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09/07/2004: "Notes from a Southwestern Walk-About..."
Traffic was slow and I was moving about 15 miles per hour when I happened to look out the truck window to see the most amazing vision. On either side of the sun in the sparse clouds you could see the two patches of pale rainbow refraction which is the norm for a good sun dog. But while they were not nearly as bright as some, because the sky was generally hazy, you could also see a sort of shadow bow just a few tones grayer that encircled the entire sun making a huge refractory ring, the subtle hues of the rainbow, around it in the Southern sky. The two sun dogs were the second brightest points on either end of a line dividing the circle with the sun in the center. It reminded me of the geometry of a Hopi Sand Painting with a bit of the promise made to Noah thrown in. Inside the ring it was a bit darker than it was outside the ring. I assumed Michelle would tell me what this meant in Native American Traditions. I'm not terribly superstitious but I couldn't help feeling this was good medicine for the rest of the trip....
Since returning from Argentina I've been thinking about what to talk about in my next blog. Haven't been in the mood to talk about serious art, marketing, or digital issues. When Jodi asked me to write a regular blog I decided to cover various art oriented trips I often take. I pulled out some of the watercolors I'd done on a three week drive out west to see my son last winter between Christmas and the middle of January and decided to try to put down my memories and insights.
Since 1992 I've been traveling a lot. For the last 10 years I schlepped students around Italy, France, Great Britain, Ireland and Spain on two week junkets to see the great art of Europe. Although I'm not an art historian I think it is quite important not only to know what historians think about the progression of art and its reasons but also to see the great work of history and realize that one is standing, say, arms length- the same distance Rembrandt would have stood, while painting Bathsheba reading the letter from King David which is in the Louvre. We were there during the Monica Lewinsky news and the comparison between the affairs of Bill Clinton and King David led to some interesting discussion not to mention opening the eyes of my students to both mastery of skill and the use of metaphor, form and content and visual psychology. To see for oneself and know that a human made these marks by moving colored mud around on woven plant fiber is such a liberating experience for young painters, illustrators and
designers. No computers, not even photographs to hinder or help. Just the genius of the human mind and hand. Learning art history from slides and books can kind of Pavlovian disgust for the art that has gone before us. Please! No hate mail from you Art Historians. I love you and respect you and understand that you have budget and time restraints and that lectures are a necessary evil. And, through the technological miracle of slides and power point, you have brought the mountain to Mohamet. But don't you secretly wish that you could take Mohamet to the mountain instead
The point is that no one falls asleep standing in the harmonious color/light of Giotto's Life of St. Francis fresco cycle in the upper chapel of Assisi, the sorrowful physicality of Michelangelo's Pieta in the Vatican, Gaudi's whimsical broken tile mosaics in Barcelona, or Picasso's urgent and gut wrenching Guernica in Madrid. These tours were not for college credit. There were no tests or assignments, although students often kept sketchbooks and photo journals of their own volition (when asked to do this in a normal classroom circumstance students act like I’m asking them to poke themselves in the eye.) And these trips were great appetizers for later courses in Renaissance, Medieval, Impressionist and early Modernism that my Art History colleagues would later teach. So I always felt like I was doing my colleagues a favor by priming the pump. And I haven’t had a student yet come back and say it was a waste of their time or money.
But as much as I have enjoyed my journeys with young artists all the recruiting and planning was beginning to wear me out. So last December I decided to quit the tour business and do a kind of walk-about’ by myself out west. I'd just negotiated my resignation as the chair of my department and after 7 years of not having time to really cut loose on my own the trip seemed like a good idea-- No students, no buses or tour guides, no agenda except that I would eventually make it to Tucson and back. And that I would take the time to do some watercolors whenever I stopped along the way. I did e-mail a few friends and tell them I might drop in on them for a night or two and a place to take a shower-- or not.
By the way... I only do watercolors when I travel. I have a large drawer full of the "souvenirs" of my trips in my flat files. They are just sketches, quite different from what I do in the studio. The sketches are 
little landscapes. They are of the moment and keep me in touch with my observational drawing and painting skills. Some take me less than a minute or two and some as much as an hour or more. They are usually postcard size more or less but rarely larger than 9" x 12". And while I find the imagery sometimes informs my later studio work (see Dust Devil which resulted from an earlier trip I took to Colorado and New Mexico in 92 ) they are not really done for that purpose. Just done for the fun and discipline of keeping my hand in. I find I can take a million photos without ever really seeing what's in front of me. But doing the watercolors makes me stop and really look at where I am.
So I loaded some camping gear into my truck along with a bag full of ham and cheese sandwiches and a few days change of clothes. I refilled the color boxes of my standard Windsor and Newton watercolor kit and took off early one morning near the end of December 2003 pointed generally in the direction of Tucson Arizona.
The drive from Columbus to Tulsa is long and boring with lots of time to contemplate. It is mostly flat farm land through Indiana and Illinois and I've made the trip a million times. So when I was blessed with that incredible sun dog from about 50 miles east of St. Louis after my first 7 hours on the road it was as if I was being signaled by some higher power. I felt I was in the right place at the right time doing the right things. Tried to get a photo but the phenomenon was too large to be captured with my little digital camera.
Once you hit St. Louis you begin to edge the Ozark Mountains although they are still quite a ways south and pretty much out of sight. But the landscape begins to change and becomes a lot more interesting.- undulating is the best way to describe it- and still green for the most part. As you drop down on I-44 towards Springfield and Joplin the limestone and sandstone rocks begin jutting up where they blasted the road through the low hills. My wife says I begin speaking in an Oklahoma drawl as soon as I cross the Mississippi. But there was no one to hear- just me and my Dylan tapes. I do admit to belting out a couple of verses of "Tough Mama" and "You Angel You".
Two nights with my parents, a visit with an old friend from high school and I was on the road again. I made it through Oklahoma City, Amarillo TX and on to the Texas/New Mexico border by 4:30. Stopped and did my first watercolor at a rest stop looking north towards the Oklahoma panhandle. Infinity is not something I can imagine. It has no landmarks to measure it by. But the desert suggests infinity in a way that you can measure and get a grasp.
NM looking towards TX panhandle, wc on BFK-Walter King. Scale is enormous and translates to such small marks on the small pages of watercolor paper. It is about a mile from where I'm sitting to the middle ground of this sketch. Have no idea how far it is to the mountains in the distance.
Made it to Michelle's place in Santa Fe at around 10:30 and Michelle and I talked and drank wine till early morning. Michelle Mosser, an excellent graphic designer, photographer and illustrator, runs her own ad agency out of her beautiful little pueblo style house on the outskirts of town. She is a transplant from Port Clinton Ohio by way of Ft. Lauderdale. We spent a lot of time discussing the possibility of environmentally sustainable models for energy and business, politics and Native American folk lore until we both were too tired to talk anymore. Michelle has focused her business on clients related to these subjects and she has become somewhat of an expert in promoting the ideas. She gave me her futon in front of the beautiful adobe kiva in her living room. I eventually fell asleep watching the fire dwindle to warm orange and gray embers.
http://www.gracecom.ws
By 10 am the next day she had me up, dressed, breakfasted and on the road heading for an Indian Pueblo near Taos to see a Native American Elk dance. We were too late but got to see the tail end of the ceremonial cleansing of the dancers afterwards. The women and children of the pueblo were all standing on their porches or roof tops, wrapped in hand woven traditional blankets, long black hair blowing in the crisp winter breeze watching as if they could see something that we European transplants could not. You see this image in many of the galleries in Taos and Santa Fe. And while the image of these women standing and watching has become an artistic cliche the reality is quite convincing. We talked a while sitting on the rocks that ring the ceremonial dance site and watched the dancers run down to the frozen creek, break the ice and wash their shirtless torsos, long black hair and faces with the icy water. We drove back down into the valley where Michelle pointed out a few of Georgia O'Keefe's more famous motifs then up to Ghost ranch where O'Keefe often painted. We picked a trail and hiked for a couple of hours following a little frozen creek that was burbling just beneath the ice. It curved around the base of tall sandstone bluffs and gigantic sandstone pillars like ghostly figures reminiscent of those Native women on the roofs of their Pueblo- sentinels silently watching everything below them for as long as anyone remembers. As empty as the southwestern landscape is I always have a sense that I'm being watched.
When we got to the back of the box canyon we had a little picnic beneath the ochre sandstone walls and painted and talked about Indian lore just loud enough to hear our voices echo back from all directions. It was a very cold day up above Taos. Lots of patches of snow especially in the shadows and north side of the cliff faces. There was a tremendously enchanting ice falls near the carved out half barrel cliff wall at the back of the canyon. Every now and then a bit of ice would break off and skitter down to the rocks below like someone was trying to catch our attention. It was getting dark and at that altitude a lot colder. Before we left the canyon Michelle made me leave a small offering for the spirits with tobacco from a cigar I'd been smoking . I can see how that sense of spiritual presence can be persuasive, even addictive. We hiked back down to the truck.
Michelle Mosser, my guide and captain near the back of the box canyon on Ghost Ranch, NM.
Looking Back down the Canyon, watercolor- Walter King
After our hike we were cold and sore so Michelle drove to some thermal springs where we put on trunks and headed for the baths. We sat in the hot steamy mineral waters up to our necks with only our heads above water in the cold night air looking up at the black starry sky which twinkled a little more than usual because of the moisture rising from the pools. Again a very strange and mysterious sensibility hung above the gurgling water and hushed whispers of bathers in other pools. Some of the baths were open to the night sky. Now my trip had really begun to engage me on all levels. Thanks to Michelle I'd broken through the administrative screens and dodges and began to allow my soul to breath again.
Michelle is steeped in Indian lore and spiritual mysteries and makes lovely connections to the environment and various current social issues as well. I've also done a lot of readings in theology myself from various religions and other spiritual writings. I was born Catholic and later chose Quakerism because I liked their minimalist ritual and quiet meetings. And I grew up with Native American kids in Oklahoma. I'm not really religious in that I'm not bent to believe literally in rituals, whether Catholic, Protestant or any other system. You'll never catch me handling poisonous snakes- not on purpose anyway. Although the image of snake handlers intrigues me as an artist and I have to say that dancing naked under the moon holds a certain attraction for me. But you won't find me practicing ritual observances, calling spirit guides, reading the stars, tarot or I Ching.
I just have a hard time accepting much of the defined, codified belief systems. I'm not an Atheist- not even an agnostic waiting for God to be proven to me. And like Saint Francis I have only a few rules. I do, however, find all belief metaphorically revealing. I think, because we are limited by time and space, we are too small to understand the whole picture. (this is the primary reason I can't accept human codifications of spirituality) Not that I don't try to understand- I do. And I feel strongly that there is something more here than meets the eye and that we often sense it in various ways with various moments of clarity, like St. Paul said, 'through a glass darkly'. Like a lot of other people I use the most common term God’ to give it a name to use in conversation even if that doesn't seem quite sufficient. I read once that the word God may have it's root in old English meaning Light. Metaphorically light means more than just the energy that illuminates the world. It, of course, also refers to the illumination of our very souls. And, for a painter, light means color. And we felt very close to God, if you will, in the moments before the new year looking out into the dark blue black universe through the twinkling pink stars as the gray green moon seemed to float above the blue gray ghosts the Spanish called the Sangre de Cristos or the Mother's Spine by the Native American people.
And so we floated, soaking in the warm waters talking of the mystery of life and again, as I have so many times thought, I was overwhelmed to realize what a remarkable mystical place this mother must have been before we Europeans invaded, tied her down with electrical lines and clawed her skin into shopping malls and car lots.
It was incredibly cold when we got out of the hot baths so we had to run, still steaming in the night air, carefully, because of ice patches, shivering and laughing in nothing but our swim trunks to the bath house where they wrapped us individually like caterpillars in tight white towel cocoons to dry out and warm up. It was cozy at first, quite embryonic, but after a few minutes I got a little claustrophobic and had to ask the attendant to let me be born. We paid our bill- really wasn't too bad- about $20 ea. -and drove to a restaurant in Chimayo feeling refreshed and relaxed. We ate chili rellenos in warm hospitable surroundings in front of a big window looking out on the lights of the village of Chimayo to which so many spiritual pilgrims come each year to be healed. Maybe that's why Michelle brought me there. To help heal my own exhausted soul.
"So?" watercolor on canson postcard paper-Walter King
It was New Years Eve and we didn't want to be out too late. The hill roads can be treacherous at night and there would be a lot of drinking going on around Santa Fe. So we drove back to Michelle's, opened a big jar of homemade beer a friend had given her and celebrated New Years on the back deck barking with the coyotes (and some anonymous human revelers on the other side of the large field behind Michelle's pueblo) while making ritual oblations to the moon and the spirits of the new year.
Yes, well, just because I don't believe in rituals doesn't mean I can't join the fun. After all, I'd just been healed.
