This post is mostly a study in landscape and the art gallery scene outside New York, and how one can accidentally stay in "the best Holiday Inn Express in the world."
In honor of my earlier support of the state of Oregon (viz. traffic citation), here is DMV-museum colocation and font sharing:
I came across a dam at one point, an awe-inspiring manmade addition to the natural landscape, though instead of featuring a huge waving flag, it featured a huge painted image of a waving flag, rending the whole colossus of the dam something like a souvenir mug sitting across the river.
The color palette changed dramatically in a single day of driving. The early grayness was evocative to sit in, drab in pictures, but a baseline for the later shifts, as much a study in colors as Monet's Cathedral at Rouen. The baseline:
I am well into my signature, diagonal-horizon 'taken while driving' photographic style, marginally less dangerous than pulling over into icey inlets, getting out, and remerging in traffic, though also an oddly bourgeois version of high-risk behavior.
From the late afternoon, here is Oregon's and western Washington's answer to Monet's cathedral:
After I checked into the hotel, I noticed a sign that said "the best Holiday Inn Express in the world." While perhaps less pressuring a distinction than, say, Obama winning a Nobel Prize, it was quite extraordinary to ascertain what separated the very good from the best. Everyone was friendly, they had a good small gym and an indoor pool . . . and late at night they baked cookies, laid out with milk. (Politicians vying for votes should try this.)
After leaving my bags at The Best Holiday Inn Express in the World, I drove into town
out of curiosity and in passing quest to find a local coffee shop to contribute to my growing mug collection. Serendipitously, it was the one night of each month called Art Walk, when all of the art galleries (note the plural) stay open late.
In the first gallery, two artists were actually making work -- a woman painting sunflowers
and another working in encaustic (which is that candlewax-like substance Jasper Johns used). I didn't know encaustic was that easy to work with, as the woman applied it to small square canvases with a paint brush, while sitting on a small floral sofa next to another woman, chatting with gallery visitors.
The next gallery was bustling
open and airy, that perfect plasterboard of gallery walls, with exposed brick and some original features.
I kept trying to photograph the crowd to capture the wardrobe difference between Idaho and New York openings ( lots of people in un-ironic lumberjack wear, snow boots, and baseball hats, enjoyably low on a scale of zero to black beret for art-world dressing). The vibe was much more 'showing up despite inclement weather, as you would at a friend's house' than 'see and be seen.' A kindly man in a baseball cap had the dubious distinction of my accidentally physically running into him, twice.
Another man was an archetypal non-New-York wardrobe example, and I asked him if I could take his photo. His reply, "Actually, my family and I moved here to get away from a stalker. So, no. No, you can't." In a vacuum, it sounds like he was joking, but I really don't think he was. It put a dent in my small talk options (what is your name and where do you live?) and felt shifty and awkward - I was glad when his wife walked up. The upshot was he compensated by kindly introducing me to the gallery director, Steve,
with whom I had a short and interesting conversation, with a visiting Filipino artist who kept saying things like "Anthropology is a dead science," the sorts of comments that make me as instinctively suspicious as when businesspeople or academics say the converse, "This has never been done before!" or "We will revolutionize accounting!" -- in the first instance ignoring history, in the second, private effort. The kindly stalkee also let me know I should try to get a tour of the art storage crypt downstairs, which I was lucky to do with a woman whose name I think was Victoria:
Upstairs, I was drawn to some of the work, a number of really interesting charcoal drawings (of which I am a picky judge). These are not great photos but get the idea across:
Here is the artist of the first, Katherine Nelson, with gargoyle:
In the same way that, wherever I travel in the world, I seem always to bump into versions of Joseph Beuys' sculpture Lightning Stag (what Jen aptly calls Olympic Turd), here I ket seeing work by a certain New York artist. The paintings, all very large in scale, were ostensibly about mythological and allegorical subjects, but really seemed to be about chances for the artist to paint his wife naked, his wife being a former dancer with an enviable physique. Victoria told me the artist liked to paint the skin to look "like stained glass" which to me gave it more of a sci-fi sheen, and looked as my own paintings do when I am "all throw pillows and no couch," that is, overwhelmingly attracted to the accent colors with inadequate attention to the structural supports.
It may just be that my taste in nude portrait painting runs more toward Jenny Saville's work, but the unavoidable truth was that, by the end of the evening, even I could recognize the exact shape of the artist's wife's breasts, as if I were taking a blind attribution art history exam and their shape were to help me identify the slides.
I left the opening to head back for some rest, appeciating the vibe of the town, as summed up in this sign:
I took a flyer for the gallery and only read it later. It reprinted a passage from the painter Robert Henri's The Art Spirit, which I print here as an uncanny and eloquent summation that coincides almost exactly with my own thoughts on art, creativity, and museums. Published in 1923, The Art Spirit has never been out of print. (Try reading it aloud; it's really honest.)
Art when really understood is the province of every human being.
It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.
The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside of it.
Museums of art will not make a country an art country. But where there is the art spirit there will be precious works to fill museums. Better still, there will be the happiness that is in the making. Art tends towards balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living--very good things for anyone to be interested in.
Little did I know that the Robert Henri Museum, in Nebraska, would days later be the site of the all-time pinnacle of midwestern hospitality.
The next morning, I stopped in at the main street coffee shop, Java, where I talked a really nice guy and they had a fixed gear bike hanging from the ceiling as part of a fundraiser.
I hopped out to photograph this charming museum sign
and then hit the road, en route to Yellowstone.
As a side note, Coeur d'Alene is a hotbed for the sorts of hair salons I keep seeing that look from a distance like coffee shops.
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