Albany Hill, Dennison and Moses, Out the Window

Albany Hill, watercolor on paper, app. 8x10 inches, 2003.

Dennison and Moses, watercolor on paper, app. 8x10, 2003.

Out the Window, watercolor and dyes on canvas, 30x42 inches, 1975.

These three paintings belong to Marsha and Mike Skinner. Marsha and Mike are old friends, especially Marsha, who suspects with good reason we are all related. Marsha and Mike bought the two small watercolors on paper from the 2004 show at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.

They bought the watercolor, painted on gessoed canvas, at The Walnut Creek Valley Art Center in 1975, from a show of a dozen or more paintings made and titled from the inspiration of a wild car ride with my cousin Ken at the wheel of his old red VW bug, his hands on and off the wheel while he drove and talked, and my hands clutching the dashboard and seat to hold on, my eyes glued to the landscape flashing by as it does when your moving through it at any speed over 30 mph.

We were traveling considerably faster; either up to Sonoma or back to San Francisco, down from Sonoma, or maybe a trip up to Corvallis, or down to Delano for me and Murray Hill for him. I also held a cup of coffee between my knees, a note book in my lap, and the ubiquitous cigarette, both legal and illegal, fresh Tareytons one after the other, the joint getting passed between us, then jammed into the overflowing ashtray with the gum wrappers.

1975. AM/FM radio. Brilliant conversation. Going somewhere. On the road, all that highway, all that color, land, sky, life and death and things and ideas and everything in here and in the car and out there, just outside the window.

These paintings were impressions, they were composed; expressed landscapes of a general nature. The technical chances I took with the paintings were extreme, and measured against what the paintings looked like fresh and what they look like today, I failed. The paintings faded. I was warned about transitive dyes and the risky chemical bond of watercolor on gesso. But I was foolish, hypnotized, addicted to the bright colors. The varnish has luckily held in the 31 years since application, a spit-wet finger won't pull the pigment, but the luminous color is gone, only the bones remain.

There is no defending my misuse of material. But the painting survives despite the fading: it seems to have moved through the seasons. The flaming violets of the blooming iris are gone, so are the bright greens and blues of the month in Spring those iris bloomed.

The painting is left a dried arrangement, a chalky drawing, a study of sere October, unlike the intentional autumn effect with the watercolor on paper, with real pigments, of Mt Dennison and Moses Mountain, dimly visible through the haze in a painting which will, presumably, if the painting lasts, and the universe lasts, fade over centuries rather than decades.

Albany Hill is what I look at these days, and the view here has literally changed since the watercolor was made. The old Bay Bridge in the middle distance, crossing over to Yerba Buena Island and the city is coming down, to be replaced in a few years by a newer version.