Conrad Buff - The Other-Worldness of the West

by Donna Poulton

Canyonland. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

There are few artists of the southwest whose technique is as expressive or singular as that of Conrad Buff (1886-1975).  His Modern interpretation of the southwest, using high-keyed architectural compositions and broken color patterns to distinguish the desert landscape, is unrivaled.  Born and raised in Switzerland, Buff moved to Los Angeles in his mid-twenties where he studied art under a number of instructors, but his work with Edgar Payne seems to have been a pivotal point in guiding his art career, especially in mural work.

Landscape with Trees. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

Horse. Credit: SternFineArts.com

In 1923, Conrad Buff and his wife, Mary, made the first of many trips to the then relatively undiscovered Zion National Park.  Buff wrote that as they drove to Zion “The air got clearer and clearer and the landscape was as fantastic as it was beautiful.  Always the same varied pattern of hills, the same foreground with the sagebrush, but the air was so clear that the design of the hills stood out against the deep blue sky which has always fascinated me and still does—the deep blue sky and the mountains and hills against it.”

Canyon Wall, Zion National Park. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

In the late 1920s Buff was commissioned to paint mural decorations for a social hall in Huntington Park, California. After seeing other Utah landscapes and work related to the mural project at an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum, Los Angeles art critic Merle Armitage wrote, “Conrad Buff comprehends the enormity of the West.  More than that, he adds thereto a discernment of the stylized and conventionalized forms in which the West abounds.  Not one artist in a hundred grasps the significance of the West’s dynamic forms.”

Monument Valley. Credit: SternFineArts.com

An exhibition at the Ilsley Gallery in Los Angeles showcased some of Buff’s Utah scenes, and a large Zion scene especially interested one exhibition visitor—Maynard Dixon.  Will South wrote that, “Immediately, there began a friendship which lasted as long as Maynard Dixon lived….[Dixon] was impressed by the style of the young Swiss and also by the locale of some of his paintings.”  South goes on to note that “According to Buff, Dixon was quite taken with a view of Zion National Park and had to ask its location because he had never been there on his own many travels of the West. Two months later, in June 1933, Dixon headed out to Zion in the company of his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)…”

Monument Valley. Credit: SternFineArts.com

During the Depression Buff worked briefly for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP).  Art critic Arthur Millier wrote, “…resting on Mr. Buff’s exploration, one can visualize a future school of painter, to whom he will have discovered the other-worldness of a region in which it is not uncommon to see, one behind another, red, white, black and blue peaks.  What at first seems to be his personal colorations turn out to be typical of the desert slope of mountains."

Canyon de Chelly. Credit: SternFineArts.com

Canyon Land (see above) depicts a large bluff surrounded by the waterway that has, over the millennia, cut its large rectangular profile and left it standing alone as an island.  The painting is unusually monochromatic for Buff, and his identifiable short brushstrokes and cross hatching are absent.  It suggests the silence and isolation of the eons and the weight of time.  Ed Ainsworth reported that Buff “repeatedly journeyed to the country known as the Wayne Wonderland on the Fremont River…sometimes with his wife and the Dixons.”

Deep Canyon. Credit: SternFineArts.com

Will South has suggested that it was his German accent, but whatever the reason, Conrad Buff spent much of his time in southern Utah during the War years. From this period came an outpouring of paintings and an evolution in his composition and method.  Since most of his paintings are undated and untitled it is difficult to ascertain exactly when and where the work was done.  Buff observed that:

Landscape painting has been my favorite thing practically all my life.  But I found out that the way that I saw landscape, especially the western landscape that I was so much in love with, wasn’t the way the public saw it.  I just couldn’t get interested in the verbenas and the sunsets.  I kept on painting these magnificent forms that I saw and that I was interested in, and I tried to get the magnificent blues that we saw on the desert, which wasn’t so easy to harmonize with the rest of the landscape.  And especially the wild country in Utah.

Utah Mesa. Credit: SternFineArts.com

Throughout the later 1950s and 60s, the perspective in Buff’s paintings comes down to eye level.  Landscapes that had been set at dizzying heights to illustrate the stature and depth of desert monoliths is replaced by scenes set at ground level.  But with the change in altitude came attendant explorations with plasticity.  The sky remained his signature blue, largely unbroken by texture or line, but the foreground elements were applied with thicker impasto and longer brush strokes.  The impression of light was achieved by the application of pure color rather than blending on the palette.

Lake Powell, Utah. Credit: SternFineArts.com

Buff’s mature desert series advanced further in the 1970s to expressive primary colors, flattened planes and architectural edifices recognizable only because they are iconographic emblems of the desert.  In these paintings, the landscape is an object - it has been stripped of the painterly devices of thick impasto, cross-hatching and the neo-impressionistic techniques of broken color. Nature has been reduced to minimal form and pure color, but in doing so Buff has established his own unrivaled vision of the West and nothing of its essence has been lost.

Untitled, Southern Utah. Credit: Donna Poulton and Vern Swanson Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

LeConte Stewart: Depression Era Art

LeConte Stewart: Depression Era Art

at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah - 21 July 2011 through 15 January 2012

By Donna Poulton

Best known for the Red Rock splendors of Monument Valley and of Zion and Bryce Canyons, southern Utah has long attracted artists from around the world.

LeConte Stewart, “Postmaster General” Credit: Church History Museum 

Although LeConte Stewart (1891-1990) grew up near these iconic sites, it was actually Utah’s small towns, farms, and urban landscapes that captured his imagination from a very young age.

LeCone Stewart, “House by the Railroad” Credit: Private Collector

In a career spanning more than 75 years, Stewart created images of Utah that are simultaneously epic and intimate. He was talented at etching, lithography, and lettering, yet it is his oil paintings that have garnered the widest recognition among both collectors and museum visitors.

LeConte Stewart, “Private Car” Credit: Church History Museum

Looking back, Stewart noted that three themes dominated his landscape paintings of Utah. The first was the desert: like most Westerners, he was attracted to sage-covered plateaus and hills — scenes of endless expanse.

LeConte Stewart, “Cannery” Credit: Private Collection

LeConte Stewart, “The Victorian” Credit: Utah Museum of Fine Arts

The second theme was the scenic region that hugs the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains: wide meadows with cottonwood trees and Lombardy poplars are punctuated with such humanizing elements as barns, corrals, farmhouses, and winding lanes.

LeConte Stewart, “Home Loan” Credit: Jan and Paul Doxey 

The third theme emerged during the 15-year period when Stewart explored the effects of the Great Depression — urban and rural landscapes of trains, stores, factories, homes, and men at work in the fields.

LeConte Stewart, “Toe Hold” Credit: Springville Museum of Art

This is the largest collection of LeConte Stewart’s extraordinary work ever exhibited.  Not to be missed.

LeConte Stewart, “The Smith’s” Credit: Utah Museum of Fine Arts

LeConte Stewart, “Untitled” Credit: Private Collection

LeConte Stewart, “Death Curve” Credit: Private Collection

LeConte Stewart, “Finale” Credit: Catherine and Gibbs Smith 

Color, Form and Light: Milford Zornes Comes Home

by Donna Poulton

Horses Red Canyon by Milford Zornes. Image courtesy of Bingham Gallery

From Milford Zornes by Gordon T. McClelland and Milford Zornes, Hillcrest Press, Inc.

By the time James Milford Zornes (1908-2008) moved to Utah in 1963, he had a long history of successful exhibitions, had traveled the world, was elected president of the California Watercolor Society and had established an international teaching reputation. He and his wife had not planned to move to southern Utah, but they found the property for sale while making an impromptu visit to Edith Hamlin at the home that she and Maynard Dixon had built in Mt. Carmel. This began a decades-long interest for Zornes in the investigation of new colors, forms and light.

Maynard Dixon's Cabin. Image courtesy of Bingham Gallery

During the thirty years that he lived in Mt. Carmel, Zornes painted around the Zion area in every season and from every vantage point.  On 1 April - 31 July 2011, the Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts and Bingham Gallery are bringing Zorne’s work home to the Maynard Dixon property that he loved so much with a retrospective of some of his finest work; some of it painted from his own back door.

Image courtesy of Bill Anderson Art Gallery

Dixon's Front Gate by Milford Zornes. Image courtesy of Bingham Gallery

Caves of Kanab Canyon by Milford Zornes. Image courtesy of Bingham Gallery

Barn in Glendale by Milford Zornes. Image courtesy of Bingham Gallery

Western Landscape Goes East

by Donna Poulton

Thomas Moran's 19^th Century paintings of the western landscape continue to migrate to the East. The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. recently received a gift of the famed artist’s painting Green River Cliffs, Wyoming from collector Vern Milligan who purchased it in 1994 for $2.7 million.

Moran is well known for his powerful paintings of the West. His Grand Canon of the Yellowstone, and Chasm of the Colorado were bought by Congress to grace the U.S. Capitol in the 1870s.

But it is his paintings of Green River Wyoming that are attracting attention and large auction records.  In 2008, his 1878 painting of Green River of Wyoming sold for a staggering $17.7 million.

Moran made numerous treks to the west, most often on the Transcontinental Railroad crossing the Green River at Green River, Wyoming. This was also the embarkation point of John Wesley Powell’s heroic adventure to run the course of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

John Wesley Powell on Green River. Photo courtesy of Utah Historic Society

Train Station in Green River, Wyoming. Photo courtesy of Wyoming Tales and Trails

A true test of the market will happen at the Scottsdale Art Auction on April 2^nd, 2011 when Moran’s Indian Summer, Green River, Wyoming is sold to the highest bidder. The painting is smaller than others that have sold for high prices and it was painted later in Moran’s life, but if it follows recent trends, it might bring well over the high estimate of $5 million.

Green River, Wyoming. Photos by C.N. Plummer

Paintings and Sculpture of Ed Mell

By Donna Poulton

Ed Mell is one of the most ingenious and successful artists working in the West today, but like most people, Mell’s career path wasn’t evident early on. After graduating, he moved to New York City to work as a graphic designer and within two years launched his own company, Sagebrush Studios, which became an immediate success with such well-known clients as Cheerios and RCA.

Ed Mell is represented by both the Overland Galery (in Scottsdale) and Medicine Man Gallery (in Tucson and Santa Fe). The above video was shot in Medicine Man Gallery.

Photograph of Gary E. Smith (standing) and Ed Mell. Courtesy of Larry Clarkson.

Sidestepper. Photo courtesy of Overland Gallery.

Preferring the West, Mell returned to his hometown, Phoenix, Arizona in 1973.  He worked part time as an illustrator and part time developing his painting skills into what would become a unique and recognizable style.  By 1978 he had become a full time artist creating paintings that moved between hard edged representation and much more abstract work; always with the familiar angles and edges. By choosing to paint a broken terrain, he has naturally cubed the landscape by dividing the images in his work into small multiple areas.

Mell told Southwest Art Magazine:   “I work from nature, and sometimes I push it a little further…Seeing the real thing has much more impact than a photographic representation of nature, so in order to duplicate nature, I like to push it a little further and bring back some of the impact that nature has in real life.”  

From Day to Night. Photo courtesy of Overland Gallery.

Dueling Fury. Photo courtesy of Overland Gallery.

Canyon Light and Rain. Photo courtesy of Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts. 

Like the Cubists, Mell has taken natural forms—clouds, sky, rain, lighting, cliffs, buttes and canyons—and ‘analyzed’ them for reinterpretation into geometric forms.  His work also resonates with elements of chaos theory and the study of approximate fractals in which patterns in nature appear identical at different scales; the repeating motifs are easily found in natural formations such as clouds, mountain ranges, lightning and river networks.

 Fractals seem more evident, more repetitive in a cubist interpretation of nature.  In both Wingate Cliffs and Canyon, Light and Rain the canyons and bluffs are often connected by long cylinders representing shafts of light, rain or lightning—emphasizing the interconnection of the elements.

 “…there are certain moods to the landscape, and sometimes that’s the main focus, to capture the mood rather than an actual depiction of [a place]…Some kind of invention happens, almost like auto-painting, but in a calculated way.  Once you have enough confidence that you’re not nervous about where it will go you can have freedom and fun with it.”

Wingate Cliffs. Photo courtesy of Painters of Utah's Canyons and Deserts.

To read more about Ed Mell:

Donald J. Hagerty: Leading the West

Donna L. Poulton and Vern Swanson: Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts

Donald Hagerty: Beyond the Visible Terrain

Southwest Art: October 2002, April 2004, March 2004 

Art of the West: May, 2003

Western Art Collector: March 2008, January 2009, February 2010