The Same Hat

James Lloyd Huffman :: 1960’s

My grandfather plowing the fields of the Huffman homestead near Highwood, Montana

I’ve been working on a painting for over four years. Not daily, or even monthly, instead, I go through concentrated periods when I do and then I don’t. I usually have other paintings in progress too, but this one sits on a couple of five gallon buckets and leans against the wall. I try to ignore it, but it's five feet square so it's difficult to overlook. I currently call it Hat, Boat, Plow, because that’s what the images are, but usually it’s just the The Heaviest Painting I've Ever Done. It has so many layers that someday I’ll need to remove the canvas from the frame in order to transport it easily. During these years, it’s been many different things with different intentions, and each time most of it gets painted out to white. I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be and I’m never happy with what it is. Sometimes it’s an albatross. Sometimes it’s a source of anxiety. Sometimes it feels like an opportunity. I'm still undecided and figuring it out.

Typically when I sit and stand in front of it, looking at it, over-analyzing it, bombarded by internal chatter, I try not to think and just paint but it usually turns out to be a dead end. Thinking and painting never mix and for some reason I can’t stop thinking with this one. Then one night I had an epiphany. Maybe I wasn't supposed to figure it out, or finish it. Maybe it’s supposed to be an ongoing experiment where I can just try things without expectations. I'm more comfortable with that idea lately, just keeping at it and not sabotaging it.

Last fall in the early morning hours, I was cleaning up and glanced at the painting and out of the corner of my eye and noticed a wrapped package of old artwork nearby leaning against my flat files. I had brought the work back from Montana. It contained a few projects I did in high school. One of them had been hanging on my bedroom wall from my youth and a few others were stored in my dad's studio. After I saw the package, I unwrapped it and pulled everything out. I leaned one of the pieces up against the canvas and sat in front of it. It's a black ink drawing on a piece of 36" x 30" white illustration board. It’s a montage of a wheat field, a fence line, a windmill, my grandfather on his horse drawn plow and a large head and shoulders portrait of him wearing his gray, felt hat. The portrait was copied from a photograph someone took of him during the late sixties. The drawing was completed for a class assignment about storytelling. It was an homage to him with all of the images blending into one another like a kind of movie-poster. Then I looked at my unfinished painting which is big enough to fill my field of vision when I’m close enough, and realized it's the hat — it's the same hat! It felt like the forty-year-old drawing could have been a study for the painting — both about farming and Montana. At that moment a lot of things aligned and made sense, reminding me that I don’t need to think.

For the Huffmans

Songs :: Bless the Weather by John Martyn, In the Country by Mission Mountain Band

© C. Davidson

Shotgun

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Riding Shotgun :: 2011

I was driving east through North Dakota the day after Christmas. It was dark, cold, the road was snow packed, and I was in a blizzard, when my friend and ex-sister-in-law called. I answered, said hello and once she said “Hi!”, I asked if she would hold on for just a minute. I muted my phone, the hairs went up on the back of my neck, and my eyes filled with tears. I couldn't believe it was her of all people calling me at that moment. I got back on, and she asked me how I was, where I was and said that she'd been wanting to talk with me since my mother’s funeral almost two months earlier. Her call felt like divine intervention. We caught up with each other and then she simply listened to my grief.

I’d spent a few days in Montana during the Christmas holiday with some members of my family, while my wife and daughter were in Florida to be with her family. I drove to Missoula purposely avoiding my hometown, specifically my mom and dad's house. It would have been too much, still like a funeral home filled with certain flowers my mom wouldn't have liked. Like when certain songs were chosen for her service that had no real connection to her. The music was more about the people who chose it than it being for my mom, like Danny Boy. She wasn't Scottish, or the Springsteen song Missing that I asked to be included. I don’t remember her once saying she was a fan of the Boss. It’s a great song, but that was about me, not her. The house might feel like those parlors filled with deep sadness and a ticking clock, so I drove to Missoula where some of my siblings either lived. We went out to dinner, and I visited with a nephew’s family the following day before heading home.

I looked forward to the return trip because highway driving is always therapy—my shoulders relax, and I feel lighter. Seeing family was good, but the drive was the main reason I went—it’s the mulling, the thinking, the re-thinking, the re-mulling, the talking out loud, the looking, and the picture taking that heals me. Maybe a little like the Cat Stevens song On the Road to Find Out. After my sister-in-law and I said goodbye, I drove out of the lead edge of the storm where the interstate was eventually dry, and I took the photograph Riding Shotgun with my mom next to me.

For Mom and Janet

Songs :: On the Road to Find Out by Cat Stevens, Joanne by Lady Gaga and Dear Mama by 2Pac

© C. Davidson

Interpreting Wink

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Wink :: 1980-1981

When I think back, I realize that many of my paintings from college were figurative. I didn't think of myself as a figurative painter then, or do I now, but sometimes they felt like the focus of the painting. I'm not particularly good at drawing the figure. I did participate in a life drawing class a couple of years ago though. Once a week in the evening for about eight weeks, with 10-15 other folks, I drew a model for a couple of hours They took donations at the door to pay the facilitator and the model. I drew men and women on large pads of newsprint with charcoal, graphite and chalk. During the two-hour session we'd get to draw ten to twelve poses, with a range of 1 to 30 minutes. Over the course of the session, I came out with a couple of drawings that were OK, and most of them weren’t.

Whenever I've played Pictionary over the years and was required to draw a figure, human or animal, they were chaotic scribbles that took me forever. My teammates usually just stared at the drawing and then at me in disbelief. "I'd need to be a clairvoyant to guess what you're drawing." I was better at drawing things like wind. The figures my father drew were crisp and clear. He always captured the action quickly and precisely. "It's a person raking the yard, um… it's a person watering the lawn!" “Yes!”

Wink was a painting I did in undergraduate school. Somehow it turned into a head-and-shoulders thing. It wasn't a very good painting, but I treated the figure in a way I never had before, so I'd always held on to it for posterity. I shipped it home from my parents' basement in Montana years ago. It’d been in storage for at least twenty-five years. Once it arrived here, I unpacked it and leaned it against a wall in our living room. It remained there for a couple of weeks before my wife said anything. Eventually she asked me what the painting was about. I was surprised by her question. I wasn't surprised because she asked a question, but because of the question she asked. I assumed the image was so obvious to everyone that it would be hard to interpret it any other way. In fact, that was the primary reason I disliked it. It felt limiting. After I told her what it was, she said she still didn't really see it. Maybe. Kinda? I was relieved. It kind of changed everything. It reminded me to relax about what I think I'm painting because I often don’t know, and I can't usually control what it becomes anyway. Just painting is the point.

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"I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it." Frank Gehry

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Songs :: Moods for Moderns by Elvis Costello, Runaway and Home by Bonnie Raitt

© C. Davidson

Hal

Someone’s Always Leaving :: 1982-1983

Hal was one of my painting professors in undergraduate school. He was born In New York and arrived in Montana from the Bay Area where he grew up. He was handsome, tan, friendly and soft-spoken. I think he had been a surfer, too. His large paintings and drawings were aggressive and full of action. They were bright, complex, crowded and spacial. They were loaded and appeared completely abstract at first glance, but the longer and deeper you looked, the more figurative they became. He casually told me once that "there's no difference between abstraction and representation. It's only a matter of how the elements are assembled and how they relate to each other that shifts a piece one way or the other."

One Friday afternoon during Spring quarter, I met with him in the empty painting studio where I had set up a few canvasses. I sat on the base of a wooden easel leg and he sat next to me in a hard-backed chair. I don't remember exactly how long we sat there before either of us said anything, but It felt like a long time. I started to feel a little nervous and felt pretty certain that he hated them and was just searching for a gentle way to tell me. He finally said, "how's your love life?" I was surprised, even a little shocked, and eventually responded with "what love life?" "That makes sense," he said. I felt totally exposed and confused. They weren't figurative, or sexual, and didn't feel erotic to me in any way. None of that was what I’d been thinking about while I worked on them, but once he said it, I tried to look through that lens. It wasn't about literal figures, or symbols. It was about what he felt in front of them. That’s what painting was about for me then and now, and I still have to remind myself of that today. Nothing more was said about my lack of a love life and we continued to talk as if nothing had shifted.

For Hal

© C. Davidson