tierra amarilla, 2021

Particularly when I work with watermedia, I am mindful of what Helen Frankenthaler called well-ordered collisions -- on and off the surface where painting takes place. Fields of color flow together, creating new fields and drawing eyes to lines that may draw minds to places and people in memory and imagination, both of which are full of collisions (well-ordered and otherwise) that shape what we see right before our eyes. Tierra amarilla, more or less, names the pigments in this painting: yellow is the main event, but earth encompasses red as well. As a descriptive phrase, "tierra amarilla" calls to mind the landscape near where I grew up in Oldham County, Texas, particularly Amarillo, the county seat of neighboring Potter County, which locals sometimes refer to as "Yellow City." "Tierra Amarilla" also names a place in Northern New Mexico that probably got the name from the yellow clay exposed when nearby creeks run dry, probably also one of the sources (along with wildflowers and dry grass) for Amarillo's name.

Tierra Amarilla, where Reies Lopez Tijerina led a group that raided the Ria Arriba County courthouse in 1967 to assert a claim to land based on title older than the United States, lives in my memory alongside Prague and Chicago as a scene that shaped my political consciousness as I entered adolescence in the late 1960s.

Painting and writing are ways of knowing. They are (as Adorno said of music) like language but not language. I see writing as a practice of silence: not a representation of speech but a way beyond it -- not better or worse but other; and, beyond both horizons, painting. All three practices -- speaking, writing, and painting -- live and breathe imagination and memory. And when they work, they draw us in.

For this piece, I thoroughly dampened the top sheet of an Arches block of 140 lb cold pressed paper and applied pigment with a wet brush. Yellow is the main event, but there is also red and a touch of blue. I invite you to step inside and see where it takes you.