Joel Sheesley
Joel Sheesley is a painter whose current work addresses the local northeastern Illinois landscape. He has worked collaboratively with a number of agencies engaged in conservation and habitat restoration. In 2017, he began a three-year project under the auspices of The Conservation Foundation to paint landscapes of the Fox River Valley. This work was exhibited at Aurora University’s Schingoethe Center and published in "A Fox River Testimony", a book featuring more than 70 of his paintings of the Fox River.
Mr. Sheesley is a professor emeritus of Wheaton College where he taught painting for 42 years. Sheesley’s work has been exhibited widely, and in 2020 he was inducted into the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame. He lives in Wheaton, Illinois.
For two years, artist Joel Sheesley crisscrossed DuPage with his easel and paints, breathing in the scope and details of the DuPage River watershed as it rolls through numerous forest preserves and putting that life to canvas. His exhibit of 55 paintings invites viewers to join Sheesley and the Forest Preserve District in experiencing nature in their own ways.
Here, the artist shares his thoughts about his works in the form of an essay written about his weekly experiences.
On Monday, January 30, 2022, partly cloudy skies and a high of 32 degrees invited me out to paint the ice and snow on the West Branch of the DuPage River at West Branch Forest Preserve. A south wind, travelling over miles of frozen ground, moderated but preserved a lingering chill. I parked on Meadowlark Dr. just off Klein Rd., walked across Klein Rd., and stepped immediately into the path bounding the Preserve on the west side. I left the path and walked across an open section of prairie where, through snow cover, blackened stubble sprouted here and there showing that the field had been burned earlier in the year.
I wound my way down the slope and brushed through waist high prairie plants, dried and stiff remainders from the past summer. Soon I was working my way through tougher taller dried plants, sapling-like with tough stems, that rose above my head. Several swales cut through the descent of this broad plain, each draining a different water source from up near Klein Rd. These shallow gullies create a topography that dips and rolls as it descends to marshland. The west branch of the DuPage River is cradled in the fold of this prairie landscape.
I wanted to paint a view of the succession of several small cataracts, cross vanes, that the Forest Preserve District constructed in the river. Ice had formed along the river edges, but these terrace-like foot-high “waterfalls,” manmade rapids, were free of ice. I set up my easel on an ice shelf below the bank. Everything I hoped for was right there. Looking upstream I could see ice and snow extending out to horizontal lines of darker water, the faces of each of three cross vanes and their runs of open water. Each vane created its own broad pool, edged further down by ice.
I quickly became lost in my work. Once having grasped the big picture and sensed and set the parameters of the world I meant to paint, analysis of all the parts and my best response to their variety consumed my attention. Only the occasional quiet chirp of a winter bird, or the surprising thud of a broken piece of ice scudding along the bank awakened me to the larger world and vibrant life thriving all around my focused task. I worked that way for a couple of hours until I was more abruptly distracted by the sight of three people, far up on the opposite bank, wending their way downstream.
Kids, I assumed. Their slow and irregular progress reminded me of children proceeding with their parents down the aisle to receive communion. On a direct course, they nonetheless find a way to turn, bob and weave, even sit on the floor, only to be picked up by a parent and brought back into the procession that does, after all, advance to an end. There was nothing direct about the approach of these three; I wondered if maybe they would just disappear into the tall prairie and fade from view.
To my surprise the first of the trio to reach me was not a kid, but a young woman, probably in her early twenties. She chuckled as she stumbled along over the rough terrain on the opposite bank. “Well,” she called out, “that’s a first for me. I’ve never before seen someone painting outside in the middle of winter.”
She was followed by another young woman of similar age, and then by an older woman, probably in her fifties. “Can you capture the sound of the river too, with your paints?” she asked. With that, all three continued their erratic progression downstream, and I thought, perhaps, out of mind. But further down, where the Preserve meets the Old Wayne Golf Course, there is a small walking bridge. They crossed over the bridge and a glance over my shoulder let me know that these three were working their way up on my side of the river.
They slowed as they approached, and the older woman asked if they could take a look at what I was doing. They stood above me, about five yards away, on a rough path above the bank. I welcomed their inspection, and like so many other passersby who find me painting en plein air, they congratulated me on how good the painting looked. I understand that such people are, without knowing it, confessing innocent ignorance of my task as they politely affirm my efforts, but there is always something heart-warming in their compliments. “Well, thank you,” I said. The older woman asked, “Are you the landscape painter that has been working with The Conservation Foundation?” “Yes!” I replied, “painting the Fox River.”
“And what is your name?” she asked. What came out of my mouth was garbled, even to my own ear. The chilling effect of two hours standing in the persistent wind somehow seemed to freeze my tongue and it struggled, in the cold, to articulate the syllables of my name. I tried a second time, the wind seemed to blow my words away, and I could sense by the way she cocked her head that she just wasn’t getting it. Never mind. She kept talking.
I listened, offering my broken and short replies for several minutes, and the trio went trudging along upriver to whatever their destination. The wind, along with the brightening sky, had risen in the few moments of our conversation. I returned to my work, settled in, and resolved to finish my sketch. I put in another half hour of work. Satisfied that anything I might further try to accomplish would only deaden the image that I had just barely brought to life, I began to pack up my gear and prepare to walk back to the car.
Working my way slowly back through the undulating prairie and gentle climb to Klein Rd., I reflected on my encounter with these three women. Our short interchange felt charmed. Who were these three visitors? What had they said? Whatever could have been their mission out there on this sunny, but cold and breezy day? Why didn’t the other young woman ever speak? What relationship held between the three? Was the older woman a guide–a matron, maybe? I would never see these three again. Their character as a trio and all of each of them, whomever they were, was confined in my imagination to a fleeting encounter.
There I had been, facing upstream, breeze at my back, breathing in a winter landscape. I was feeling for it, reaching out to river, ice, sky, and stubbly banks with brushes that touched color to the surface of a grey-toned canvas. That landscape also breathed, shifted in wind, flowed to riverbanks, and ran icy water down its broad dale. Now “the three” came bumbling down, crossed over, and walked up as audience to my efforts; conductors/interpreters, of the relationship between land and painting.
Voices raised had trailed off in the muffling wind. The older woman had called out, “You’re painting God’s beautiful world.” “Yes, it is beautiful,” I had replied. There had been some gestures of the arms; a bit of leaning this way and that. Then they turned and moved on. I lost track of them almost immediately.
Now, as I picked my way up the slope, I was haunted by a kind of poetry surrounding all this. The river and its cross vanes, the surrounding prairie, the trio, my painting, and I myself, each bargained for the eminence of its respective moment. But like the hardened stems of tall prairie plants, these moments, as they came to mind, felt residual, leftover. My efforts to frame, to compose those slippery moments, hardened them. Whatever poetry I had sensed was more ethereal than anything I framed. The quicksilver of experience remained untouched.
Somewhere, climbing through the thick prairie plants, I tripped in the tangle, lurched forward and fell flat on my face. I heard the scraping noise of dried stems against my jacket as I went down. The ground, despite the snow, was much harder than I would have imagined. I lay still and took stock of my knees and hands. I rose and shook myself off. Back on my feet I lumbered on.
There are, in fact, no actual moments. Instead, we are contained in a continuous and unbreakable flow of experience. To excerpt a moment is to risk shaping a kind of idol that begs our veneration, a fixed and stable god. Our walls and bookshelves are full of these idols, each begging us to hold to hardened immutable truths. The artist’s task is to wrestle, like Jacob unrelenting, with these gods. The story that emerges from such wrestling walks with a limp. It moves as a child might move down the aisle toward the communion table. As three women might bob and weave their way down a wintry riverbank.
March is so much about wind and weather. Clouds sail ceaselessly across the sky, and wind delights in blowing down here on ground level too. It sends my canvas reeling away across a field–or flying directly into the West Branch of the DuPage River. So, I try to clamp things down tight, mark the wind’s direction, and angle my easel to avoid disaster. Even so, I often end up clutching the canvas with my left hand as I paint; it’s impossible to step back for a discerning look at my progress.
But this past Tuesday the wind was light. I wanted an active sky on a cloudy gray day, and that was exactly what I had. I parked on Riverview Drive in Warrenville, adjacent to the West Branch, and walked downstream to a place that I had discovered while wading upstream from the Warrenville Grove Forest Preserve parking area a few days earlier. Conditions were right. My view was across the river and on to a low lying plain that fills in times of high water and creates a temporary island of the more upraised portion of the opposite shore.
The bank on my side was low and soft but stable and I set up my easel and began to work. As I blocked-in a general scheme of this gray sky marked by changing gray clouds, I watched for a moment when the darker clouds might move into an arrangement more auspicious for my composition. There–it happened. I quickly struck in the pattern with a slightly darker value of medium gray.
Three days ago a rock that rose above the surface created a long undulating ripple that enhanced the sense of space in the watery foreground. But we’d had rain in the last day or two and now that rock was submerged. Just under the surface, the rock was high enough to quietly disturb the water in a subtler version of what I had seen earlier; I could work with that.
The weather prediction was for complete overcast, but I began to see small patches of blue breaking in among the clouds. I kept working. I sensed a definite brightening and began to feel a bit of warmth penetrating my right shoulder. Clouds were thinning out. Then, pausing for a moment to look up to the southeast, I saw the long edge of a cloud bank retreating from an expanse of perfectly blue sky. My scheme for a painting made on a gray day unraveled before my eyes. My project was foiled. All around, things began to sparkle in the bright sun.
Rather than pack up and head for home, I decided that I could at least sketch in the placement and shape of the trees, though I wouldn’t get their proper color and value in this new bright light. I was clumsy in my rendering of the proportions and elegance of the trees across the river. I hardly matched their grace as I dragged my brush in pantomime of their gestures. This was simple drawing, but for me, a slow task. I struggled, and these trees kept me occupied for three quarters of an hour.
In that time the atmosphere began to change again. The warmth on my shoulders disappeared. The sky darkened, filling in once more with clouds. My day returned. Sparkly water and blue sky turned leaden and there again was that indescribable dark brown-green-purple-gray. The ripple generated by the submerged rock dropped back to the soft blur that I saw at the start. On the opposite shore grasses and trees, now sullener looking, reflected downward in dimmer Naples yellow, ochre, burnt sienna, and deep browns.
I had been painting for two hours. A song sparrow alighted in a small tree behind me and filled the air, even as it darkened, with song. I stopped work to look and listen to the sparrow. In that moment I decided to pour my remaining energy into describing the low plain that stretched away from the opposite bank. My composition allowed only about an inch and a quarter of vertical rise on my canvas in which to place about three hundred yards of wetland that began at the river’s edge and stretched back to where the old railroad embankment and its ragged growth of trees created a horizon; not much space in which to operate with the rough bristle brushes I pack in my French easel.
Though I had won back my overcast sky, there was nothing constant about the light it shed, and in that changing light I read, mis-read, and re-read the color shifts in that receding plain again and again. I sketched a series of long horizontal lines of color and value-change intended to generate the sense of spatial recession. Each time I thought I had it I looked again and realized that no, I was reinstating flatness rather than depth. What’s more, the few trees that I had painstakingly planted across that plain were being obliterated. Soon all my strokes, each one inspired by observation, amounted to no more than a general background for the details that I so dearly wanted to convey.
I stepped back from my work, looking in hope for an emerging resonance between canvas and landscape. What I saw was vaguely disappointing. None of the attractive details of this landscape were in sight. I stood wondering if I had captured enough information to resolve the details back in the studio. Maybe. I breathed a reflexive sigh. In a simple impulsive move, I walked back to the easel, wiped off my brushes, and began to pack up.
Somewhere I had read a comment of Ernest Hemingway’s about a story written without sufficient knowledge of the facts that support it. Such a story, he said, would always have a hole in it. Better for the author to go back and do the necessary work, he said; never try to paper-over what you really don’t know. Get the facts. Then, even if those facts never find an explicit place in the story as told, they will undergird it with the understanding necessary to properly convey the story.
I’m all in with Hemingway on this iceberg theory that says a story is supported by a great deal of information and experience beneath the surface. What we see on the canvas is only the very last touch that the painter laid down. It is supported by a great deal of unseen work called underpainting. Underpainting is like a rich compost whose nutrients feed the sprouts of detail that emerge on the visible canvas surface. The underpainting’s general resonance with the actual landscape is essential.
But what about my story? It had been an encounter with changing, even competing facts. My story was not simple but multifaceted. Would I find that I missed some important facts, leaving significant holes to fill? What sort of evidence had I laid down in the underpainting that would support the complexity breaking out all around? The changing cloud patterns, the grasses and tree trunks that had brightened and then darkened again, the dark water that soon sparkled and then returned to its illusive dull blur, the warmth on my shoulder, the soft mud under my feet, had I provided the groundwork for any of these? And that sparrow, never to be seen in my painting, I’d like to think its presence could somehow be felt.
Sometimes I think every painting is a survival story. Every stroke is a hunch, a guess at what color, value, line, and weight of pigment might convey some token of the complex unfolding landscape. Stroke upon stroke, stroke cancelling previous stroke, the painting emerges from a mass of misjudgments, hesitations, blunders, and changes of direction, all wagered as the landscape itself morphs in endless variety. What survives lies on the surface and claims, inspired, to have fallen directly from the sky. Its conceit relies on those many unseen errors and embarrassing missteps concealed in the underpainting. Hidden underneath, they plug the holes and guarantee a believable story, a survivor of its own telling.
The Covid19 pandemic has been described as a “spillover” event. Spilled over from its usual animal hosts, the Coronavirus invaded the human population. A natural world pathogen broke through our defensive walls, invaded the human domain, and left us feeling violated and vulnerable to an unseen and often death dealing intruder. We watched as the virus spilled out, adapted the capability of human-to-human transmission, and spread in waves devastating human populations around the world.
Spillover is not new. HIV, cholera, smallpox, and bubonic plague are a few of the more crippling examples of historic spillover events. Spillover is a technical term for health care professionals and experts in zoonotic diseases, but it is also a term that could characterize a long-observed dance between human and non-human populations. In a more broadly metaphoric sense spillover suggests the possibility of a two-way street where the technological and cultural invasions of humans into the natural world are just as common as natural invasions or zoonotic diseases in humans.
The West Branch of the DuPage River is a specific case of this kind of spillover. It’s hard to imagine the West Branch as an industrial river but in the early 19th century, when European settlers were moving into the area, it was the rivers and streams, both large and small, that were target sites for production and settlement. Even a small stream like the West Branch was a source of power for sawmills and gristmills. Gary’s Mill Road is so named because the Gary family had a mill there where the road crosses the West Branch. Between 1835 and 1897 several different mills operated successively on the West Branch at the site of Warrenville Grove. The Hobson family operated DuPage County’s first West Branch River mill, built in 1834, in Naperville. European settlers were pouring into the “old northwest” and their technical arts and engineering spilled over onto the landscape. Ultimately industrial agricultural technologies overwhelmed the entire state, nearly erasing every vestige of the natural prairie environment.
We use periods of reciprocal invasion of nature into human culture and human culture into nature to delineate different epochs of human history. The Agrarian, Industrial, and Technological revolutions signify periods of human incursion into the realm of nature. Times noted for plague, famine, and climate change signify periods of nature’s counter incursions into human affairs. There is a constant back-and-forth in these spillover events.
I found myself thinking about spillover while looking at and admiring an illuminated manuscript page in a book by Guillaume de Machaut, a 14th century French poet and music composer. The book is a compilation of Guillaume’s music, and of his thoughts about the arts of poetry and music. The artist who painted this particular page is called the Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy, and on this page, he shows a regal Mother Nature introducing three of her children to the composer Guillaume de Machaut. The children are, Reason, Eloquence, and Music. Reason is depicted as male, and Eloquence and Music are female. These characters line up on the lower edge of the picture where Guillaume stands separated from them on the right, under a tree next to a narrow doorway. An eager Mother Nature introduces Guillaume to Reason while she reaches around behind Reason to clasp the hand of Eloquence, pulling her forward. Music stands third in line with her hand on Eloquence’s shoulder.
I’m impressed with the idea that reason, eloquence, and music are understood as children of nature, and not as children of the human race. Their origin is in the natural world. The poet-composer Machaut welcomes them as a spillover handed on to him from Mother Nature. Rising above these children in the illustration is an active landscape full of agrarian workers, their animals, birds, plants and trees, and various buildings. The perspective is not rationally systematic, so the landscape feels like it rises rather than recedes; all the elements depicted in it rise above each other as if hung on a curtain. Piled like this there is a sense that everything here is somehow spilling out. It is about to tumble down to where Machaut stands greeting Eloquence, Music, and Reason, the guests whose capacities he requires for his creative work. The cornucopia of nature is spilling over and down to the artist. At the same time it spills across the manuscript page itself as winding stems and plant forms break from the illustration’s frame and invade the margins and the text.
I went up to Hawk Hollow, to paint, just before sunrise. A day or two earlier I had scouted out the confluence of Luther Bartlett Creek and the West Branch of the DuPage River. Standing on the south bank of the West Branch I looked northeast. Luther Bartlett Creek flowed down from the north, joined the West Branch as it began to turn south, and created a spit of land that separated the two streams even as they were in the process of becoming one.
At that hour the moon was just setting in the west and the sun just beginning to spill over the horizon in the east. Early May greens were filled with warm rosy oranges and yellows. I thought of Robert Frost’s famous lines, “Nature’s first green is gold,/Her hardest hue to hold.” It was an inspiring moment. Guillaume de Machaut certainly would have seen Eloquence in it, Reason too, and I think maybe even Music. As I began to brush in my sketch, I welcomed whatever habitation these three children of Mother Nature might find within me, helping me to convey the beauty of Hawk Hollow early in the morning.
I’ve looked at other illustrations by the Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy. Like in so many medieval illuminated manuscripts, the artist gives us “broccoli” trees, fancifully patterned landscapes, and richly brocaded backgrounds. Nature seems to have been absorbed into a kind of needlecraft. But, on every page, bursting beyond the frame of any given illustration, nature does spill over in plentitude. It runs freely as ornate vines and spiraling branches and floral patterns all around the text, filling initial capital letters and reaching down into every margin. Art historians refer to the zoomorphic capital initial letters in these manuscripts as “inhabited.” Anywhere in the margins of a page, not only plant forms but birds and other animals are likely to appear.
We are talking about spillover in general terms, not in the precise meaning of contemporary healthcare professionals, but it cannot be denied that spillover is literally happening right before our very eyes. This is a spillover that we have, by tradition, happily embraced. We readily welcome being filled with inspiration from the natural world. But I wonder if the point might be pushed a bit further. Is it possible that Reason, Eloquence, and Music really do reside in nature–that nature is their point of origin, that they are “children” of Mother Nature? Could it be that nature is eloquently reasoning with us, inviting us to join in its music? Could it be that we attend to reason, eloquence, and music rather than invent them? If so, we become their stewards not their owners.
I go back to my Hawk Hollow painting of the confluence of Luther Bartlett Creek and the West Branch of the DuPage River. Clearly my goal as an artist is to point toward the scene’s Reason, Eloquence, and Music, not to capture these things as my own. In choosing plein air painting as the starting point for my work I set myself on the side of subjectivity rather than objectivity. As a plein air painter you not only cannot escape your presence in the work you make, but you also cannot escape your presence in the landscape itself, and maybe, the presence of the landscape in you. You are there both to spillover and to be spilled-over.
On February 21, 1963, at the age of 70, Charles Burchfield, one of my favorite landscape painters, opened his door on a winter morning and recorded in his journal: “How good it is to be alive, and experience Winter!” I can almost see Burchfield standing on the threshold, taking in a cold blast of winter air, eager to step outside. Plein air painting guarantees one important thing; it takes the painter outside. I move from “in” to “out” of doors, a passage across the first of many thresholds.
This past Thursday, late in May, I was outside on a commission to paint a Mill Creek landscape in the vicinity of Mill Creek Forest Preserve west of Randall Road. I took it as an opportunity to explore something new. Looking to the north from the Kaneville Road bridge, Google maps showed Mill Creek looping and meandering across the landscape. It looked promising; I was on the threshold of a landscape where I had never been.
I parked up by Peck Farm and walked a quarter of a mile or so on the path that parallels Kaneville Road and leads down to the bridge. I figured that I would walk to the bridge and then leave the path to follow the creek. Forest preserve walking paths can generate a sort of magnetic field. A lot was happening in the landscape all around me but the path, simply by its very existence, had a proscriptive effect. I felt obligated to stick to it, and as I neared the bridge the thought of leaving the path engendered a rising sense of transgression. Suddenly I did not want to be seen. I waited for a moment when no cars were passing on the nearby road and slipped quickly and secretively off the path.
I cut through some thick reed canary grass to the edge of a patch of buckthorn. The outer edge looked impenetrable, and that is what I confronted all along the stream right there, a wall of thorny green. But I knew from experience that once you break through the prickly dense exterior of a stand of buckthorn, the walking isn’t so bad. Buckthorn is notorious for shading out every other plant species and it’s usually easy going once inside its dense shade. I gingerly parted the tangled buckthorn branches and entered the spooky quiet of a buckthorn “forest.” I made my way stooping and zigzagging through a kind of dark fairy world whose mud floor was clear of undergrowth. There, where the brightness shone, was the edge of Mill Creek. My passage out of the thicket was easier than my entrance.
Then I stood in an open flood plain. The creek snaked through great spans of reed canary grass. Camouflaged within the grasses were patches of thistles and stinging nettles, in late May, still not especially injurious. Here and there small willows and box elders, half-dead-half-alive, fallen into the stream, created minor dams where water backed up and deep holes formed against the bank. I came upon a new beaver dam, but no sign of a beaver hut. As I walked along the meandering banks, clouds of silt stirred in the water below; like stealthy submarines, disturbed carp were moving upstream. I tried in vain to catch sight of the warblers and other small birds I heard all around me. I was astounded by two enormous standing snags, cotton woods or maybe huge old willows, I couldn’t be sure. They were completely stripped of bark and riddled with nest holes, dwellings for any number of critters and birds. I knew that Mill Creek Golf Course was just beyond the trees west of the creek, but where I hiked, on the east bank, I felt as though I were the only person in the territory.
I followed the stream closely, wondering what it was that I was looking for. A conjunction, a cantilever, a balance or imbalance, a contrast, or maybe a subtle monotony of shifting forms (or those same forms anchored resolutely in place), the sweep of the land, the drift of the stream, a peculiar object and its shadow, a passage of light, an awareness of deep space, a perceived anthropomorphism, sky, clouds, simple horizontality, pure texture, these things, pulsing below whatever they might be called by name as subject matter, arose all around me. The landscape revealed itself as an experience rather than as an object. Minute by minute, as I moved, the landscape moved.
There is always a question of capacity, my capacity to expand to the land’s wider limits, my capacity to bring the expanse into the limits of my sketch. I meet the landscape in the habitus of expansion and contraction. I want to know the land, but with the ancient Hebrew psalmist I confess that “such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is too lofty for me to attain.” The psalmist spoke of God, but it was by travelling through the landscape that the psalmist’s capacities were enlarged. “If I go up into the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths of the earth, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn and settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me.” Earlier in the psalm he had summed it up, “Where can I go from your presence? Where can I flee from your spirit?”
This landscape god guided me upstream to where Mill Creek enters a small deciduous forest. The temperature dropped immediately upon entering, even as a curtain fell on visibility. Towering overhead, these trees, at their rugged feet, hugged the creek banks. Tuned to the flood plain and its widely dispersed trees, I stumbled along as a kind of blind man in this new place. Flashes of sunshine dappled the dark understory, the contrasts rendered space and forms unintelligible. I turned and worked my way back downstream to the edge of the forest, back to the open light.
I could see why someone might assign different gods to different elements of a landscape. It felt like there was a creek god, a buckthorn thicket god, an open reed-canary-grass-flood-plain god, a god of great standing tree snags, a deciduous forest god, gods of carp, of beavers, of birds. In the unique presence and ambiance of each I felt a different spirit. I can also see how someone might begin to think of artists as mediums, transmitters of these spirits into artful forms that recall each god’s unique place and function in the world. Some art historians and theorists imagine that such intentions take us back to the very beginning of the artmaking impulse.
Emerging from the forest and looking downstream, I now saw the Mill Creek landscape in reverse. How many times have I worked for several hours, painting en plein air, only to turn around and see, at my back, an even more striking landscape? And now here, looking back toward the flood plain that I had just come through, was the landscape I had been looking for. I set up my easel and began to work.
Instantly it became clear that I was no fit medium or channel for the landscape gods. A third of the way up from the bottom of the canvas I drew a horizontal charcoal line. In doing so I established my horizon and, in relation to it, predicted where all the elements I saw before me would fall. With one vertical line to indicate the placement and height of a single tree I constrained the proportions of everything else in the scene.
Hardly a channel or medium, I had become a god myself. Like the beaver-god who builds a dam, the bird who pecks a nest hole in the snag, or the carp who hides in a swirl of silt, the god in me found and ordered my world. So I joined the other gods, incomprehensible, but each a divine presence ordering its place in the landscape. My picture as secure as any nest hole, any beaver dam, and as ephemeral as silt swirling behind the carp’s tail.
South of Naperville, in Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve, take the trail that goes to the model aircraft field. Just beyond the field leave the path and head through tall grass to the west. Soon you’ll find yourself on a rise that overlooks Spring Brook meandering through the prairie. I was standing there late last August enjoying the wind and the way it swept through big bluestem grass, bending and swaying those turkey-foot seedheads this way and that. Down the slope, in the sea of prairie restoration, I admired the silver shimmer of Spring Brook that has also been restored to its more traditional meandering habit. I insist on pointing out that this part of Illinois is not flat. We live on a huge area of glacial moraines that roll gently as they spread to the west and south. Nonetheless, fact is, “overlook” in our region is not always easy to find.
The road sign, “Scenic Overlook Ahead,” despite its stereotypical ring, always attracts me. If I have the time at all, I pull over, get out of the car, and take a look. I want to see the land spread out before me. My response to the view is typically an inwardly whispered acknowledgement, “Ahhhh, so that’s the way it is.” “Breathtaking” is often the word, and I think that expresses something important. The scene, it seems, has drawn my breath away, and maybe something of myself along with it. A bit of self-emptying happens, and I am left less full of myself, less focused on the narrowness of my day-to-day preoccupations.
I have it two ways while I’m painting at Springbrook Prairie. I’m both immersed up to my chest in russet big bluestem, golden rod, and a hundred other prairie plants while, in my mind, I’m flying high out there with a red-tailed hawk over the outstretched prairie. The 16th century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel painted a number of “overlook” landscapes. Many were somewhat fancifully based on his trips to the Alps. From his experience high up in the mountains he sketched the land flowing out beyond him. He often drew some birds in the air, their flight becoming, in our imaginations, our own. Art historians have used the term “world landscape” to describe his work because it sometimes feels as if Bruegel wanted to include the whole world in his view. An overlook affords rootedness to a specific spot while you imaginatively inhabit places far removed.
World landscape was popular in the 16th century in northern Europe. Geographers and cartographers were expanding their work in line with discoveries in global exploration and new science about the earth and the solar system. Artists landscape paintings offered graphic visualizations of this exciting and novel way of understanding the world. The 16th century Belgian cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius said of Pieter Bruegel, “And this Bruegel, whom I esteem, painted many things that cannot be painted…. In all his works there is always more to be understood than is actually painted.” I love this statement. To paint things that cannot be painted, that is an extraordinary accomplishment! Ortelius was not meaning to say though that Bruegel achieved the impossible, (to paint what cannot be painted) but rather to state that somehow Bruegel’s paintings embody something that is not visible but rather is inwardly felt and understood. I think, in his world landscapes, that invisible unpaintable thing is my loss of breath, my loss of myself in the face of Bruegel’s expanding scenes.
When I look contemplatively at Bruegel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” something does seem to go out of me–breath-taking. I feel emptied on one hand and filled with longing on the other, filled that is with an absence, a kind of homesickness. My center-stage controlling self is diminished and I become aware of my small place in the universe. I float out, with Bruegel’s magpies into a vast wintery landscape. There I look down on houses, shops, roads, fields, and on people wending their ways across the land. I experience, through the painting, a parallel to my actual overlook experiences in the landscape itself. Author Frank White, in a book called The Overview Effect, says, “...mental processes and views of life cannot be separated from physical location. Our “world view” as a conceptual framework depends quite literally on our view of the world from a physical place in the universe.”
White’s book is something of an argument for continued human exploration of outer space. He centers the argument in the confessions of astronauts who attest to a fundamental transformation in their thinking because of having witnessed the earth floating, a small blue sphere, deep in space. White takes this transformation seriously and wonders if it may constitute the beginning of an evolutionary change, a new wrinkle in the human brain. In 1968 we all shared in the astronauts’ experience through the famous photograph of earthrise, the Earth just rising above the surface of the moon. Is it possible that through this shared experience we, the global human race, could be evolving toward a higher phase of existence?
Unmitigated experience is the invisible unpaintable thing that works of art give us a chance to reconsider. They do this by offering a metaphorical experience of their own. Nothing can replace my experience of Springbrook Prairie but works of art offer me a parallel, another kind of experience. If I dwell deeply in it, I am transformed by it. Through a profound experience I am, if only in an incremental sense, converted. The experience takes me out of my current constellation of self, and I am reborn to new possibilities. Sometimes a slow process that builds to life-changing effect, it can also be dramatic and instantaneous. The things that really change us are experiential. They can happen as we stand alone on a mountain side, sit among others in an ordinary classroom, gaze at “Hunters in the Snow,” or in the case of the very few, look back on Earth from a position on the moon.
When I had put about all I could manage into my 12”x24” plein air painting of Spring Brook, I packed up my French easel, strapped it into my backpack, and slung it over my shoulders. I set the painted sketch I had just made down in what I thought was an identifiable and easy to return to patch of open space in the big bluestem grass and walked off to check out another potential vantage point, under some trees, where I thought I might also want to paint. I stood there in the shade assessing the view, realized that I was feeling pretty well worn out, and decided to head for home.
I walked back through the blowing grasses to pick up my painting. It was not where I expected to find it. Probably I had not gone far enough, so I walked on. But now, clearly, I had gone too far, and still no painting. I mapped out a forensic search, crisscrossing back and forth on the hillside. Still, no painting. Self-doubt set in. My thought pattern became narrowly concentric. Had I not taken careful stock of where I had set the painting down? Did I, or did I not know where I was? My pulse quickened and I could feel perspiration rising. Where was that painting? Briskly I walked further up the hillside. There it was. Of course, just where I had left it.
I hiked back to my car, opened both doors and sat for a moment letting the car interior cooldown. I was aware of a kind of push-pull going on between my painting experience and my panicked search for my lost painting. I am no astronaut, but for several hours, while painting, I had drifted out into space. There I was able to forget myself. I wouldn’t call it rapturous, but in a subdued sense, it was expansive, maybe breathtaking. The experience didn’t dispel my later panic, nor would it relieve a host of other daily worries. I am, after all only viewing the Earth from a very modest overlook, an overlook situated here, on Earth. Neither do Bruegel’s landscape overlooks, his “world landscapes,” ever escape the gravity of their earthy anchor. I would also guess that the poignancy of the astronauts’ extraterrestrial experiences depends, as well, on an unpaintable feeling that they too are connected, bound to the earth.
Occasionally I confront a landscape and think, “Well, that view just has to be painted.” Most of the time, however, I’m more ambivalent. I’m not sure what to make of the scene. “Is this something I should paint?” or “Were I to try to paint this, how on earth would I do it?” these are my more typical responses. I’ve got to find a way into a landscape to paint it. Often, I sense a wall keeping me out. I’m looking for a crack in the wall that will let me in.
Last fall I was down at McDowell Grove admiring the season’s most brilliant colors. I was on the hunt for a paintable view of the landscape there, but everywhere I looked I felt rebuffed. Everything had a sense of self-sufficiency about it, no reason for me to clammer in with my artmaking pretensions. I wasn’t looking for something beautiful–beauty was everywhere around me. I was looking for something paintable. That meant finding a chink in the landscape’s beautiful armor that I could take as a nod of welcome. I was looking for an invitation to join the landscape, not as an admirer, but as a participant. I wanted more than to observe the landscape’s beauty, I wanted to do something with it.
I found this “do/with” sentiment recently as I reviewed some old records from my years of teaching. As an explanation of her artistic work, a graduating senior had written, “Basically, I am a very simple, uncomplicated artist. ...I especially enjoy doing nature, but I also like to do everyday common things.”
I was struck, in these words of a young art student that I knew more than 40 years ago, by her use of “doing” and “to do” to describe her work. She liked “doing” nature and “to do” everyday common things. I know what she meant. She meant that she enjoyed painting, drawing, and sculpting based on subjects found in nature and the everyday. But why did she speak of “doing nature”?
What could “doing nature,” mean for an artist? A quick look in the dictionary for the word, “do” yielded that nothing about the word “do” is simple and uncomplicated. Its use varies widely as does its meaning. Basic to its many applications is the idea of performing a task or working on something to bring it to completion or to some required state. “What does she do?” usually means, “What sort of work is she engaged in?” “Do me next,” usually means “Attend to me next.” “That will do,” typically means the situation in question has been suitably addressed. In each case there is an implication of physical engagement and active participation. Any kind of doing is “doing with.” It is participation, through both mind and body, with other things.
For me, “doing” nature is a bodily affair. It’s as if I must find, within myself, a space and a capacity for the project. I try to feel, internally, the project’s scale, scope, and direction, and on that basis I respond with a kind of physical hunch that I have the aptitude to reconstruct or rearrange what I see before me to a satisfactory conclusion.
So, I was closely observing the McDowell Grove landscape, looking for that opening, a place through which I could enter the landscape, inversely let the landscape enter me, and so “do” it. Like the observant member of a religious sect who is committed, my observation was participatory, not objective. I was like someone who “observes silence.” By being silent, she creates silence within her, makes her own version of silence, and so “does” silence; so I observed in order to “do” my version of the landscape.
Committed observation drew me upstream from the main parking area off Raymond Road. The trail slowly climbs, as does the stream bed, but it also rises ten or fifteen feet above the stream bed and offers, between clusters of trees, interesting views of the river. But I found these views somewhat opaque. I didn’t know what to do with them. I climbed down the bank to the river’s edge but still felt befuddled by what I saw. So, I crossed the stream to the opposite shore. There the land lies low and you can look back into the steep bank I had just descended; interesting, but not compelling. I waded back through the stream and climbed up to the trail.
I walked back to the main parking area and went down to the river near the stone pavilion. There I stood gazing across the river to the flats where Ferry Creek enters the West Branch. I was drawn to the blazing fall colors on the far side of the flats. There stood interesting old tree snags whose boney white bodies brightly reflected the afternoon light. I could just make out a series of horizontal lines of changing vegetation spreading across that flood plain. Given my low angle of vision, Ferry Creek was hardly discernable, but I knew it was out there working its way toward me across the flats. Closer at hand, just across the river, was a big pile of limbs hung up in a tangle on the bank.
Was it a beaver hut? No, they were just limbs that had somehow been caught and accumulated right there. The pile of limbs became a sort of orientation point. They invited my curiosity and rewarded me with a mystery about just how they might have come to rest. They were texturally and colorfully different from the landscape behind them. I began to sense that this pile of drifted branches acted as a homely counterweight to the flaming stand of trees in the distance. They spurred memories of drifting and the impermanence of every aspect of river life. I began to feel that there was something that I could do with these branches. They were an entry point, that chink I was looking for in the armor of beauty, and as I explored it, it, for its part, was simultaneously getting under my skin. I had found my invitation. I set up my easel and began my sketch.
Only in a marginal sense, can doing nature like this, be said to produce something new. Doing nature awakens sensuous attraction for outlines, colors, textures, and values that rouse deeply held feelings for the landscape. These sensuous elements, like seeds, suggest potential as progenitors of new worlds. The seeds do produce new life, but life still grounded in preexisting patterns. Yes, the canvas is bare when I start, and full when I’m finished, but I have hardly created something new. At best I have redesigned patterns already on display. I haven’t so much created a new world as I have done the world as given.
“A very simple, uncomplicated artist,” as she claimed to be, my former student underestimated the complexity of her own methods. Her enjoyment in doing nature derived from the complexity of this kind of doing itself, of finding a point of entrance into nature, of taking into herself the sensuous elements of the natural world, and of reworking them to her own infelt standards and putting these forms into play on canvas. I have no idea what she does now, forty years later. I hope she is doing nature and still likes to do everyday common things.
I’m standing alongside River Road in Warrenville, looking north toward the Warrenville Road bridge. Just below me the West Branch of the DuPage River has overflowed its banks. The river basin and flood plain resemble a small lake. Flattened patches of last year’s grasses and prairie plant stems lie broken on the water surface and look like miniature islands floating here and there. Where I stand the waters are still, but far across, against the distant shore, I see evidence of a strong current. On what would be the near bank, about fifty yards away, two lanky sixty-foot trees rise from the river’s submerged edge. They lean into each other, lone dancers in this inundated world. It’s April and the bleached remains of last summer’s prairie are the dominant colors, though hints of pale green show in some of the more upland bushes and shrubs. Beyond them is the dull reddish-purple of budding but leafless trees. The spring sky is sunny in a blank sort of way and it reflects a bright blue across the muddy water.
I’m here to make a painting of this scene. At the top of my view, just north of the Warrenville Road bridge, is a collection of older classically informed buildings. One is the old Methodist church, bought in 1924 by artist Adam Emory Albright who used it as a studio for himself and his twin sons, sculptor Malvin, and painter Ivan. Adam Albright was a well-known and respected painter of bucolic landscapes that served as backdrops for scenes of country children at play. But it is Ivan Albright’s work that is on my mind as I look across the swollen river toward the old studio.
Cars and trucks run constantly across the bridge. The walking path on the east side of the river is under water. Walkers and joggers pass me by on the path that parallels River Road. Recent reconstruction of the bridge and restoration work on this whole landscape ensure that the flooding will be contained. Though an enormous amount of water is flowing downstream toward me it poses no threat and begs no particular notice. There is a sense, in midday light, that nothing stands out here. The scene is swamped in its own ordinary everydayness. No one gives it a second thought.
Ivan Albright must have stood near to where I stand and beheld some version of the springtime run of the West DuPage River many times. How would it have come across to him? Albright achieved national fame in 1945 for his painting, The Picture of Dorian Gray, commissioned to appear in the Hollywood film of the same title. It is a shockingly detailed depiction of decaying human flesh. Decay, pitiful failure, the macabre, even disgust, is what we encounter in so many of Ivan Albright’s depictions of the human body. Would he have seen the landscape in the same terms?
During the First World War Albright enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the Medical Corps. One of his tasks, while stationed in France between1918 and 1919, was to prepare illustrations of soldiers’ wounds. Art historians have pointed to that experience as a probable source point for his later works that depict the frailty of human flesh. To me, Albright’s work speaks of the inevitable failure of the human body, and the vanity of life. His voice echoes the most despairing portions of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
Albright was primarily a painter of the human figure, but he did make some studies of landscape on the Maine Coast and also some swamp landscapes in Georgia. Albright’s swamp paintings are the best indication of how his voice would have rung out had he turned his attention more fully to the landscape. The swamp immediately suggests the claustrophobic entrapment that Albright also saw in the human body.
What lies before me here as I look upstream toward the old Albright Gallery of Sculpture and Painting could evoke similar tropes. The soggy landscape, dead prairie plants, leafless trees, and nonchalance of walkers and bikers wending their way up the river path all could be pushed metaphorically toward the static tired despair of the interval between winter and the real return of spring; that moment when doubt is stronger than hope.
People, confronting Albright’s work, often speak of mixed emotions, of repulsion and attraction, as they look at his paintings. They are repulsed by the ugliness of what is represented but attracted to the intricate detail and craftsmanship they see there. I’m hesitant to call it an attraction to beauty, but what else would you call it? It is so well done, even exquisite. It speaks to beauty’s capacity to hold even the oppositional forces of this complex world together. Were there only the macabre and despairing in Albright’s work it would never have survived for our viewing. I think it is the work’s beauty that saves it.
I begin to set up my French easel and immediately see that making it stand securely on the slope that runs down to the river is going to be a bit of a problem. Also, the sun wants to glare across my canvas making my task all the more difficult as the bright surface tires my eyes. And there is my composition, an arrangement of subdued forms lacking any major shadows or passages of light that might otherwise lend it some drama. “Why am I doing this?” I wonder. I get to work.
Painting is a kind of contemplation that drives out articulate rational thought. I do not think about beauty while painting, but I do sometimes notice it both before me in the landscape and occasionally on my canvas. Today however, I have chosen to paint a rather humdrum picture, and the ghost of Ivan Albright keeps pointing out its downside. Then I notice those two lanky trees that lean, tired, into each other on the flooded dance floor. They have their own peculiar grace about them.
I remember Albright’s painting Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida. She, tired and worn as she is, evokes in her pathetic powdering and cosmetic pampering the memory of beauty and its healing potential. Beauty is there in absence and so, in absence, makes its most profound appearance.
I begin to tie my hopes to those two lanky leaning trees. They and the possibility of a bit of blue sky reflected on the water emerge as key players in my painting’s survival. I sense that I need to demonstrate the quiet progression of space across the still flood, close at hand, that leads to the distant current. Some exactitude about the buildings beyond the bridge, including the old Methodist church, will be necessary; in that architecture I may find a bit of subtle shadow and light. Somewhere in the uniformity of the midday sun I’ll have to find quiet contrasts. If not beauty itself, maybe I’ll manage an invitation to beauty.
Sometimes we confront beauty face to face, but just as often we must conjure it in its absence. The most profound art does this; great art makes you see and feel what has not been literally depicted. Beauty of this sort isn’t something to try to possess or hang onto. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray proved that point very well. Ivan Albright pushed beauty into obscurity. There, absent, it is even more poignantly found. There, in Ida’s aging face and legs, there, in the muddy West Branch spring flood.