Don Stinson + Randall Wilson Catalog

DON STINSON

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DON STINSON + RANDALL WILSON

GERALD PETERS GALLERY® 1005 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 Tel 505-954-5700 | www.gpgallery.com

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DON STINSON + RANDALL WILSON It is difficult to write about two artists whose knowledge greatly surpasses that of your own. Both formally educated with undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, Don Stinson and Randall Wilson are possessors of encyclopedic minds. Furthermore, both have gone to great lengths continuing their education by constantly staying up to date with exhibitions, art historical publications, attending symposiums and writing and lecturing. It is no surprise then that their relationship would have begun in the classroom. Meeting at the youthful age of 18, Stinson and Wilson studied together as undergraduates at Colorado State University. There they would solidify their bond to each other as well as their craft.

A remarkably skilled realist painter of Western vistas, Stinson’s art historical knowledge is equaled by his ability and technique. Often spoken about in the great company of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, Stinson frequently visits and paints the same iconic Western landscapes of these great 19th century painters. However, unlike his predecessors, Stinson sneaks in something for the viewer to consider: an abandoned road side attraction, deserted railroad tracks or even a shoe tree, Stinson quietly but effectively reminds the viewer of the human presence upon the land. Interestingly, rarely does Stinson depict an actual human figure or busied or populated scene; rather he paints a vacated and forsaken building or discarded materials (in the case of this exhibition, shoes). By painting the “once was” Stinson’s narrative grows to address the multiple histories of the American West. Layering notions of progress, agricultural pursuits and failures, and the expanse and collapse of industries, Stinson carries forward the tradition of western genre painting.

This dialogue with the past is also prevalent in the work of Randall Wilson. Like Stinson, Wilson draws on his heritage and his cultural roots in the West. Recently relocated from Southern California, Wilson returned to New Mexico two years ago. Growing up in Denver, Wilson spent much of his time with his Hispanic grandmother in northern New Mexico. There, in his grandmother’s adobe home Wilson began woodcarving at the age of nine. Like many young artists, Wilson, eager to leave behind his traditional artistic practices, would embrace a more global aesthetic, turning his attention and practice to industrial design.

His return to New Mexico in 2014 would prompt him back again to his early artistic experiences and material forms. Wilson’s works over the past two years, as presented in this exhibition, are crafted from local cottonwood trees. Harkening to New Mexico’s long standing retablos, bultos, santos and viga artisans, Wilson explores craftsmanship and simplistic beauty in large wood slabs and blocks. Carving, incising and painting the wood, Wilson delivers a fresh and contemporary voice to the traditional medium.

Like the innumerable stories of an old and dear friendship, where memories of the past and present day seem to intersect, the narratives found within the paintings and sculptures of Stinson and Wilson capture this same quality. Both bodies of work, rooted in history, supported by skill and excited by new perspective, remind us all of our potential to reflect and utilize new materials and points of view to enrich our lives.

EVAN FELDMAN, DIRECTOR OF CONTEMPORARY, GERALD PETERS GALLERY 2

“Among the many pleasures of Don Stinson’s handsome and thoughtful paintings is the sly inclusion of small figures performing obscure operations in the landscape, indicative of how both large and small are the presence of people in the land.”

WILLIAM L. FOX DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR ART + ENVIRONMENT NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART

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DON STINSON PAINTINGS 2016 Looking at any group of paintings or watercolours by Don Stinson you are struck by their dimensions. Not the dimensions of canvas or paper - the individual pictures may be quite modest in size – but the visual span of their imagery. They are, for the most part, panoramic, the width of each piece far exceeding its height; though some are vertical, like his oil painting of An illegal fire in Zion (2013) which at an overall 130 by 40 inches seems to overwhelm you as if you were in the canyon itself. But Stinson achieves an equally powerful effect on the more modest scale of the subjects in this exhibit. He achieves this by the boldness of his compositions, which are governed by extended lines, inviting the eye into distant territory far from the initial viewpoint. Like all good landscape paintings they not only suggest recession into space - they force you, as spectator, to take a journey into that space, to compel a physical interrelationship with the huge scale of American nature.

Artists in this country had arrived at solutions to this conundrum already back in the mid-eighteen hundreds, when they adopted ultra-large canvases on which to paint their visions of the wonders of the East Coast, or of South America. Frederic Edwin Church used a very long, low format to paint his astonishing view of Niagara Falls seen from the very brink. The finished picture, of 1857, measures 42 x 90 inches, and makes the viewer giddy with the expectation of being swept over the brim into the torrent. But the artist’s preliminary sketch, which measures only 11 ½ x 35 ½ inches, achieves exactly the same dizzying effect: scale is created by the horizontal format, combined with a vivid delineation of every detail of the plunging water.

When Albert Bierstadt travelled to the West a few years later, he understood very well the potency of this crucial combination of dimension and observation. He often painted subjects that existed only in his imagination, but he painted them on spectacularly large canvases, and in wonderfully accurately observed detail. He didn’t need any particular mountain in front of his eyes: he knew the terrain so well that he could invent it on any scale: the geology, the climatic conditions, the varieties of pine and scrub, the depth of the mountain lakes.

Bierstadt wanted to evoke the unspoilt vastness and emptiness of the newly discovered West. Don Stinson is keenly aware of the time-honoured identity of the West, but very conscious that it can no longer be painted honestly as empty or undiscovered. Some of Bierstadt’s later pictures carry with them hints of the impending desecration of the places he celebrated, a desecration he was to be partially responsible for, simply because he described them so vividly. Stinson sets out to record that desecration, while at the same time registering his wonder at the persistence of nature’s grandeur in spite of all.

He is also – and this is what makes his work so telling - a humane recorder of how Americans interact with their country, what they do to it. He doesn’t judge them but notices how their interventions change the landscape, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but always as marks of human habitation and need. In doing this he links a strange and wonderful landscape with more ordinary places, with the East Coast or with Europe, where humans make their marks as equally arbitrary agents of a universal impulse to live, to create,

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to improve, or to destroy. He links with other painters too: with Rackstraw Downes, observing the detritus of suburban industry, even with Richard Estes, bringing his New York Photorealism to bear on the anomalies of the urban American landscape.

Stinson’s interest is often in uniquely American things – drive-in cinemas, for example; but it can focus on something more generally symbolic: shoe trees are a phenomenon that occurs in other parts of the world as well as the United States. What drives people to hang their shoes in the branches of roadside trees? No one has worked out a simple answer to that, but it is a strangely poignant custom, strange at least because it springs from an apparently universal human instinct. And as if to confirm its ordinariness, Stinson paints his shoe -tree in broad daylight, under a sun shining through broken veils of rain from a clear blue sky over which ‘little fluffy clouds’ are scuttling like anxious beetles caught on a time-lapse camera (After Zion: West of the Park).

Local entrepreneurship changes the landscape more obviously, of course. Stinson notes how the do-it yourself sign for an improvised cinema can transform the desert into a sea, with the lone russet sail of a solitary barge afloat on it (Low living Bohemians at work in West Texas).

An example of the intervention of the creative imagination that has particularly intrigued Stinson is the imposition of emphatically American imagery at the Cadillac Ranchn outside Amarillo, Texas, where a long row of upended and half-buried 1950s Cadillacs stands like a monument to a lost civilization. The erosion of the cars by vandalism and sprayed graffiti makes them more lost, more mysterious and at the same time more unmistakably American. Stinson distances himself from the details to see this ambiguous monument looming on the horizon as a henge of ancient stones, or the ever-mysterious heads of Easter Island, brooding like a baleful commentary over the flat land.

He reserves his most powerful imagery for other ‘henges’: the lines of wind turbines that gather in many areas of the desert. Their white sails flicker in changing light like huge flocks of sea birds – shades of Brigham Young at the Great Salt Lake? – While their tall masts suggest the stems of giant palms slicing in long files across the empty terrain, measuring space in depth and height. The sheer scale of these structures is wonderfully evoked in Re-wilding Imagined: the physical size that Bierstadt would have demanded effortlessly suggested by Stinson’s telling draughtsmanship, the sun-drenched space created by the many-coloured planes delineated by the artist’s confident yet subtle gestures.

ANDREW WILTON AUTHOR OF “AMERICAN SUBLIME: LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN THE UNITED STATES, 1820-1880” AND FORMER KEEPER AND SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT TATE BRITAIN

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DON STINSON

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DON STINSON, COAL CREEK CANYON,WATERCOLOR ON ARCHES PAPER, 15 1/2 X 30 INCHES

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DON STINSON AFTER ZION: WEST OF THE PARK OIL ON LINEN, 46 X 90 INCHES

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DON STINSON, GIORGIONE PASS: IMAGINED BEGINNINGS, OIL ON LINEN, 38 X 46 INCHES

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DON STINSON, RE-WILDING IMAGINED, OIL ON LINEN, 18 X 52 INCHES

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DON STINSON LEFT SHOE COSMOPOLITANS IN VALENTINE OIL ON LINEN, 24 X 60 INCHES

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DON STINSON LOW LIVING BOHEMIANS AT WORK IN WEST TEXAS OIL ON LINEN, 12 X 32 INCHES

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DON STINSON OPEN GROUND: WEST OF THE ROAD TO BOULDER OIL ON LINEN, 30 X 60 INCHES

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DON STINSON TONTO BASIN SHOE-TREE: A SHIFT IN MIGRATORY PATTERNS OIL ON LINEN, 42 X 84 INCHES

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RANDALL WILSON

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RANDALL WILSON, THE CROSS SERIES NO.6, COTTONWOOD AND STEEL, 37 INCHES DIAMETER, 12 INCHES WIDTH

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RANDALL WILSON THE CROSS SERIES NO. 4, COTTONWOOD AND STEEL 37 INCHES DIAMETER 12 INCHES WIDTH

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RANDALL WILSON THE CROSS SERIES NO. 5, COTTONWOOD AND STEEL 37 INCHES DIAMETER 12 INCHES WIDTH

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GERALD PETERS GALLERY WOULD LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUALS

William L. Fox, John Macker, Shane Mieske, Molly Wagoner, Andrew Wilton

Images © 2016 Don Stinson, courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery.

Images © 2016 Randall Wilson, courtesy Gerald Peters Gallery.

Essay © 2016 Andrew Wilton, Author of “American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880” and former Keeper and Senior Research Fellow at Tate Britain. © 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

GERALD PETERS GALLERY® 1005 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 Tel 505-954-5700 | www.gpgallery.com

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RANDALL WILSON