Landscape for a Good Woman
Although the series is called Landscape for a Good Woman, it is a group of figurative works in oil on canvas and oil on linen. Comprised of 4 full portraits and 19 smaller sketchpieces, the works range from 4x6 inches to 4x6 feet. Each work, however, makes a significant contribution to the “landscape” created by the series.
This is a series of figurative works is intended to create an interior landscape, building sketch upon sketch towards, the larger works. Each sketch has a personality, a point of view, an opinion; one may not like, or admire, or want to be any of these one-dimensional women. They are built out of interior monologues, emotional, literary, art historical and musical references that colour single facets of her personality. Then the sketches combine to build the outer appearance in the full portraits.
In contrast, the larger works are intended to be inscrutable, somewhat unreadable, for such is the outer appearance of her life. In the end, the years, the experience, and all of the interior machinations, simply seem to record the exterior evidence of a life lived out on these transitional foothills, somewhere between the mountains and the prairie. A limited pallet of alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue is used throughout; the works are formally, aesthetically, thematically and emotionally linked.
They build upon each other. The painting process is integral to the meaning of the works and is consistent throughout. A crimson ground was laid down on each canvas and allowed to thoroughly dry. Then an impasto landscape, meaning a landscape of wet oil paint, was painted in one pass. Using a kitchen knife, a paring knife, as a drawing implement, the space for the woman was first carved and scraped out of the impasto landscape and then drawn in with the tip of the knife. Her figure became embedded, claiming her space in her landscape. Sometimes starkly Outstanding, sometimes barely distinguishable from the land, the environment, that surrounds her. Although the series is called Landscape for a Good Woman, it is a group of figurative works in oil on canvas and oil on linen. Comprised of 4 full portraits and 19 smaller sketchpieces, the works range from 4x6 inches to 4x6 feet. Each work, however, makes a significant contribution to the “landscape” created by the series. A limited pallet of alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue is used throughout; the works are formally, aesthetically, thematically and emotionally linked. They build upon each other.
The 24 works are connected and the group de facto strengthened by Identical crimson framing - reclaimed cedar fence boards. Not commercial, not specifically pleasant, but providing a contemplative journey from an interior that is never expressed, to an exterior that deflects; defaulting to an inscrutable reflection of the environment that surrounds her. This is the Landscape for a Good Woman.
The sun at its zenith.
Right between her eyes,
the insistent horizon
infallible, inevitable.
In this land
so harsh and unforgiving,
find the fortitude
to meet it with a level gaze;
an aware and weighing presence
on either side.
Ref:
"Searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree. The band of shade thrown by the shack narrows as the sun climbs, until at noon it is all but gone. It will be two hours before it is wide enough on the other side to shelter a boy's body."
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow 1955.
as sudden as a exclamation mark,
as enigmatic as a question mark."
Look at this good woman in this landscape
A soul not shrinking,
not lost in mystifying clouds of the feminine.
A capable body,
not for anyone's use but her own.
A truth-telling in the return of your gaze.
as sudden as a exclamation mark,
as enigmatic as a question mark."
Ref:
"Desolate? Foreboding? There never was a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drought or dust storm or blizzard, it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don't get out of the wind but learn to lean and squint against it. You don't escape the sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But the world is also flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its sudden flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as a exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark."
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow 1955.
like a wildfire, or a glacier.
Ref: "In the Dust Bowl years, all that country was returned to the range by the Provincial Farm Rehabilitation Administration. I can imagine myself bumping across burnouts and cactus clumps, scanning dehumanized waste for some mark - shack or wind-leaned chicken coop, wagon ruts or abandoned harrow with its teeth full of Russian thistle - to reassure me that people did once live here. Worse I can imagine actually finding the flat on which our house stood, the coulee that angled up, the pasture, the dam behind which the spring thaw created our "rezavoy" - locating the place and standing in it ringed by emptiness and silence, while the wind fingered my face and whispered to itself like an old blind woman, and a burrowing owl, flustered by the unfamiliar visitor bowed from the dirt mound of its doorstep, saying 'Who? Who?' "
Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow 1955.