn't attempt it.

I went to the bay beach and was happily alone to paint.

I had made a similar one ,m last trip. I like to see the differences, which point out where to go.

Atlanta

 I am represented by a Gallery in Atlanta since 2013. Alan Avery Art Company.

We had another successful show in 2022. 

The landscape of the last years has been the "backyard" of Canaan NY.

My last trips across were 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016.

I had begun a group of figures in 2012. These are what caught Alan Avery 's attention.

Then I went back to the landscape, til in 2017 I focused on what became the above show, which was figuring out the figures.

I made the figures in Canaan NY but was aware that the inspiration was from the beginning in the landscape of California. I first began there, and probably between Hank Pitcher and I, a wager from Paul Georges, that figure was the real purpose of Art. I continually went back to this idea through the years.

The landscape was the space I dreamt of this possibility. What the figure would look like.

The shows in Atlanta allowed me to gage my progress.

Alan this stop characteristically waved his hands and said what of the sculptures--? He was referring to conversations about re making sculpture, I had used to make the still life and enlarged  paintings of.

This vision had all shifted back to California. The landscape becoming the trip to get back to it.

So off to Florida which has replaced California also as a place of imagination one might dream such as the above musing.

Figures in the Landscape, The National Gallery.

 While I call this Landscape Blog, it is really about painting.I have found in painting the landscape something wants to reveal itself.

This coming forward is a figure, if a bush a rock or actual figure. The painting in Modern art itself became figure turned inside out literally. One could call that an idea.

This Katz has been here for a long time now. Im always happy to see it.

Alex said to me recently, I'm thinking of Stuart Davis-- or I'm unsure maybe he said I should think about him?

This post is sprawling to thoughts of a show I just saw at Mint Museum. You see I use these trips to put together some new idea. Southern Modern had a Jacob Lawrence and then reminded me of Horace Pippin I saw at Barnes. Pippin is a bit like Rousseau Picasso liked so.

This is the Lawrence, then two Pippins from the Barnes.

I think you can see the surface compositions in play here. Especially the use of Rugs.

There are a few more on my Facebook page.

This detail of a David Park shows he was already on this trail.

So the landscape is somewhat like the mind in that the ideas come forward in ideas, 

maybe a figure. 

This is the muse

 I chase. 

This metaphor. 

In 

"the landscape."

Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

Crazy to see these figures on the Philadelphia Museum Building after the Barnes.

They seem almost kitch to me-- I think there is some Greek subtlety missing.

Though they do have a singularity and completeness in the figure I look for, of course they are Greek.

The Philadelphia Bathers is not as good to me as the Barnes. It seems tame to me--  maybe a more obvious form or composition. 

I like its relation here to Maillol. They usually have something in the space juxtaposed. A few years ago a muse type painting of Marden really looked great.

The Picabia here points to the direction of abstraction. I think it makes sense, the Duchamp furthers it. Marden's painting towards Pollock seems an end point to this cycle. I have felt we could go back and trace another cycle.

Anyway I'd like my paintings to be seen in this context.

Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

 I went to the old Barnes with a bunch of my artist friends in 1972, we had decided to go from a bar we were all at in lower Manhattan and arrived at 5 or so in the morning. We slept in the car til it opened and were informed one needed a reservation-- they made an exception. I went I guess about ten years ago when the new museum opened. They didn't allow photos. Now, Here, today I feel I see it for the first time. It is Amazing. 

It tells its own story though parallel to most narratives. The Cezanne Bathers is central. And Matisse's relation to Cezanne. There are just so many amazing Cezannes. Barnes misses Picasso. Most Picasso is earlier or periferial. El Greco's relation to Cezanne is plain and how that plays out in Picasso is not quite there, either.

Without Cezanne there would not be a 'Demoiselle', by Picasso. I have never seen Cezanne so clear as the expressionist. And that expressionism applied to a surface, or maybe I should say ruled by the surface. Many traditions flow from there. Pascin is an artist we don't think of much now. I could see Larry Rivers. Interesting how that was of a time. 

But then later today at the Philadelphia Museum, Picabia and Duchamp continue that surface into Abstraction.

Matisse's Joy of Life and Dance mural.

Renoir is here also in profusion but for me he is something else. In the Phila. Museum Maillol makes a similar relation to the direction.

I see in this Gauguin how he is influencing painters younger than I.

Geez this is just a little of what is there. The Cezannes, The Renoirs, Matisses from Nice period, and all the peculiar hangings allows one to see it all freshly. One has to see this museum if one hasn't.

The Southern Route

 Gulf Islands, Louisiana and Big Bend.

I started to recognize this as a Route in 2000 or so. 

I think first I painted east from Big Bend to Gulf Islands. The weather and scenery was just more interesting. Though, I can't tell you how many times I stood under the back of my car's tailgate waiting out a thunderstorm in Louisiana. Rain the big drawback til Texas.

                                                                            Gulf Island Sea shore, Pensacola, 16 x 24", o/c, 2011

Louisiana Swamp near Cecilia, Dusk 16 x 24", o/c, 2011

                                                                       Big Bend, Texas, looking South to Mexico, 16 x 24", o/c, 2011

These three represented something. The hurricane trees in Pensacola. The swamp was newly discovered near Layfayette, LA. Lake Martin. The Big Bend scene. All has something to do with my own demeanor also.

Anyway this is the route I will travel towards, I say towards as the weather will dictate a lot this trip.

A trip West in Winter, 2025

So I'm off tomorrow on a trip across the country. It is prompted by a teaching stint at University of CA at Santa Barbara, which I have been lucky to have association since when I first showed my paintings there at a University Gallery in 1996.

It is not at all the best time to be doing this. In my experience something will come up though which will make the trip memorable and define some idea for my new paintings.

Already the Fires in Malibu, which will be a memorable event for time to come, is there at my destination.

As I write this in Canaan NY it is snowing. I just attended the memorial for David Shapiro and it reminds me of Davids poetry relating to this moment. 

The Snow Fell 

And so the snow fell

And covered up poetry.

And so the snow fell

And covered up cities like bags of leaves.

And so the snow fell

and covered up an architectrure.

And so the snow fell

and covered our friends.

And so the snow fell

and covered up one red orange sexual flower.

And so the snow fell

and covered the clear watertowers, the windows and the doors.

And so the snow fell

and covered up the fire and a house within.

And so the snow fell

and fell on their fallen trees.

And oh the snow fell

And covered up the photographs of snow.

Stevens wrote of the Wintry slime as he thought of the Imaginative weather of poetry which came alive in places like Gulf Islands National Seashore . I shudder as I write this as Gulf Island is still relatively empty. Pensacola seems to prefer bars and shopping malls.                  

To think 40 years ago I made these paintings. The black and white signaled destruction to some and it was there. But in the larger painting the Circles, gleaned from an essay by Emerson, talked of recurrent cycles.

The Winter is a dream of Spring. So They are hopeful in some way, especially in the scope of my whole painting oevure. I am taking leave in a most fearful time. Trumps inauguration as I reach Texas. This next Painting was nicknamed, The Viet Nam painting. It kind of cleaned the slate for a beginning to my painting life. Another cycle.

So again I can't think what my friends must be thinking. One friend lost his beautiful home in Pacific Palisades. California has always harbored disaster maybe in thinking about the Big One. It has been a part of the sublime western landscape I've loved and take off now-- to try to meet.

Obviously it is about more than Landscape to me. I'm always looking for something out there.  I found making a painting something was always trying to come to the fore, to distinguish itself, to say something. I thought, the idea,  of the painting, the figure.

 Gregory Botts Sunflowers at Horsefly Mesa, 24 x 48", 2014

The above painting seems the height of my Painting Along the Road. It was a ranch in Telluride, we went to as a class to paint. Painting the landscape has taken me to some of the most beautiful of places.

I continue to paint on my way across the US, from NYC to New Mexico where I also keep a studio.

I've done some aspect of this since 1990 when I painted in New Mexico, then mainly in Santa Barbara CA and Big Sur, along with Yosemite and then the Tetons in Wyoming before I traveled back to NYC.

It was not until 2007 that I painted in the eastern parts of the US, though I painted in Eastern Long Island until it felt too developed to get the feeling I was after.

There is a sense of the wild that makes a harmony with the form of my drawing and painting.

A student in 2007 suggested I make a blog as I made my trip to New Mexico and Painted Along the Road. This gave the idea some structure that kept me doing it until 2014.

I've painted through the next year's trips. Though with the beginning of Facebook and then Instagram, the posts became shorter and more fragmentary here on Blogger.

I thought I'd go back to Blogger and try to add to the content of the narrative, along with my evolving painting's form.