Rackstraw Downes in "Balance" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[ 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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