Prairie Forward

Canvas

Near Augusta

I have a neatly folded pile of heavy cotton canvas and imagine unfolding it and attaching it to a wall. I won’t need to build a frame because I’ll gesso it on the wall, paint it on the wall, and display on a wall. I’ll need to re-arrange my current studio space to accommodate it or rent the corner of a warehouse somewhere else. Once it’s unfolded, it’ll be close to nine feet by eighteen feet. I purchased the bulk canvas years ago and used half of it for four large, stretched canvases. I’ll use what’s left to paint something big—maybe depict a big view of Montana, the Dakotas, Kansas, or Minnesota—a horizon that’s filled with soybeans, sagebrush, cattle, or wheat. It’s impossible to predict what it will become but I like thinking about it.

I imagine a space that I can walk into. Then get completely disoriented because I can’t locate myself in relation to the foreground, or the background because I’ve never been in a painting before. It might feel like an overwhelming moment on one of the countless road trips I’ve taken during the day and at night—sitting in the hot dust of August, or a brittle night in winter. At some point on every trip, I pull the vehicle over to the side of a remote road, or into an adjacent field and linger for a while. If it’s dark, I stare into the blanket of stars. Sometimes if it’s during the day, I open the tailgate and sit with my lunch, or dinner. I might even have food left that my wife prepared and a thermos of warm coffee. If it’s quiet and I’m in the middle of nowhere, the crickets, grasshoppers and meadowlarks might be loud around me. If I’m lucky, the air will be heavy with sage or sweet grass and I can just drift.

Songs :: Break My Heart Sweetly by John Moreland, and Plains (Eastern Montana Blues) by George Winston

© C. Davidson

Grind My Stone

Occasionally somebody would blurt out, “I need to go grind my stone.” “We told you the lithography class was going to be a pain in the ass” one of us responded. Whenever I walked through the lithography end of the print lab, I’d look over at the presses and worktables and see someone scowling and slowly grinding their stone. It didn’t look enjoyable. Eventually though, I’d see a beautiful print they’d completed weeks later, and if I was lucky, I’d get to see them smiling while they peeled the thick paper from their stone. Then they’d get to reprint it and reprint it again.

My friend was a print maker and a ceramicist. Sometimes his lithographic prints defied the thick hard stone they came from because his images were soft and overpowered any kind of limestone I could imagine. Another friend was mostly an intaglio printer. He used found photographic material and created black and white photomontages which he then exposed to light sensitive film, exposed the films onto a photo-sensitive aluminum plate, then etched it in an acid bath. He also drew directly onto the metal plate to scratch-out or add details. Eventually, he used the plate to make black prints onto thick rag paper. They were beautiful and dense. Sometimes they were political, sometimes they were domestic images oozing with melancholy.

I’d often find him sitting on a stool at one of the long wood tables in the central print lab. He was usually humped over his plate, revising it, or manipulating the films he used to expose his plates. His ear buds were usually in and likely listening to Lou Reed or David Bowie. He’d look up and give me a friendly nod if I was just passing through, or I’d sit for a few minutes to talk.

One Saturday evening I was alone in the painting studio on the second floor. During weeknights there were often other students painting, but after midnight, or on a Friday and Saturday night, I was usually alone. I was sitting staring at a blank white canvas. I had just finished applying the last coat of gesso the day before. My friend walked in, greeted me and sat next to me. While we sat there, he scanned a few of my paintings that were around and then settled on the large blank canvas I was about to work on. “I don’t know how you do it.” “Do what?” I said. “How you’re able to stare at a white surface and just start painting without a specific plan”. I asked him why. “Because I’m uncomfortable with the immediacy of it, that’s why I make intaglio prints. I develop a plan and the process takes a long time before the image is printable. It gives me the time to get comfortable with it.” I understood what he meant and explained that I’m usually too impatient.

I’m most comfortable with something I can immediately react to. That’s why I used house paint along with traditional oil paints. House paint allowed me to inexpensively obliterate areas of paintings I didn’t like. That conversation had a huge impact on me. I’d never heard another student reveal themselves in that way about making art, about the reluctance and fear—how the emotional part of the art making process had the biggest impact on what we made and how we made it.

For Ed S. and Dave J.

Songs :: Bottoming Out by Lou Reed, Without You by David Bowie, and the entire Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps albums

© C. Davidson