About My Recent Works
The Latin root of the word modern is modo, meaning just now. This
interests me because I have often made paintings and drawings
about modern ruins in the landscape: drive-in movie screens, abandoned
gas station canopies and other disregarded relics of ordinary
efforts to hold a place on the land.
My most recent works are landscape paintings
about land art and earthworks from the 1970’s, some of which
have only just now become visible again: Robert Smithson’s
land art project Spiral Jetty along the northern edge of the Great
Salt Lake; Michael Hiezer’s earth work in the Southern tip
of Nevada, Double Negative; and Nancy Holt’s, Sun Tunnels
project in northeastern Utah. These sites might be ruins, but
they are clearly not ordinary. Rather, they are grand examples
of the efforts of 20th century artists to leave a mark on the
landscape.
Nancy Holt started Sun Tunnels after her husband
Robert Smithson’s death in 1973, and completed the project
in 1976. It is made of four concrete pipes aligned to the rising
and setting sun on the winter and summer solstices. I found Sun
Tunnels ten days before the winter solstice in the early hours
of a morning when the sun never appeared. It had started snowing
at around 2:30 a.m., and nature, in the form of a thick blanket
of clouds out of the northwest, overwhelmed the art. As dawn warmed
a small crease along the horizon and the moon shone down over
the clouds, I prepared to leave. Just then, the headlamps of my
car made the project visible in a narrow beam of unnatural light.
Until the winter of 2003, when drought caused the
Great Salt Lake to fall to the lowest levels in decades, I had
only known Robert Smithson’s land art project, Spiral Jetty
from photographs taken in the seventies. Spiral Jetty was built
of granite boulders and earth pushed into the pink, brine-tinged
water of the lake with bulldozers and dump trucks. When I got
there, the art itself looked to be in a state of elegant ruin,
the granite rocks encrusted in foot thick salt caps and barely
protruding from the pink-tinted surface of the lake.
The artist Michael Hiezer cut two trenches across
an escarpment on the north side of Mormon Mesa for the earthwork
Double Negative in 1969. When I arrived at Double Negative, the
edges of the two 30’ x 30’ x 50’ trenches looked
like an ending and a beginning reaching out for each other across
history and geology. Just after the sun went down, the temperature
was 119 degrees. Later in the studio, I painted the trenches as
I found them that evening, glowing with heat in the high beams
of my truck lights.
In these three large oil paintings and ten of the
small watercolors, I am exploring some of the most ambitious sites
of 20th century land art with some of the most expressive tools
of 19th century landscape painting. I reach towards those eloquent
tools in the hope that I might recover something fresh out of
these 20th century relics of bulldozers and dump trucks.
DON STINSON
