These Are Some of the Works Lost in the Great Fire of 2011
- On Labor Day of 2011, a fire began when a tree fell on a powerline miles away from our home. There was a strong north wind that day. We were in a severe drought and living in a pine forest. The sky turned an ugly orange-brown. We were working outside in the yard. Suddenly, just to the west of us, the tops of the 80-foot pines were ablaze. We had just enough time to put six dogs into a Honda Element. Two sets of golf clubs were already in there.
- I had a show in Houston at the time, so 19 drawings were away from home. All the rest — 40 years of work as well as works by well-known friends — and all that we owned was burned.
- The images below are all that I have left of that part of my aesthetic life.
Before the fire, we had a large front window that looked out onto the forest. A small garden provided fresh veggies. Objects collected from around the world peopled the house. Art was everywhere. The atmosphere was idyllic and very conducive to creative thought.
After the fire, there came a surge of new creativity, perhaps out of a desire to repopulate our world with the outpourings of a renewed aesthetic passion. I wanted to rebuild the house and fill it with new works that were better than any that had come before.
After the fire, there came a surge of new creativity, perhaps out of a desire to repopulate our world with the outpourings of a renewed aesthetic passion. I wanted to rebuild the house and fill it with new works that were better than any that had come before.
I'll give you a little information about the images on this page. The triptych above hung in the stairwell of our home. I've always loved that format. This one had a nice warmth to it, more so while it was burning. The second image hung in the kitchen. It was called "Parable of the Stupid Virgin" (not a reference to Jesus' mom).
I have a real fondness for religious iconography. In the early '70s, I had a '68 Buick Skylark that had been turned into a hot rod. On the doors, I painted my business sign, "Sacred Art from the Heart," parked outside my studio. It actually got me commissions from a Catholic monastery.
I have a real fondness for religious iconography. In the early '70s, I had a '68 Buick Skylark that had been turned into a hot rod. On the doors, I painted my business sign, "Sacred Art from the Heart," parked outside my studio. It actually got me commissions from a Catholic monastery.
Franz Kline didn't start painting his big black brushstroke paintings until someone gave him a gift of countless yards of canvas. My friend, the watercolorist Michael Frary, gave me about 100 sheets of Arches paper near the end of his life. Suddenly, I had a limitless supply of good large sheets of drawing paper, so I began doing large format drawings like these. There was an amazing sense of freedom when the cost of good paper was no longer a consideration.
The second of the two drawings had a precognitive component to it. A few months after I finished it, I was in attendance for the last days of my father-in-law's life. He lay in his hospital bed, struggling to breathe, and looked frighteningly like the figures in this drawing.
The second of the two drawings had a precognitive component to it. A few months after I finished it, I was in attendance for the last days of my father-in-law's life. He lay in his hospital bed, struggling to breathe, and looked frighteningly like the figures in this drawing.
The first two of these three images were made in the late '80s. I had a friend named John Groth who worked for Sports Illustrated and made drawings that really captured the feeling of movement. These two calligraphic images are the only imitations of his technique I have ever tried, although some of his influence persists in my own drawings to this day.
The third piece is a pastel made in 2000. It was framed under reflective glass and so showed the viewer his or her own image below the smiling figure above. This hung in our guest bedroom and was one of my favorite works.
The third piece is a pastel made in 2000. It was framed under reflective glass and so showed the viewer his or her own image below the smiling figure above. This hung in our guest bedroom and was one of my favorite works.
I called these my candy landscapes. They were made after traveling through Central Oklahoma near the Arbuckles, a beautiful region of the country hidden more by culturally imposed ideas of beauty than by anything inherent in its own nature.
The first of these three commemorates the loss of my friend Bill Gordon. It's a long story, but I think the image can stand on its own without elaboration.
The second is a pastel under a sheet of colored acetate. In my painting, I often use colored glazes to achieve certain effects. I have a fondness for yellowing varnish on old paintings, and I seem to always regret restorations that replace the unifying layer of old varnish with something that often creates harsh and disjointed colors. I also enjoy reflective surfaces in some of my work. It seems to add a random element in how one is able to view the piece, often making direct viewing difficult so that one is forced to move in relationship to the picture surface.
The third is a simple little drawing that I liked for its compositional quality. It has nothing special to recommend it, but it is a satisfying bit of work on its own.
The second is a pastel under a sheet of colored acetate. In my painting, I often use colored glazes to achieve certain effects. I have a fondness for yellowing varnish on old paintings, and I seem to always regret restorations that replace the unifying layer of old varnish with something that often creates harsh and disjointed colors. I also enjoy reflective surfaces in some of my work. It seems to add a random element in how one is able to view the piece, often making direct viewing difficult so that one is forced to move in relationship to the picture surface.
The third is a simple little drawing that I liked for its compositional quality. It has nothing special to recommend it, but it is a satisfying bit of work on its own.
What Is It about Hamburger With Coffee?
What Have We Created for Ourselves?
On God in Aesthetic Culture
- The 1980s saw the emergence of big-box churches and a new televangelistic theology. People like Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, and Robert Schuller, with his Crystal Cathedral, created so much distance between worship and community that cynicism became easy. God quickly went out of fashion for the cultural mainstream. Religion became an ugly joke, another cause for rebellion against the old order.
- Thirty years later, any form of theistic approach to life is considered a cultural embarrassment. An almost militant atheism pervades much of Western thought. The blind men of yesterday all tried to describe the elephant by touch. Each had a different description depending on what part of the animal their hands found. The newly blinded Western culture denies the existence of the animal altogether since they cannot touch it.
There is a transitional vagueness in the history of art from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Somehow, we moved from darkness to light, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The plague years had long passed. The Reformation took hold in the north. Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press. Literacy moved out of the monasteries and back into the general population. The New World discoveries enlarged our view of the planet.
No two scholars will agree on the causes of this transition or on when and where the Renaissance began. The loss of population to the plague years resulted in a subsequent economic boom. Specifically, the European economy moved from feudalism toward a free enterprise system. Literacy became more widespread as individuals needed to understand and record economic transactions. The remaining population and subsequent generations became able to afford more, and, as a consequence, artists began to portray subjects with no religious overtones. When patronage was no longer the sole domain of the church, images of everyday secular life began to appear. Portraiture became a newly available vanity — the Arnolfini marriage portrait, the tombs of the Medicis, and Ghirlandaio's "Old Man With His Grandson" with that wonderful rum-blossom nose. In the centuries that followed, visual art came to address a broad spectrum of subjects and objects. Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya — how could his Disasters of War ever have come to be if he had been stuck painting a ceiling for Julius?
In 1610, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. At the end of the play, Prospero renounces magic and embraces the secular. The mystical world is no more. At the end of the 18th century, Domenico Tiepolo paints frescoes in which Punchinello, who has been described as a course, lecherous, gluttonous trickster, replaces any reference to Biblical characters or greater spiritual concerns.
I'm jumping through a great deal of time here with a generalized view of the changes that created a secular approach to art. But the change was real and certain. Within several centuries, Western art became almost totally secular, although it has retained a mystical element right through to the present day. Barnett Newman painted his abstract expressionist "Stations of the Cross" in the 1960s. The very definition of fine art, as opposed to graphic design and illustration, is that shamanic ability to see the larger reality, to explore the unseen and the ineffable.
No two scholars will agree on the causes of this transition or on when and where the Renaissance began. The loss of population to the plague years resulted in a subsequent economic boom. Specifically, the European economy moved from feudalism toward a free enterprise system. Literacy became more widespread as individuals needed to understand and record economic transactions. The remaining population and subsequent generations became able to afford more, and, as a consequence, artists began to portray subjects with no religious overtones. When patronage was no longer the sole domain of the church, images of everyday secular life began to appear. Portraiture became a newly available vanity — the Arnolfini marriage portrait, the tombs of the Medicis, and Ghirlandaio's "Old Man With His Grandson" with that wonderful rum-blossom nose. In the centuries that followed, visual art came to address a broad spectrum of subjects and objects. Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya — how could his Disasters of War ever have come to be if he had been stuck painting a ceiling for Julius?
In 1610, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. At the end of the play, Prospero renounces magic and embraces the secular. The mystical world is no more. At the end of the 18th century, Domenico Tiepolo paints frescoes in which Punchinello, who has been described as a course, lecherous, gluttonous trickster, replaces any reference to Biblical characters or greater spiritual concerns.
I'm jumping through a great deal of time here with a generalized view of the changes that created a secular approach to art. But the change was real and certain. Within several centuries, Western art became almost totally secular, although it has retained a mystical element right through to the present day. Barnett Newman painted his abstract expressionist "Stations of the Cross" in the 1960s. The very definition of fine art, as opposed to graphic design and illustration, is that shamanic ability to see the larger reality, to explore the unseen and the ineffable.
Somehow, modern-day atheist ideology chooses to entirely deny the existence of the elephant regardless of the thousands of years of "ignorant" human belief in a divine consciousness ordering the universe. "Creation was a spontaneous event." "The Cambrian explosion of new species and the Ordovician radiation were spontaneous events." "The transition of hominids into a sentient, self-aware, creative species capable of invention on a god-like scale, the Adam and Eve moment, is a routine result of natural selection."
It isn't that there is no scientific explanation for such events. There always should be. The laws of entropy vs. increasing order in biological systems notwithstanding (There are strong opinions on both sides of that unresolved argument). Rather, it should be seen in the context of the sheer joy of a creator/creation relationship, much as the painter and the painting resonate with one another. There is a conscious intent behind such events.
There is little difference between the devout atheist and the devout fundamentalist believer. Both build their beliefs on a foundation of ignorance. Both live in a very narrow world, terrified of any truth —scientific or otherwise — that might threaten the fragile footing upon which they have chosen to construct their reality. H. G. Wells said, "There is no way but knowledge out of the cages of life."
I came by my faith without faith. My knowledge of the divine — of the larger, very conscious reality underlying all of existence — came by direct experience and by rational thought based on sound education. Sid Gautama was absolutely right about illusions induced by desire. You can't shape reality with beliefs. Reality has its own shape, and it will continue to have it when your illusions have died with your body. This brief candle, this life we have inside of what was created, is the greatest of all possible gifts. Whether or not you believe in God, you should thank Him every day for it and for being allowed to share in this wonder.
It isn't that there is no scientific explanation for such events. There always should be. The laws of entropy vs. increasing order in biological systems notwithstanding (There are strong opinions on both sides of that unresolved argument). Rather, it should be seen in the context of the sheer joy of a creator/creation relationship, much as the painter and the painting resonate with one another. There is a conscious intent behind such events.
There is little difference between the devout atheist and the devout fundamentalist believer. Both build their beliefs on a foundation of ignorance. Both live in a very narrow world, terrified of any truth —scientific or otherwise — that might threaten the fragile footing upon which they have chosen to construct their reality. H. G. Wells said, "There is no way but knowledge out of the cages of life."
I came by my faith without faith. My knowledge of the divine — of the larger, very conscious reality underlying all of existence — came by direct experience and by rational thought based on sound education. Sid Gautama was absolutely right about illusions induced by desire. You can't shape reality with beliefs. Reality has its own shape, and it will continue to have it when your illusions have died with your body. This brief candle, this life we have inside of what was created, is the greatest of all possible gifts. Whether or not you believe in God, you should thank Him every day for it and for being allowed to share in this wonder.