Other Connections

I am currently in a show in Houston, Terra Infirma. The title refers to a group of watery landscapes by Dixie Friend Gay and swampy landscapes by Ruben Coy. My landscapes are bombscapes.

The co-director of the gallery wrote the following about my recent work for the press release for the show.

"Scott Winterrowd makes atmospheric watercolors of atomic bomb test sites. These drawings explode with color. Winterrowd’s drawings are like Turner’s, that is if Turner was plagued by the thought that the world could go up in smoke at any moment due to nuclear fallout."

I found it funny that although Volker and I had not actually met or talked that he picked up on the Turner influence in my work. Actually I have never been a great Turner fan, although there are certain works that speak to me. I was fortunate to see the large Turner exhibition, and there were a number of great watercolors. I have always marveled at how Ruskin called Turner's abstract atmospheric paintings "True to Nature."

My influence from Turner comes via Moran. Below one of Moran's many Cliffs on the Green River paintings, and below that Turner's Burning of the Houses of Parliament.





Even more than Moran, Frederic Church has been a major influence, plus I have spent a lot of time with one of Church's great pictures, Icebergs, at the Dallas Museum of Art. Church was hailed as the American Turner after the display of his first great picture, Niagara, in London in 1857, the same year it was completed.



This work is 5 x 7 feet, and it hangs in the Corcoran Gallery in DC today. I tend to think that Church and his reference for the sublime in nature was a factor in my paintings of Nuclear tests. I was not thinking consciously about it, but there are some definite parallels.

A nice Church and Turner paring below. Top Cotopaxi, 1862, with Turner's, The Fighting Temeraire, 1838.






And then there are my bombs...



Mohawk Test, watercolor and ink on paper



and Licorne Test, watercolor and gouache on paper

More Moran and Me

Back to my work and personal motivations. Below are some different images of the Gateway Rocks at GOGs. I have paired them Moran's images, his small oil which is now in a private collection, and the print below, which was most likely used in a tourist guide to lure people to visit the Colorado Springs/Manitou Springs area, the Saratoga of the West.

This is a hand colored engraving, I am sure it is a book plate print.

My view through the rocks.

Moran's oil again.

My view of the gateway rocks with the whiterock formations in the foreground. I particularly enjoy Moran's work. If we think about it, he established for us the views in many of the major parks such as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon that have become so famous and visited today.

I alos have great respect for him, as he would trek out many summers on army expeditions for months at a time into wilderness areas, sleeping out under the stars (or in a tent) in what must have been (and would still be) pretty cold elevations even in June and July.

I thought of him often when backpacking in the Sierras. I will have to add some images form those trips soon, and talk about past adventures and art.

My one regret while in Colorado Springs was that we did not make it to Manitou Springs. I have always wanted to visit this site.

These are the manitou Cliff Dwellings, created at the beginning of the 20th century from the remains of a collapsed ruin in the Four Corners region. The structures are created to mimick buildings in major Mesa Verde sites. I love the idea of creating fake archaeological sites for the tourist trade.

Even more of my favorite stuff

In the show at the Carter there is an amazing drawing by Mark Tobey, I think it is called Broadway Afternoon. Below is not it, I could not find an image, but this is a similar drawing. I really enjoy the maniacal line work in Tobey's work. There are a couple of great Tobey's at the DMA and one in the Carter collection now. He learned Japanese calligraphy, and created his own visual language based in frenetic line work. Compositions such as this one are full of energy and movement. There are also these embedded faces, as in the drawing at the Carter right now. There are numerous smaller faces in the drawing from the Wadsworth, emerging from the patterns of line, as if they are faces of people you might pass in a bustling crowd.



If I could take one drawing home with me, it would be the Tobey.

More of my Favorite Stuff

In the show at the Carter, there are a number of great works by John Marin. There is an incredible graphite drawing from 1913-14 (my favorite) and a number of nice, if not typical, watercolors. The one below is a standout, From the Bridge, NYC, 1933. It is one of a few made that depict a similar scene. If you notice, the lower left left shows a horse and cart depicted in a cubo-futurist manner- meaning kind of cubist, but it also shows motion, as if we are seeing multiple views of the horse and cart as it passes us by. This is contrasted with the modern, the skyscrapers. The black lines steaming from the left are not Futurist force-lines, but the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, which by this time was about 50 years old. Not so modern really, but Marin was responding to the sprouting skyscrapers across New York City between 1913 with the construction of the Woolworth (which he painted-a lot), and into the 30s with the Chrysler and Empire State.




This was also a subject that Marin may have adapted from his friend, Alfred Stieglitz. below is Old and New New York, by the famed photographer.



I think, as I look at this in reproduction, that Marin is showing us in the grean field at right the girder scaffolding of new buildings, and the towers of lower Manhattan from the bridge. What makes the work so exciting is the use of collage. Not pasted discarded papers, but of different drawings on different sheets of watercolor paper, with scenes pieced together.



The white areas around the horse and cart are torn, heavy, watercolor paper. The buildings, girders, and some of the lines of the cables are made by scraping the paper with a sharp blade (shaving through the painted colors to the paper). There seems to be about three different sheets pieced together to make this work.

It is really a complex and interesting watercolor.

Unintentionally, I seem to have some affinity with Marin, who is not always my favorite watercolorist (he did make oils, but they do not hold a candle to his watercolors).

A lot of my field sketches, have a Marin kind of feel, kind of cubistic.

These are two from my trip sketching in Bandelier, New Mexico in August 2009. It is Frijoles Falls and Frijoles Canyon respectively.







Marin painted in New Mexico in 1929 and 1930 only, but made a number of watercolors while out there both summers. He worked mostly in and around Taos.

Here are a couple:Taos Canyon and the sacred Taos Mountain.

Stuff I Really Like

I recently saw the drawing show at the Amon Carter Museum again. I have always loved the Carter for it's collection of American art, and it's riches in 20th century modernism. The show is drawn from the works on paper collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum and in terms of some of my favorite painters, it is amazing. All 20th century.

Take for example:
Arthur Dove



This work is in the show, and it has always been a favorite. The larger oil and wax emulsion version is in the collection at Yale University Art Gallery. This work is great, sorry for the bad web image, but the bleeding and the use of textured white paper is a knockout.

There are also a lot of small 4 x5 " sketches that Dove made in his late career for larger finshed oils. They are phenomenal. There is a small sketch for his painting Flight, that is now in the Phillips collection in DC.

Here is a sample of one of Dove's small sketches, not in the exhibition.



These are so tiny, and made from oil, casein, gasoline, wax, among other things. He was very experimental in the materials he used.

My favorite work by Dove is a collage titled, Rain, from 1924. It is a collage of a metal sheet, a little paint, rubber cement, and twigs. It is the most amazing work and it lives at the National Gallery in DC. It was O'Keeffe's, and she kept it to the end of her life. I cannot find an image at present, but I will.

The Demuth's in the show are very nice as well. Here is one.



I think this work is a bit faded, and unfortunately there are better Charles Demuth still-life paintings. The best Demuth's in the show are Eight O'Clock (Evening and Morning). It was my first time to see them in person.

The show ends May 30 so get over to see it. The Carter is Free. I will post more of my favorites from the show later.

Moran and Me

At top is my rendition of the gateway Rocks and Pikes Peak, and below is Thomas Moran's, Pikes Peak through the Gateway Rocks, ca. 1881. Moran is known to literally move mountians in his compositions in order to heighten the drama of the scene. I suppose I do as well, I tend to compress the images upward. When compared to the photograph of the actual site (below and taken from a slightly different vantage point), you can see that Moran has greatly diminished the central rock in the "gateway" and emphasized the white outcropping in the foreground. Scale is also an issue, with the tiny figures on the path dwarfed by the towering formations.
Moran made pencil and watercolor skethches when working in the field and then transformed them into finished oils back at his studio in New Jersey.

From the view I was working from, you cannot see the white stone formation, it is hidden behind the hill.

I was surprised at how small the Garden of the Gods is. It is a spectacular park, but very compact. The painting in the middle was made on site. It was a good fifteen minute sketch.
I am still looking for the Moran paintings, may have to scan them. I will post soon.

Recent Work

I recently visited Colorado for a wedding in Denver. I did finally get to stop by the Garden of the Gods, a great tourist destination that has been operating since the 19th century. I have wanted to see this spot for a number of years, since I got to work on a Moran exhibition at the DMA. We had a few paintings by Moran of the sites in the Garden of the Gods. Here is one of my paintings after the trip. I will post some sketchbook paintings and some Moran comparisons later.