Landscape Art - Wetlands and Highways

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Brackish Marsh Series (selected works) - scroll down for Highwayscapes; Hunting Grounds; and Weeds, Trees, and Trash

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Following love and marriage I've been driving from Oakland to the Sierra Foothills for around 15 years. These works started with photos snapped of the Suisun Marsh on Hwy 680 northbound. The motorized views they capture yield unfolding meanings: on the one hand, the visual respite offered by places that seem to harbor little but grasses, water, light, and birds -- how these interrupt the moving views of development tracts with operatic names (Aria, Ovation), industrial parks, phone towers, billboards, businesses large and small encased in an aesthetic of low-slung uniformity that bracket the marsh on both edges. On the other, how the marsh itself is subject to the same historical-economic-cultural forces that give rise to these less-pleasing landscape forms; such as the paradoxical role of duck hunting clubs, which have made strange bedfellows with environmentalists in efforts to protect wetlands from the potential ravishes of commercial development. I've tried in these works to merge the beauty of protected water, habitat, and species with forms that make visible the human forces always at play outside the marsh's edges. The marsh as a land form-place-space, also described in various documents with wonderful words and phrases like "brackish," "tidal flows," and "reconciliation ecology," is extending in my mind into thoughts about protection, cultural mixing, the beauty and robustness of 'impurity,' vulnerability and hard-won balance.

US Hunting Grounds

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Trees, Weeds and Trash

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Highwayscapes

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Brackish Marsh 1

Charcoal and graphite on Stonehenge rag paper

22 x 30"

2017

Brackish Marsh 2

Charcoal and graphite on Stonehenge rag paper

22 x 30"

2017

Brackish Marsh 3

Charcoal and graphite on Strathmore 400 paper

18x24"

2017

Brackish Marsh 4

Charcoal and pastel on Lennox 100 paper

22x30"

2017

Brackish Marsh 6

Charcoal, pastel, ink and collage on Strathmore 400 paper

18x24"

2017

Brackish Marsh 5 (Day of Dread)

Charcoal and ink on Strathmore 400 paper

18x24"

2017

Brackish Marsh 10 (Ovation, New Homes)

Charcoal and graphite on Stonehenge rag paper

26 x 40"

2017

SOLD

Brackish Marsh 7

Charcoal, graphite and acrylic paint on Strathmore 400 paper

14x17"

2017

Brackish Marsh 8 (egret bathing at the confluence of rivers)

Charcoal and pastel on Lennox 100 paper

122x30"

2017

US Hunting Grounds 1

Charcoal, pastel, graphite, masking tape on Lennox 100 paper

26x40"

2017

California highways meet Weimar Germany? Maybe best to leave it to Walter Benjamin, who wrote about Klee's angel in 1940:

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Theses on the Philosophy of History IX)