067MONUMENTALthe immersive landscape of northern New Mexico.
“It’s so engrossing,” he continues. “I wanted to
see what would happen if I indulged in the joy of
that spot. I’m interested in the passion, the mood of
a place over time. In the foreground, there is sage-
brush, a line of pinon and juniper, the gorge, then
the sky. That’s the basic composition. Almost all the
paintings were done on site. I wanted to get out there
and touch the sagebrush and feel the weather.”
As he painted, he discovered that the vastness
of the scene began to affect his perception of it.
“I found that my attention coalesced in areas of a
scene that weren’t contiguous, and that this ‘seeing’
wasn’t expressed in a, say, single neatly composed
40-by-60-inch canvas,” he explains. “I spent more
time looking at a leaning thunderhead exploding
upward into the atmosphere than at the horizontal
plain below; at specific locations along a snowy tree
line rather than the whole tree line at once. My atten-
tion meandered and dwelled and grew and skipped
throughout the landscape. I didn’t really recall what
was in the gaps between my attention. And I was
always parsing and framing and reducing the expan-
sive, no matter how wide a view I took. So I started
making the work to express this experience. If I got
excited about a cloud ascending upward, I’d paint
it ascending upward and add as many panels as
necessary to do so. If I kept following the branches
of trees as they stretched outward, I’d arrange panels
such that they followed the branches, too, and I left
vacant other parts of the scene that I didn’t notice. If
I noticed a tree line in parts, I’d paint it across many
individual panels—more like a filmstrip’s frames than
like one long contained scene.” He calls these works
Fractured Landscapes.
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