PHOTOGRAPHY & EDIT: Rebecca Goodpasture
JIM WILCOX
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA
light: well, I consider light to be my first subject; everything else is something for the light to play on.
ON LISTENING:
We had a friend go out with us on our boat, years ago, and we go out in the middle of Jackson Lake and we turned off the engine and just sat there, and she was from California and she said,
“Doesn’t it bother you to have all this silence?”
And I said, “Well, first of all I don’t think it’s silent. I hear the water lapping on the boat, I can hear the birds in the trees, I can hear the breeze rustling things, to me that’s nature’s music. It’s not silence at all. And then the second thing is, I like it.”
There’s a time and place for noise. I love going to a concert and listening to an orchestra that’s crashing and booming, but I wouldn’t want to listen to that all the time. In fact, as much as I like that kind of music, I don’t usually play it while I’m painting. Because there’s so much plot that it gets in the way of what I’m doing, unless it’s the right plot for what I’m doing. If I’m doing something rainy, and I’m listening to something rainy, that’s okay, and if I’m doing something serene and I’m playing serene music, that’s okay. But if I’m listening to something crash boom I’d better be painting a storm or tornado or something. Otherwise I’ll be fighting the music trying to do the painting.
I listen to nature’s music out there. I see people out there with earphones in and I think, “Well first of all you want to know if a bear’s coming at you.” I’ve had that happen before and I’d like to know it’s coming.
I don’t want to miss what I’m there for. Sometimes I’ve had a deer come out and watch me, it’s almost like it’s enjoying my demonstration. And I feel a connection to the deer. The deer seems to know that I’m not a threat, and I enjoy the fact that the deer seems to know that I’m not a threat. And, that’s part of the experience out there, I love it.
I was out one time, I think I was up at Taggart Lake. You should go up there. It’s a mile and a half hike, and it’s beautiful. But I was up there one time and it started to rain, and it was just a downpour. And I moved over underneath a tree and I watched it rain and watched the water bounce off the lake for about an hour. Thouroughly enjoyed it. It was a different kind of a concert.
ON THE BEGINNING
Our first gallery was about 1/6th the size of this room, it was a little building, about half a block south of the square. It was a shoebox, but it was really cheap and it was our first summer here and we were trying to figure out how to sell my work. It was $100 a month for the summer. In the winter they didn’t even expect to rent it in those days. This is, we’re talking 49 years ago. Next year we have our 50th anniversary of being in the gallery business.
It was so small that I had my work, and I had some photographs that were done by one of our employees. We actually had employees. It was a friend that worked on commission, didn’t make anything but she had a nice summer.
The next year the Pink Garter Plaza opened up. They had some space and we chewed our knuckles a bit and finally decided, “Well maybe we could manage that kind of rent, we ought to be able to sell that much.” So we opened the gallery there. We had to finish the space. I laid the carpet. I made the lights, we couldn’t afford the fancy ones. We stapled burlap to the walls, so that when you moved a painting it wouldn’t leave obvious marks, and that was our second gallery and the first one where we carried somebody else’s work.
And there were a couple of artists that I admired and invited them to be with us, and it grew over the years and we now carry about 40 artists. We have a lot more space than we had then.
PLEIN AIR:
I was visiting a friend who’s an artist, he makes a living as an artist, he has for many years, and when I visited him one time he asked if I’d come into his studio and critique his work. And I went in and looked at his work and I said, “Well, the one suggestion I’d make is that you do more painting on location.” Because it was obvious from his paintings that he didn’t. And a few years later I was there again, and he wanted a critique. We went into his studio and I looked around and I said, “I don’t have anything to tell you. Because you haven’t done what I told you to do last time.” He hadn’t been painting outdoors and you could see it.
If you don’t paint outdoors there are a lot of things you miss. Even if you work from really good photographs, they don’t tell you everything. Those instruments have biases, color wise, so the colors may not be right. You don’t see the atmosphere, you don’t see the details, you don’t see the little colors that are back in there. And the darks tend to get very dark and black and featureless. And that’s why you need to go out there. If you’re out there in nature, you know. You have to learn to see what’s there instead of what you think is there.
When I taught school up in Seattle, we had a school that was up on a hill and you could see the layers of mountains going back, and I’d take the students out on the hill and I’d ask what color the most distant mountains were. And quite often they’d say, “They’re black.” And the reason is because the sky was so much lighter, and the mountains didn’t have a lot of color at that distance, so they interpreted that as black. Well it was probably the same blue-grey you’re looking at out there now. You have to learn to see that. And the best way is to get out into nature and look.
ON SHADOWS:
If you paint in the studio for a long period of time you tend to start making things too warm, and shadows in particular will become too dark, quite often, and too black, too devoid of color. But if you’re out there those shadows are neither black nor uncolorful. They have some beautiful things going on in them. You might have a shadow that is full of color, reds and greens and blues, but you don’t see it in a photograph. In fact sometimes the light is so bright that what you see most is what’s in the shadows. And then sometimes it’s the other way around, the shadows become very flat relatively speaking, and the highlights will have a lot more detail. Normally, nature doesn’t make both highlights and shadows the same. It will make one of them stronger than the other.
FOCAL POINTS & SOLOISTS:
Your painting is better if something is stronger than something else. Have you ever been to a Yanni concert? He’s a pianist. My wife and I went to one years ago down in Park City, and it was outdoors and it was at dusk going into night, and he was dressed in white. He had a soloist, a woman that was dressed in red, and then the orchestra was dressed in black. When the lights came on, you knew who was most important, because he shimmered. And the soloist stood out pretty well, too, and the orchestra was just in the background.
So you’ve got your focal point, you have another subject that’s important but not as important, and then you have the background that lets them look important. That’s the way a painting should be, you have a star, and then you have the supporting cast. And if you have more than one star in a painting it can be a problem.
I did a painting years ago, I had a technique for doing rock that looked like I stuck a rock on the painting. I sent a painting into a show that had a jury and they rejected the painting because, the guy that called and told me about it said, “You have these beautiful mountains up here and then you’ve got this gorgeous big rock down here and they’re competing with each other.” And I realized, that he was right. I hadn’t subdued one of them; I hadn’t turned one of them into the soloist. Well they were both soloists, but singing different songs. I thought, “Ok, I either need to paint everything else like the rock or I need to paint the rock like everything else.” And everything else was more like I’m painting now.
My son came into the studio, he was about eight years old, and he walked into the studio one day and he looked at a painting that had a rock like that and he said,
“Did you do that painting, Dad?”
“Yes.”
“It sure is real! Except for the sky, and the mountains, and the trees and stuff.”
So he crossed everything off but the rock, and that was one of the best critiques I ever had in my life. Because he was telling me, you made something too important.
INTERACTION:
Years ago, there was a guy living here, he worked here for the summer and then he went back to, I think it was Atlanta, in the wintertime. And he had a job there that was almost a volunteer job, he didn’t make a lot of money. But he bought a very large painting, and made payments through the next year to pay for it. He wrote me a letter one time, and he said,
“I make my way home through the fumes and the debris in the city and I climb the stairs into my apartment and I open the door and I look at your painting and I breathe Teton air.”
That’s what I want them to feel, if they can.
SPRING COMES TO THE VALLEY:
To me, the shape of the river is elegant. You know, if you did an abstract painting and all you had was that in red across a white canvas it’d be beautiful to look at.
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"SPRING COMES TO THE VALLEY": 36 x 48, oil on canvas, $26,000
This is fairly accurate, it’s about what you see when you’re up the hill a mile down the road. But there are times when I change things a little bit. Well here, let’s talk about the trees for a minute. I imported those, they’re not in that spot, but I tried to get an interesting rhythm and an interesting shape there, too. I think everything in your painting should have an interesting shape whenever possible.
Like this little slip right in here, for example. That, to me, is a beautiful shape. This one too, it’s simpler, but it’s still a beautiful shape. This shadow pattern here, same thing. And I try to find those things and emphasize them, because they make paintings a lot more interesting.
REFLECTIONS OF LAKE POWELL:
I was fascinated by the direct light here, and the shape of it. Again, it’s just an interesting shape. It looks like a Brancusi sculpture, if you know anything about Brancusi, he did shapes.
This is reflective light, over here, and that can be very rich and beautiful. Here’s the atmosphere coming into play. You’ll notice this rock, which is lit up by the sun, is very different from that rock (further back in the piece), which is the same kind of rock, lit by the same sun, but the atmosphere changes how it looks. But here again, you try to find shapes that are interesting and that’s part of why I’m drawn to that subject, because the shapes are interesting.
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"REFLECTIONS OF LAKE POWELL": 40 x 30, oil on canvas, $18,500
We don’t have a light source in a painting, all we can do is reflect light. So, to make that happen you have to do things so that it has a relationship that’s similar to an actual light source. And every once in a while it works. It’s wonderful when it does. And if I do a painting that makes you squint, because of the light, and occasionally I do that, that makes you feel really good.
THREE LAST MINUTES OF GLORY:
I frankly think that every once in a while God gives you a painting that’s beyond your ability. That was one of those. I knew more about how to paint that before I started than any painting I’ve ever done. First of all, I knew I’d have to paint it quite dark, so that the color would hold up in the lights. And I knew I’d have to paint it fast because I’d have to work on wet paint all the way through, or most of the way through.
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THREE LAST MINUTES OF GLORY: oil on canvas, Jim's personal collection (not for sale)
When I did that painting, it was probably several years before I started doing, on a regular basis, things that I did in that painting. And there are still things I’m learning from that painting. The original is, well I did a 24 x 48, and I liked it so well I was saving it for an important show. And somebody was interested in buying it and I said, “Well, I would only sell it if I got something I liked better to send to the show.” And I thought, “Well I’d like to do it bigger anyways.” And so I did a bigger version of it and I sent that to the show. And after it won the award, which was the most important award I know of in western art, I decided to keep the little one, so I have it upstairs. And I still look at it and I think, “How did I do that?” There are some things in the foreground that I’ve never done, except on the larger piece. There are things there that I haven’t done since, and I like them, I’d like to do them again.
The point is, it was a gift. It was beyond my ability at the time. And every once in a while you get a painting that is a gift. And I think that’s God’s way of encouraging us.
There’s a rhythm in nature. And you see it up here. It isn’t “boom boom boom”, it’s “bom bidi bom bom”. And the trees have a rhythm also, they’re different sizes, different shapes, different colors, and those rhythms are things you want to pick out of nature.
The actual physical texture, it’s due to what I was using to dry the paint, and I was painting over some paint that was kind of sticky. And here again, everything is quite dark, but it’s subtle color changes, color and value changes. This area up here, the lower hills, that’s where I knew I’d have to paint fast. Because I wanted soft edges there and that means you paint into wet paint. The sky I repainted three times to make it darker, because it was needed to make the lights stand out.
ON SUCCESS:
An artist came in from Canada one time, and he said, after we’d talked a while he said,
“I’m the best wildlife artist in Canada. And I’m the best landscape artist in Canada. And I think you should carry my work.”
I said, “Well, let me see what you have.”
And he showed me, and I knew he wasn’t the best landscape artist in Canada and I knew he wasn’t the best wildlife artist in Canada.
We have distorted ideas of how good we are and how bad we are. We’re probably never as good as we think we are on a good day and we’re probably never as bad as we think we are on a bad day. But he was having a bad day all the time. He had no clue how bad he was.
John Clymer, do you know who he was? He was a famous artist. There used to be a magazine called the Saturday Evening Post. John Clymer did Saturday Evening Post covers, he was the second most used by the magazine. And John Clymer came and built a house here years ago, out at Teton Village. In his 90s he was quoted in an article as saying it got harder as he got older. And I thought, oh no, I was hoping that someday I’d get to the point where I could take a blank canvas and start painting and know I was going to come up with a masterpiece, better than the last one. So the next time I saw him I asked him,
“So, is that really true?”
and he said “Oh yea.”
And I said “Well, you keep getting better all the time, don’t you?”
and he said, “Yea.” He said, “But the distance between where you are and where you’d like to be keeps getting greater.”
And it does. In the early years of our gallery I was successful enough that I was starting to get a little cocky. I thought I was pretty hot stuff. And, I’m not anymore. Because of this: I know a lot more than I did then, I paint a lot better than I did then, but I’m also humbled by what I’m not able to do. Or what I’m not able to do as well as I’d like to.
So, I have an occasional good day, well, a lot of good days, where I do something that I’m pleased with. Not necessarily proud of, but pleased with. On occasion I do something I’m proud of. And those days are good days, but the other days keep me grounded, they remind me: ok, you’ve still got a lot to learn. And art is something that you never stop learning. As far as I know, I’ve never known anybody, well, I shouldn’t say that. I’ve know a few that thought they had arrived, but they hadn’t. And the ones that have arrived don’t know it, because of this. They know there’s more left that they’d like to do and can’t do.
