Chapters
by Daniel Stuelpnagel
Chapter Three
untitled # 321 (2005)This desert landscape came off the easel in 2005 but was surely begun in my drive west during the late summer of 2001.
I stopped at Graceland, visited friends in Dallas and Austin, and spent a couple of days with my cousin Tim in Denver, and by the time I reached Salt Lake City, I had made a plan to follow his recommendation and go up to Black Rock.
My experience at Burning Man went like this. I came in Monday afternoon with a ticket and a rider and was probably one of the first thousand vehicles. I drove out to a likely spot at 8:45 Justice where my nearest neighbor was about a hundred yards away. My Japanese rider, Kesuke, who spoke little English and carried a knife, took his gear and headed out to explore the nascent Black Rock City of 2001. I was solo car camping my first time there, had twenty gallons of water and all my possessions.
I pitched a tent with a drop cloth, a pool cue, and some twenty pound hand weights, along with some rope I had bought at the Gerlach store, and spent most of the ensuing week witnessing outlandish art projects and drinking tequila with my neighbors. We went to raves, helped build things, gave gifts to naked people, and met visitors from all over the world.
My DC tags established me as someone who had at least come from farther afield than San Francisco, and I felt welcomed into a much bigger world than that of an isolated easel painter.
It was hot and dry, with high winds and daily dust storms, dust devils two hundred feet high came sweeping out of the foothills, and within the hour there would be no visibility, just lots of playa dust everywhere.
My formerly sparse neighborhood was a parking lot, by the time the weekenders had come in and the other thirty thousand participants had arrived.
My newest neighbors brought an RV fully stocked, and welcomed me to sit in a camp chair and enjoy cold beer and a roast beef sandwich. Their main guy, Steve Leffler, was from Sacramento, which was where I was headed, so I had a new connection to a place where I had almost arrived.
It was my first time camping in the desert, so no surprise that by Sunday morning I was exhausted and dehydrated and ready to leave.
I left as I had come, early and with a rider; on my way out, I was hailed by one of the carpenters who had spent a month building the lantern posts for BRC, and he asked for a ride to San Francisco, just eighty miles further and an obvious choice for my west coast landfall.
untitled # 111 (2001)
private collectionAn hour after leaving Black Rock Desert, you take a short cut and go right past Pyramid Lake, adjacent to a reservation. You are out in the midst of sand and rocks and then there is vast blue water going miles into the distance. Caked with a week’s worth of fine playa dust, I got immersed and came up looking at bright sun and clear blue sky through sparkling water, and felt cooled and cleansed and ready to embrace the experience of arriving in California. I drove into San Francisco, and dropped off Marty the carpenter on Potrero Hill, about five blocks from the intersection of 25th and York Streets in the Mission, where I would end up living in a rental house full of artists two years later.
I had tethered down one more corner of a giant trampoline.
In the ensuing six weeks, I went to Bill’s place in Sacramento and got settled in to start editing his latest manuscript, developed a new series of seascapes painting on his back porch, located and found a place in a group exhibition in San Francisco where I sold a small painting for $250, witnessed on television the events of September 11th, 2001, along with the rest of the world, obtained my first gallery representation at the newly opened Exploding Head Gallery in Sacramento, and then packed up to leave for my five-week painting trip to the Galápagos Islands.
untitled # 118 (2001)
collection of Taylor Mayo
(Charlottesville)This painting is probably my most direct interpretation of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Each seascape is an imaginary amalgam of various experiences, and perhaps the emotions I was experiencing at that time were so strong that I was able to channel them into a very clear picture of the one particular place where I happened to be. This seemingly simple composition has endless variations, and opportunities to take it more towards natural representation or more stark abstraction.
I think the best of the seascapes, or at least the ones I find most intriguing, are those that walk along this fine line separating photorealism from horizontal geometric abstraction, those in which I have orchestrated a subtle, nuanced vision that encourages the viewer to be drawn in, perhaps slightly mystified, and ultimately to experience recognition of one of our most common primordial experiences, the seeking and witnessing of the horizon over water, and, finally, from shore.
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