Having spent a lot of time road tripping through this country I have driven past countless scenes like this, but to be honest I have never given them the time of day. Endless telephone wires, one homogenous tower after the other, a pump house, McMansions, another gas station, my impulse was always to get to the desert or the woods as fast as possible to flee this type of modern industrial drudgery.
Rackstraw Downes’ “At the Confluence of Two Ditches Bordering a Field with Four Radio Towers, Texas City” does not give me this opportunity to flee into the woods. Instead I am placed right here unable to look away from a run off and radio towers.
Although the image appears to be static at first my eye keeps on returning to the sewage pipe with water flowing into the swampy ditch and the telephone wires above it bending and flowing like a beautiful organic wave. I think of what’s in that water coming from the pipe? How will those chemicals affect all the plants in and near the ditch and when those chemicals penetrate the earth how will they affect the soil and underground organisms. Likewise how do the countless electric wires and the radio towers penetrating the sky affect the atmosphere, weather and migratory patterns of birds?
The combination of electricity and water creates lightning especially when electricity moves in the clouds or between the clouds and the ground. Downes places the telephone wires and the radio towers right in the middle of these clouds. The cloud cover is bunching up with pockets of darker areas moving in. Downes captured the sky at that moment right before a storm where you can palpably feel the electricity in the air build. The lines of the radio towers and their angular secondary lines visually echo a beam of lightning striking from the sky, but instead of a momentary flash of lightning these towers are stationary. Instead of a brief threat these are a more continuous one.
I also start to think about what the land was like before these structures were built. Was this a prairie or a swamp? Did the Karankawa ever stay here? Are there arrowheads, shards of pottery or a burial ground underneath these 20th century towers?
I start to think about the water from the drain again and follow it down the ditch to the distance on the right which ends in a black hole. Above it I see a line of houses and think how they are affected. Do they have wells? does this run off find its way into their sinks? Do they care? I start to realize that there are no people in this painting. As a matter of fact there are no birds, no animals, just a wasteland with remnants of human activity, human “progress”.
There are many artists who want to convey these thoughts to their viewers but they do it in such a heavy handed way, fortunately one can not accuse Rackstraw Downes of this. Yes it is impossible to make a painting where one's perspective or opinion is absent, but it is a spectrum, and on this spectrum Downes is as far to the objective side as possible. Yes he picked the location and centers the viewer with a certain pictorial point of view but beyond that I get the feeling that he is a genuine perceptual painter that wants to convey what he sees as objectively and accurately as possible. This presence of the painter and his eye and accurate touch is what illuminates the painting.
If this image was a photograph I would have walked right by it but because I can see and feel a human presence and attention and care in every inch of the canvas it pulled me in and kept me for over an hour. Downes is not a surgical painter, his touch is not analytical and calculated or one that tries to document in a cold and removed way.
There is a one to one ratio, it is accurate and precise but also felt and applied in a non fussy way which is a pleasure to look at. That being said there is no superfluous painterly flourish. Every stroke, every color transition is a sincere effort to match what he is perceiving as well as simultaneously accepting the limits of that pursuit. It is not just the touch and nuanced color that allows me to enter and spend more time with this painting than I would a photograph, Its extra charm is that it is not a mechanical flat one point perspective like those created by the camera. Downes has a very unique way of creating central and peripheral angles and views within his canvases that feel a lot more accurate to my personal experience in the world than any frozen one point perspective snapshot.
Like my experience in the world whenever I'm surrounded by industrial constructions I try to zoom into a piece of nature and appreciate its magnificence. Downes allows me the same opportunity. When I'm overwhelmed by the telephone wires I can travel over to the resilient reeds and velvety violet swamp water in the bottom right and enjoy every millimeter of color transitions. The color in his darks and middletones are magnificent and they remind me of this profound quote of Charles W. Hawthorne, “It is not the sentimental viewpoint but the earnest seeking to see beauty - in the relation of one tone against another - which express truth - the right attitude. If you’re a thoughtful humble student of nature, you’ll have something to say - you don’t have to tell a story. You can’t add a thing by thinking - what you are will come out.”
