Rackstraw Downes Lecture, UC Davis

I attended a lecture last night given by Rackstraw Downes, a wonderful landscape painter originally from England. I found this talk incredibly inspiring, particularly with regard to his inspiration and his painting style. 

He spent the majority of his MFA studies painting abstractly and it wasn't until he graduated that he began to explore a more realistic style. 

While describing his paintings, shown during the lecture in slides on an old projector, he knew what the buildings housed, he knew the people and the political climate surrounding the areas he painted. This struck me as being very significant to the content of his paintings. These were not panoramas quickly taken by a photograph, these were careful, painstaking studies of the environment and the people who lived in them. 

He mentioned the internal struggle he sometimes has of making a painting that is too idyllic; how does one make a "modern" painting of a mountian? His answer was to paint what was there, to pay careful attention to the reality of the landscape.

He paints in extremely long format because he wants to include everything relevant to the environment he is painting. This has caused him to develop a wide-angle style of painting not based in any mathematics but painted by sight. Here are a few of my favorites:

In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front, (1990), oil on cavas, 16” x 120”, Coll. Ellen Jewett and Richard L. Kauffman, New York

Beehive Yard at the Rim of a Canyon on the Rio Grande, Presidio, TX, 2005, Oil on Canvas,  6 3/8 x 34 3/4 inches