“Veduta” means “view” in Italian. In the series of Veduta weavings, I explore how systems of color can evoke memories of certain places or even impressions of places where I've never been.
Deserts and the idea of the American frontier are the themes of this picture. Besides landscapes, the picture is made of ethnographic images of desert dwelling people - Native Americans, Arabs; Biblical images - Abraham, John the Baptist, Jesus; and Western Americana images - cowboys, trains, miners. Amassing enough images that had the right palette of desert colors from my hundreds of art books was a difficult task, as depictions of deserts are rare in Western art until Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.
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I had a book of Moroccan paintings done by Delacroix. And I used plates from a couple of excellent books published by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, a museum devoted to American Art with an emphasis on the West. There is a wide selection of books on“Western” or “Cowboy” art, but I doubt there could be any other genre of painting with such a low proportion of excellence to kitsch. When I was in Phoenix to deliver this picture to its owners, I went to the Phoenix Museum, which devotes major efforts to collecting art that refers to the American West. Seeing this genre in that museum was a real eye-opener to me, and made me for once believe that Western themes could contain intellectually challenging sets of ideas to explore. |
I’d thought that those themes had long been exhausted, the way the “Madonna and Child” theme or the “Royal State Portrait” theme has been exhausted. Because the desert appears empty and barren, it can fool the viewer into believing that the number of people who have stood in the same spot and seen the same vista are few, or even perhaps that for this particular line of sight, this particular focus on a certain geologic feature, she’s actually the first witness. Of course the desert is never empty or barren, there’s always some form of life carrying on. And with eons of humanity walking over the world, there’s no place that hasn’t been witnessed. There’s really no such thing as discovery, only rediscovery, or recontextualization, or reintegration. |
