Three Lies and the Truth

I want to say something about grit and determination, about perseverance through pain, about having no excuses, but every time I look at my current work in progress, all I see - rather all I hear - is the wind.

It’s what I do not see - the absence of something I can’t quite describe - that is definitive and not the composition of the painting itself.

Picture it: Wyoming. West side of the Bighorn mountains. Scrubby brush and grass going on forever with stony ridges rising to tempt those looking for a longer view, and up one of these rises - right over the boulders, right over stone - goes a wooden pole fence.

I had not seen anything like it. Right on top of stone and at a steep incline ran a fence that struck me as more than a fence. It was a testament to the temperament of those that peopled the West, to those living there today.

Grit. Determination. Perseverance.

It was striking and humbling. I knew I wasn’t cut from the same cloth as whoever made it.

The grass was the color of butter. The rising stony ground had a streak of red flashing through it pointing to the light grey boulders and marking a transition in sedimentary layers.

The scene had everything a picture-maker would want (except strong/colorful light), and so, back home in Tennessee, I set about painting it, but as I progressed through the painting I felt an emptiness that did not come from the vast high desert.

Deep down I knew what was missing, and deep down I knew I could not change it.

I was near Thermopolis, Wyoming, and there was not a trace of the Shoshone anywhere that I could see. No Natives. They are farther west on the Wind River reservation or north with the Crow. They were not there. Their absence - not a romanticized version of them, but a real, human version - is the reason I struggle to continue this painting.

It isn’t so easy as placing a blanket-wrapped Native in the scene or having a tipi in the distance with smoke from fires rising. It isn’t easy to say, “I want you here too, but I’m not sure how to include you.” It isn’t easy to show empathy and have it be well-received when all you have is the buttery grass, silent stones, and landscape painting.

And so,

I have a painting of a hill in Wyoming with a wooden fence running up and over it. Apparently, that is all I have.

If I chose to exaggerate the scene and pump up the colors for visual delight to entice buyers like candy entices children, it would be a lie. If I chose to add a Native figure to the scene in an attempt at poetry, it would be a lie. If I avoided my internal struggle with such a simple thing, it would be a lie.

If I present the landscape laid bare, lacking much artistic merit, soundless except for the wind, but containing remnants of an ageless struggle that wordlessly implores me to seek, to go further, somehow deeper -

then it would be the truth.

I don’t know how to do that with paint. I don’t know how to do that with words. I don’t know how to do that.

The working title is, “There Was a Will,” and is supposed to bring to mind the phrase “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” but now I’m not so sure I want to comment on this will.

I just wanted to admire the grit and determination it took to build such a thing in such a place, but I think that such a title may raise more problems for me. “What about the other will, Seth? What did they lose for this fence to be here?”

I wait.

My answer sounds like wind through the grass.

“I don’t know how to do that…” is related to my previous post titled “Art is the Veil” - click here to read it.