MATTHEW KIRKPATRICK
Seven Paintings
Lorena Erickson
American 1905-1995
Devil’s Tower #3, 1970
Oil on Canvas
After living in Wyoming for two years, Erickson returned to her childhood home of New Paltz, NY, but remained committed to the landscape of the American West, which she claimed represented the true America. In Devil’s Tower #3, the dramatic intrusion of the stark monolith on the rolling landscape literally overshadows the figures, on horseback, as they approach. Erickson believed that nature would ultimately triumph over the encroachment of humans, and here, the enormous rock formation seems as if it is about to swallow the inconsequential explorers who approach it.
*
Roscoe Crooks (born Matthew Peuse)
American, 1930-2005
Corral, 1981
Oil on canvas.
Though Western themes had fallen largely out of fashion in the art world (perhaps they still thrive in other worlds), Crooks managed to cling to both the genre and critical acclaim. In Corral, we see a work exploring typical Crooks subjects—horses, troughs, fences in need of mending—at the height of his interest in replicating what he perceived to be the washed out, burnt oranges, yellows, and browns of the Old American West. By 1981, old ideas of the frontier like ruggedness and adventure had become clichés. In Corral, Crooks uses the common western trope of a gathering at a corral to invoke a sense of nostalgia. However, the deep wrinkles on the cowboys’ stone faces, their thick biceps, shredded clothing, and the skeletal horses around which they gather betray the reality of a cowboy’s life in the west.
*
Harley Booth
American, 1901-2014
Ergodic Texture, 2000
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Light touches each edge of the subtle creases in the paper where the paint collected in troughs like valleys on a topographical map. The landscape of paint mimics the light that touched Booth’s eyes as he stood in some dead field and was so bored by what he saw he chose to paint something entirely different.
*
Annette Morgan
American, 1925-2011
Horseradish Farm, 1972, 1975
Oil on Beaver Board
Annette Morgan grew up in Collinsville, IL, the self-proclaimed “Horseradish Capital of the World” and in Horseradish Farm she commemorates her hometown in this pastoral scene of young, shirtless boys poking their hoes around the thick green foliage of mature horseradish plants. All of Morgan’s paintings drip with nostalgia, but it is difficult for even the most naïve Pollyanna to not gag at the cloying sincerity of this painting. Notice the earnest faces of the boys, engaged in the backbreaking labor of tending horseradish; notice the sweat on their backs, how one boy has raised his arm to wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. Notice in the distance the windmill, the silo, the wild dogs, and the hot air balloon floating over the hills (are there hills in Illinois?) while the youngest boy, clearly on the verge of death from heat exhaustion, kneels to capture his friend’s urine to drink lest he die from dehydration.
*
Marian Bailey
American, 1932-
Aerial, 1965
Oil on canvas
Italian futurism’s influence on Bailey’s Aerial is undeniable, though her contribution to aerial landscape is hard to classify. At the time of its painting, Bailey had never seen the ground from the air; her research was conducted entirely through photographs and other aerial landscape painting, especially landscapes by Georgia O’Keefe, Susan Crile, and Hank Simmons, in addition to the Italian futurists who commonly explored visions of the earth from the air. In Aerial, the sharp angles and distinct zones of color, reminiscent of the commercial art of the period, and the appearance of falling motion, are combined in a style that is familiar, yet groundbreaking—elements of various styles can be seen in Bailey’s work, but the combination is so refined and uniquely her own that this work remains an unparalleled example of the genre.
Typically, aerial landscapes depict patchwork farmland, fractured landscapes, or crumbling metropolises, but Bailey’s landscape rejects these tropes for an aerial view of her hometown, as if plummeting toward her childhood—an indistinct small-town rooftop among dozens of rooftops. From the air, the green yards and swimming pools look lonely and empty, yet the trajectory of the point-of-view of the painting is moving quickly downward: whether from desire or force, we cannot tell.
*
Kenneth Raney Clark
American, 1855-1940
Carapace, 1939
Oil on wood
On the threshold of knowledge, you stand before this empty shell and gaze upon the luster inside, the true beauty of this imaginary tortoise exposed only in death.
*
Jasmine Burns
American, 1958-1999
Closed Road, 1990
Oil on canvas
The canvas is 36 inches wide and 24 inches tall. Beginning in the upper left corner of the canvas, one can see the blue of the sky through diaphanous clouds, a mixture of Mars Black, Charcoal Grey, Perylene Black, Titanium White, and Zinc White with an almost undetectable amount of Pewter and Indanthrene Blue. The same color could have been achieved by mixing Titanium White and Perylene Black. The paint is thick, applied via tiny mounds of paint heaped onto the tip of a small, square brush. Moving to the right, the clouds darken and then lighten and then darken again. Here the strokes are less noticeable, though close inspection will reveal them. In the middle of the canvas, the clouds lighten again and the blue (Prussian Blue, Charcoal Grey, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue, Titanium White) can be seen more thoroughly as the clouds all but disappear. On the top right of the painting, only blue sky can be seen except for an inexplicable trace of Winsor Green. Below the cloud on the left side of the painting, a bit of a tree (some combination of umbers and ochres) can be seen. To the right of the tree are more clouds, and then more sky. In the middle of the painting is a lot of sky. To the right of the sky is more sky. Moving down, on the left side of the painting, to the right of the tree is sky.
The sky dominates the canvas until one’s eyes move down to another bank of clouds disappearing into the distance above the mountains (Terra Verte, Winsor Green, Perylene Black, Gold Ochre) in the background. On the left, midway down the canvas, below the tree, can be seen a greenish field (Cadmium Green, Chrome Yellow, Bismuth Yellow, Oxide of Chromium, Titanium White, Gold Ochre). To the right of the field is more field, and then a road (Charcoal Grey, Oxide of Chromium, Titanium White, Gold Ochre, Perylene Black) that begins at the lower left of the canvas and extends inward toward the middle background, disappearing into the mountains. We are meant to feel loneliness when we see the road, because the road begins somewhere off canvas and ends somewhere out of sight in the quiet, distant mountains. There is no evidence that anybody would want to travel on the road. We feel lonely because it is a lonely road. The road makes us grateful for our inadequate homes and families. We yearn for the warmth of shelter when we see this road. To the right of the road is a dead and brittle field (Gold Ochre, Brown Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Venetian Red, Raw Umber) with a single tree (see brittle field) that almost blends into the bleak field. To the right of the tree is an old, strangely colored horse (Charcoal Grey, Titanium White, Bismuth Yellow, Olive Green) looking for food in the dead field. The color of the horse suggests that a child painted it. The horse is hungry and thirsty—all the food has died and the water dried. The horse will be dead soon, its body left alone in the field to be consumed by Bald Eagles and flies. To the right of the horse is more dead field and to the right of the dead field is still more field, also dead. On the lower right side of the painting is the artist’s signature in Charcoal Grey and Prussian Blue. It is a large, bold signature, even for Burns, and is the most vibrant element of the painting. Our eyes are drawn here, to the corner, to this bright artifact, as if the painter’s boredom in painting this lackluster landscape was worth it because, at the end of the day, she could sign the painting, sell it, and get it out of her studio.
Matthew Kirkpatrick is the author of Diary of a Pennsylvania Farmer (Throwback Books), The Exiles (Ricochet Editions), and Light Without Heat (FC2). His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Common, Puerto del Sol, Denver Quarterly, Believer Logger, The Conium Review, Juked and elsewhere. His audio collage and hypertext, “The Silent Numbers” is anthologized in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and was part of the “Shapeshifting Texts” exhibit at the University of Bremen. He is an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches fiction and new media writing.