[ RACKSTRAW DOWNES ] I was driving across the landscape and there was this endlessness in Texas.
There’s almost nothing. It is deserts and there’s just
a little bit of scrubby vegetation here and there. Then suddenly in the
middle of all this emptiness were these pink mountains around the edge of it.
Every direction there were these hills.
Perched around in this empty landscape were these
tiny little structures made out of pipe with corrugated roofs on them.
Because in the desert, shade is the most priceless thing you can get, shade and water.
Took me an hour or so to understand that it was a racetrack.
And so these corrugated roofs were shelters for the horses.
There was a judge’s tower. And then there were two spectator shelters.
I was fascinated by these lovely little airy structures which lived so lightly on this earth.
And I ended up making five drawings that really interested me.
One of them I never painted,
but I made four large paintings that went together. They’re all the same height.
Two winters I spent on those four paintings.
I was interested in sparseness and extreme clarity.
Each thing was different. Mountains were pink, the structures were silvery-white.
The desert floor was a sandy yellow. I actually went out and bought some new tubes of paint.
I first came out to Marfa because of the mountains.
I had been painting for many years in New Jersey, which is flat.
And the Texas coast near Galveston and High Island and Beaumont,
all flat as could be.
I’d been to Utah, I’d been and seen these magnificent mountains.
And these weren’t magnificent and I liked that about them.
In the meantime of course I came out here and painted Judd’s buildings instead of the mountains.
Those two buildings there, standing in the prairie like that, without their other ten,
those sites were a little bit like ruins and construction sites both at once, because they were abandoned construction sites.
I was fascinated by those things.
They weren’t shapes our culture teaches us that buildings should be in.
And then I came down to Presidio and immediately responded to those sand hills up there.
They’re not classic mountains at all, but very odd.
You’ve got height and you’ve got depth,
looking down and looking up are real ideas in painting.
And they’re very different from painting on the flat-scape or painting on the level ground.
I was astonished at the drama of the light as it moved around those forms.
The way those shadows were first on one side and then on the other side of the late afternoon.
Totally different.
It’s not my drama, it’s a drama of the sun making this effect on that mountain.
I want to keep my emotions out of it.
My emotions should be the emotion of respect for that form.
Almost reverence.
I go over that same little shadow over and over again till I get that shape.
It has a character. It has ex...some kind of little curlicue there where that rock sticks up.
And you’ve got to get that curlicue and you’re not satisfied till you get it.
There’s a rapport between my image and that real thing out there. They answer to one another.
I get very possessive of my places and I don’t want any other artist
coming around here and messing around and painting my places.
Or photographers or any other kind of image-maker. I want it to myself.
As you stay there longer you discover more.
You are constantly learning from the site you’ve chosen.
And I often feel that I could go on working on a painting almost indefinitely.
Towards the end of a painting you begin to look around and you say, "Now, I wonder why I didn’t stand over there,"
"Why did I stand in Point A instead of Point B?"
[ laughs ] And you think, "That would have made a terrific one too from over here."
"But I’ve kind of, I’m done here. I’m finished, I want to move on."
When I left Maine, it was an emotion very much like that that’s made me do it.
I was painting a line of hills and my hand said to me, "Get out of here.
"Don’t do this anymore. You’ve made that line of hills so many times, you need to go somewhere else.
And I put my house up for sale that day.
One of my favorite writers on painting said that landscape artist seems to have to move to a new location in order to reinvent himself.
And I think there’s some truth there.
I don’t think of myself as being a landscape painter.
In the popular envisioning of that term,
a landscape consists of a painting with a--a field and a pond and a tree and a mountain in the distance, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s a sort of recipe thing.
I hope very much that my paintings don’t look like recipe paintings, that I’ve gone to other places and seen something different.
I like to say I paint my environment, my surroundings.
It gives you the idea that it is a physical thing that surrounds you and it does,
it takes us immediately away from the flat plain image of the world.
Surroundings implies that the landscape does really curve around you.
Because I follow the curve that I see the curve also expressed this way on the canvas.
And if you’re standing on a high hill and you look at a straight road down here and the foreground of your painting
down below, it’ll tend to...it’ll curve up like this and the horizon will curve down like this.
So you get this sort of almond shape composition that does repeat itself in my painting.
That whole idea of the wandering eye popped into my head back then.
That you don’t see an image all at once, you see it part by part. It unfolds.
The first painting I did like that was of the Natural History Museum,
before they built the big dome there.
I thought, "If I stand here and paint that marvelous thing there, against the light, you can’t see that
it’s red, really. It just is a darkness. You don’t know what it is."
And then I look to the left and down the street, 81st Street I think, and then down the avenue which is, Columbus maybe.
I’m turning my head nearly a 180 degrees.
So that you really have gone a long way. You’ve gone the whole
way through the building and you’ve arrived at this vista
and then you’ve arrived at the opposite vista in the other end of the painting.
Perspective is not what I’m interested in, that is for sure.
I went out into the landscape and started working,
boom, just as though I were an abstract painter.
And I didn’t start out with the idea, well you know your vanishing point is here and then your flanking trees are here and here.
I didn’t construct it like that at all.
I began to find that things, perspective told me it didn’t seem to be true to my eyes.
And I’m not sure what is true to my eyes, I’m not sure it’s something that I can really ascertain or write down,
but I know that everything changes as you make the minutest movement in your head,
and still more when you turn your shoulders.
There is no solution to the representation of the world.
As soon as you take a three-dimensional world in which there is movement and place it on a two-dimensional surface,
you move into the world of metaphor, inevitably.
And perspective is an attempt to standardize the metaphor of the depiction of space.
The fact that you have these problems though are of course the reason that makes you
want to go out and do it again.
It’s always alive.
And I don’t want solutions, that would not be interesting to me.
The process itself is an unsolved problem and always will be.
[ chuckles ]
My first trip down here, I passed a little group of beehives.
And I liked the way they were grouped in this big empty landscape.
I just put those beehives in the back of my head and I was down on the Rio Grande, drawing a water gauge measuring station
and the man came up and stood behind me and watched me draw for a little bit.
I turned around and I said, "Excuse me, but
"you don’t happen to know who owns those beehives up the Casa Piedra Road, do you by any chance?" He said, "Yes, I do."
When the snow starts to fly up in Colorado, he brings those bees down here to the Rio Grande
and sets them up in these small groups.
And had about six drawings of beehives I made all in one day.
And I looked at them and I thought, "You know, they are kind of fun, they really are."
And I started coming back down in November so that I would have a longer time with the beehives still there.
He got here late one year. He put them all in these enormous yards.
One in front of a little mountain on the side of the Rio Grande and one out in the middle of the plain towards Candelaria.
So I said, "All right, I’m going to work with these two sides."
And all these hundreds of beehives, and I got going on them,
and I got the stretchers built and everything. I said, "I’ll never finish this before he moves them away,"
"So I’m going to take these sketches," which were oil sketches, for the big canvases,
finish the sketches up like highly finished paintings.
So I ended up with those two rather small paintings with many, many, many, many beehives.
I painted a power plant generating station in the middle of the prairie and
I struck by this enormous lump sitting in this enormous flat-scape in which nothing happened.
It was absolutely miles and miles and miles of nothing.
[ laughs ] And I thought it was wonderful.
Now that was a structural juxtaposition of two disparate things and sitting there and that could make a painting.
As I worked on that thing, a lot of detail of that power plant and fence lines and
ditches and roads came into the painting,
but very minutely.
The main impact of that painting is this huge lump sitting on this empty tabletop of prairie.
As you paint you’re exploring. "What is the structure? What is the interest here?"
You go to a place and you are attracted to it for reason "A,"
but once you start painting, reason "A" disappears.
Some factory workers are out having a good time in the evening playing softball.
It’s the girl’s team tonight. And you say, "This is kind of nice. This is good that these people are getting out and having a good time."
That’s the reason you start. And then everything else becomes important.
How long should the shadows be of this tree in the late afternoon?
How do you get the scale of these buildings around here to work with the scale and the figures?
Blah, blah, blah. All these other considerations come in and that initial idea is completely lost and forgotten.
And you’re involved with other things. You’re involved with the softness of light on the tall grass and the way it changes
when it gets to the mown area of the grass.
Why is it doing that and how do you express that in the, in the movement of your brush?
All these other things become important to you.
And that old theme, that literary theme that first attracted you is finished. It’s gone.
I’m interested in big open spaces which are empty.
Emptiness, like the emptiness of the racetrack area there with those sparse scatter of buildings.
And then the marvelous markings on the floor in the arena that
Judd discovered, that’s like the tracks on the racetrack.
I had first got interested in those markings on the floor in the World Trade Center.
When I painted, that flooring had all be ripped up 'cause they were vacated spaces.
On that floor you saw all these wonderful scratches and markings and stains.
The history of that floor is just written very richly all over there. And I like that history.
That’s what I mean by saying "reverence" for things out there.
Something as anonymous and minute in a sense and inconsequential as a scratch is something. It’s a real thing.
It’s like you and I, it’s a personality. [ chuckles ]
It looks empty, but it really, I, I see fullness there.
Yes. And I’d like you to see that fullness too in my painting.
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