Artists have long painted outdoors, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when Winsor & Newton created collapsible screw-cap paint tubes and the portable French Box Easel [1] was introduced, that on-the-spot or plein-air painting became a common mode for representing the landscape. This was especially true for the Impressionists who studied how the changing light influenced color. The French artists Claude Monet, Pierre-August Renoir, and Camille Pissaro, and their counterparts, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, and William Merritt Chase in the United States, were among the first to fully realize the potential of Impressionism by painting outdoors. Before then, the practice for landscape painters was to make charcoal or oil sketches on the spot and finished oil paintings in their studios. fine arts magazine 

While plein-air painting has endured throughout the twentieth century, much of its allure was lost to photography. [2] One of the rare artists to have carried this practice into the twenty-first century, is the English-born, Yale-educated painter Rackstraw Downes. Dividing his time between New York and Texas, Downes has been painting exterior and interior panoramic scenes of the American land- and urbanscape from life in Maine, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and elsewhere en plein air for over thirty-five years. 

 On most days Downes leaves his studio early in the morning, carrying a box easel in one hand; a wooden construction of two boards resembling a folding table, which allows two unfinished canvases stapled onto its opposite inside surfaces to be stored without touching, in the other; and a backpack holding a hammer, cord, and four metal tent pegs to secure the easel against strong winds. The box easel contains his palette, already prepared with dabs of oils, a selection of fine sable brushes, a palette knife, and a small clip-on cup to hold his paint medium, which is half linseed oil and half turpentine. 

If his subject is within the Five Boroughs of New York City, he often takes the subway to his painting locations; if the canvases are large or he is working out of town, he drives his car. Downes usually works on several paintings at once, and the choice of location depends on the weather and the light. He paints until about noon or whenever the light changes, then moves to a second location to work on another painting. While many of his sites are quite remote, with few if any visitors, others can include busy street corners with frequent curious passersby. 

I was able to observe Downes paint onsite in the summer of 2009. He had set himself up on a hidden patch of green way uptown on the West Side of Manhattan. Despite the relative remoteness of the site (the only other people I saw were two construction workers), there were numerous distractions. Cars passed below constantly at brisk speeds; helicopters and planes crossed noisily through the sky above at regular intervals; and there was a noticeable breeze that put the cord anchoring the easel to the test. None of it seemed to bother Downes who was fully absorbed in finishing a small detail of his painting, depicting a section of a wall composed of concrete and granite slabs confined by a wire fence. 

To meet up with Downes, I took the ‘A’ train to Washington Heights and joined him on a precarious hike that led us past graffiti-covered concrete pylons underneath the access road to the West Side Highway. Walking on grounds covered with drug paraphernalia and through a seedy underground passageway, we finally arrived at a beautiful spot covered with grass and rocks overlooking the Hudson River, the New Jersey Palisades, and the Henry Hudson Parkway. 

 It would be hard, however, to discern any nineteenth-century romanticism in locations such as this; it is a sentiment rarely in evidence in Downes’s work. His paintings are for the most part urbanscapes or industrialized landscapes, Even Downes’s more “pastoral” scenes, painted mostly in Maine or Texas, lack the rural nostalgia of Pissaro or the sublime power of the monstrous yet pacifying natural domain described by the German naturalist Carl Gustav Carus in his, Nine Letters in Landscape Painting. [3] Downes’s diverse subjects have included, among others, oil fields, beehive yards, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, housings projects, expressways, and two haunting and foreboding depictions of an unoccupied floor at the World Trade Center, Untenanted Space in the World Trade Center – Winter Sun. 

As have many painters before him, Downes begins by making pencil drawings onsite, returning later to sketch the scene in oil before executing the final painting. He often adds more paper to a drawing, or canvas to a sketch, in order to accommodate the full extent of his subject. Many of his drawings and oil sketches feature such extensions, with some drawings spreading over as many as ten sheets. For the oil sketches, he staples the initial canvas (which has been prepared with a thin stain of umber, giving the canvas a middle tone between black and white) onto a wooden board, adding more canvas as needed. Back in the studio, once he has determined the scope of the scene in this way, he transfers the oil sketch onto canvas with the help of a penciled grid; afterwards he returns to the exact location to complete the actual painting. He prefers to never touch up the paintings in his studio in order to avoid the subjective embellishment and interpretations that memory inevitably incurs. For Downes, painting is a constant negotiation between truth to life and truth to art. Every artist has to make a choice – as Bonnard once noted: “Before you add color, you must see things once or see them a thousand times.” [4] 

Examining the segues from pencil to oil sketch to oil painting reveals the evolution of Downes’s paintings. What lies between line and finish are studies of perspective, details, light, architectural structures, and, most of all, a decision-making process that determines the extent and scale of the scene to be represented in the finished work. In the drawing phase, Downes still experiments with different views and focal points; it is the oil sketch that determines the proportions and contextual setting of the final painting. 

Downes’s drawings trace out his way of thinking and knowing and getting to know his subjects, and demonstrate an innate relationship between drawing and seeing. The drawing for The View North from Washington Bridge on the Harlem River, at 19 by 53-1/8 inches much larger than the finished painting, depicts a high-rise apartment complex built on a landfill that extends out into the Harlem River. Downes wrote in great detail about this drawing and what attracted him to paint this view, revealing much about his way of looking at the world and learning to understand his subject matter: “The building sat in a gorge-like topography: to the left George Washington High School sprawled atop the Manhattan massif; facing it on the Bronx side, like artificial bluffs, were two towers of slab-like recent apartment buildings. Sandwiched between them was a line of old tenements that had been rendered structurally vulnerable by the blasting that made room for the highway down below – they were now reinforced with I-beams. Cupping this whole right-hand mass was the curve of an access road, a curve that I felt needed to complete itself before the drawing stopped.” [5] To include the entire scene required the drawing to be extended by three additional sheets of paper. 

Like the late-nineteenth-century Impressionists, with whom he shares a concern for truth and the direct observation of modern life and landscape, Downes sees objects and colors as interdependent – an organic whole in which all is related. [6] 

Downes’s drawings for Farm Buildings Near the Rio Grande – three paintings depicting different views, painted at different times of the day, of a barn open on three sides with an elongated wooden truss system and thin tubular metal columns – in comparison, are reduced to the principal architectural structures and the scattered trees surrounding them. The actual barn is adjacent to Downes’s house and studio in Presidio, Texas, near the Mexican border, and his studio and car are depicted both in the drawings and the painting. The drawings are similar to technical drawings of a building or architectural renderings that are meant to develop a design into a coherent proposal and to communicate ideas and concepts. 

Downes’s paintings remind us that looking is not equal to seeing. They invite prolonged examination, in essence, recreating the artist’s own “intelligent” vision, which is as much about knowledge as it is about perception. In his 1981 essay “What Realism Means to Me,” Downes quotes an observation by the British nineteenth-century painter John Constable on the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruysdael: “Ruysdael understood what he was painting.” [7] Similarly, Downes understands what painting does; his realism is a structuralist-minimalist approach to painting itself. In the same essay Downes also quotes Fairfield Porter writing on Impressionism: “What does the paint look like, what does it do?” [8] 

Downes’s formative years, which lasted from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, were dominated by the emergence of structuralism and minimalism. Structuralism is a philosophical system that looks at the world in terms of its functionality and the rules that describe its parts. Ultimately, it is concerned not with meaning, but with the fabrication of meaning. Minimalism replaces essence in art with presence and place: it relies on the void, the space around it. Minimalist sculpture affects and interacts with the space it occupies, to the extent that the surrounding space becomes an intrinsic part of the work. The abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning once said, “subject matter in the abstract is space.” [9] 

 Downes studied painting at the Yale School of Art from 1961–1964 as a classmate of, among others, Richard Serra, and began his career as a painter of geometrical abstractions. [10] By the mid-1960s, he began to feel the limits of the hard-edge abstractions he was painting, still under the influence of Al Held, his former teacher at Yale, and he decided to start over. He began to paint landscapes in Maine, where he had just bought a house, making oil sketches onsite and finished paintings in the studio. He was encouraged by the work of some of the leading figurative American painters at the time – Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver, Joseph Fiore, and Jane Freilicher, among them. Capturing the “soft edges” of the Maine scenery required him to radically alter his painting technique by learning to paint with looser brushstrokes that got his edges to tremble. 

Yet Downes paintings continue to be informed by his training as an abstract painter. A conceptual quality is visible in most of his work, underscored by rough yet tender brush strokes that recall the abstract landscapes of the French lyrical painter Nicolas de Staël. He paints “concrete in detail and abstract as a whole,” [11] to borrow from Fairfield Porter’s description of Édouard Vuillard. Downes eschews the belle facture, the smooth application of paint practiced by nineteenth-century French Academic painters and by the American photorealist painters who came to prominence in the 1970s. 

The philosopher Edward Casey, who has written extensively on the representation of place, distinguishes a dual function of landscape painting: “[It] at once stands for and stands in for that which it represents. As standing for, it serves as a sign of its represented content or subject matter: in this regard, it is a semiological entity. As standing in for, it is a perceived object, a material object in its own right that has taken the place of something else material (even, at the limit, a landscape as an embracing detotalized totality) … as a perceived object, it is undeniably physical and it is prized as such.” [12] 

Landscape painting reached one of its pinnacles in the nineteenth century with scenic panoramas that depict separate locations in one painting, which the viewer is meant to “circumambulate,” such as Thomas Cole’s monumental epic The Course of Empire from 1836. 

 Downes’s signature panoramic style was, he says, “…in part sparked off by the enthusiasm of locals in Maine or upstate New York for some certain “great view” in the area – which invariably turned out to be a huge vista from a high vantage point. Such imagery appealed to me for the way it seemed to counter what I saw as the fragmentation and reductionism of much modern art.” [13] He also looked hard at seventeenth-century Dutch panoramas, like those of Ruysdael and Philips Koninck. 

With Circumambulation Clockwise of the Six-Sided Bull Barn, Marfa, TX, Downes created his own version of the circumambulatory panorama by using multiple canvases. Six small paintings are arranged on the wall in a circular configuration that measures a mere thirty-seven inches in diameter. The viewer is invited to view all six sides of the barn in order, as though making a real circumambulation of the barn itself. The painting is somewhat of a rarity in Downes’s oeuvre as his multiple-part paintings are typically installed in a line. In works such as Snug Harbor, Metal Ductwork in G Attic and Four Spots Along a Razor-Wire Fence, August–November (ASOTSPRIE), the viewer is forced to view each part one at a time. This way of seeing is also required for his more extreme panoramic paintings, those that are ten feet wide, but less than twenty inches high, such as Garbage Arriving in Barges at Fresh Kill Is Hauled to the Top of the Landfill in Athey Wagons, or In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front . The critic Sanford Schwartz has remarked that the “disquieting centerlessness” of Downes’s paintings makes them “difficult to [be absorbed] fully at once; the eye can take them in only piecemeal … If we take a number of steps back from these narrow wide-screen works, we can comprehend their scope, but the luscious little detailing is lost. The representation, as it were, shuts down.” [14] 

Comparing Downes’s paintings to those of the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School and another English-born artist whose name has become synonymous with the American landscape, one finds interesting formal and iconographical similarities between them. Cole depicts the juxtaposition of untamed wilderness with cultivated land as a portent of the future prospect of the American nation. Cole often composed fictional scenes of wilderness, albeit based on plein-air sketches of the region, mixing realism with idealism. At the time of painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow, 1836, one of the most celebrated paintings of the American landscape, the idealist scenery was already collapsing; the area depicted in Cole’s painting was on its way to become popular tourist attraction and to be increasingly industrialized. 

Both Cole and Downes depict reality, but depart from the conventional representation of space. Downes’s panoramic paintings often display horizon lines with a pronounced curve. They do not correspond to the way horizons are represented by most camera lenses; they also differ from photorealist paintings in this respect. Downes’s paintings are expanded spatially, but condensed in terms of time, not unlike nineteenth-century photographic studio portraits that needed several hours of exposure. 

Like Cole’s, Downes’s paintings chronicle human existence – they are records of social history as it evolves. The Dam at Fairfield, one of Downes’s earliest panoramic onsite paintings, is one of only a few works where he combined two vantage points, which enabled him to depict the river disappearing both up- and downstream. Together with its complement, The Pulpmills at Madison, The Dam at Fairfield depicts the Kennebec River Basin in Maine that is populated by pulp and paper mills between Madison and Waterville. Both paintings, like Cole’s The Oxbow, are charged with moral significance. At the time Downes painted both scenes, the Kennebec River Basin was already embroiled in controversy. Shortly after Downes completed his paintings, environmentalists successfully stopped the driving of logs from the north downstream to the big pulp mills, which was harming the fish habitat in the river. Ironically, this led to more fishing and pleasure-boating and a rising carbon footprint due to increased highway traffic. 

 It should be noted here that, despite these parallels, Downes dislikes nineteenth-century American plein-air landscape painting such as that of the Hudson River School: “I find it theatrical in concept and calculated in execution.” [15] Among the American painters he admires most, aside from Fairfield Porter and others of his circle, he counts George Inness, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley. He is, also, deeply admiring of the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whose works he discovered while visiting Belgium and Holland in 1972. In a 1973 essay, he cites from notes made at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam: “Brueghel’s Toren van Babel reverses the scheme of the Impressionists and grand manner painters on whom I was reared. At one foot it is densely legible, a thousand stories in every square inch. At one hundred feet it is a magnificent abstraction … Up close it is equivalent to two or three books of the Odyssey.” [16] 

In Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel, Downes saw the possibility of a painting in which “the minute is the natural component, not enemy, of the grand; the fusing and playing against each other of the contemporary and the mythical, the literary, and the pictorial – in this comprehensive operation … an epic appears on a modest canvas 30 inches by 24.” [17] 

Downes’s paintings are almost miniscule relative to the scope of their subjects and surprisingly small-scale when compared to many of today’s younger figurative painters, such as Neo Rauch or Peter Doig. De Kooning famously remarked that “content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny – very tiny, content.” [18] 

Reviewing Fairfield Porter’s exhibition at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in 1954, the poet and critic Frank O’Hara wrote that Porter “has moved beyond the earlier felicity of sentiment … to a more abstract concern for the verity of painting itself.” [19] The same could be said about Downes’s paintings made after 1973. Downes’s Dunham’s Farm Pond, painted in 1972 in upstate New York, lacks both the spatial peculiarities and the relational perception of later paintings, such as his 1974 paintings of the Kennebec River Basin. Furthermore, Dunham’s Farm Pond was painted during a period when the artist made no initial pencil drawings or oil sketches. 

Downes is a serious thinker, and a passionate one, as well as a prolific writer on art. He belongs to that “greatest generation” of artists/writers who bloomed in the early 1970s and included Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Fairfield Porter, whose critical insights almost equaled their artistic innovations. In addition to writing criticism, [20] Downes edited an anthology of Porter’s writings, and published a diary on the making of two onsite paintings.[21] In discussing Four Spots Along a Razor-Wire Fence, August–November (ASOTSPRIE), a four-part painting, he describes the day-by-day struggles of painting outdoors in an urban environment, where nothing ever remains the same for very long. From the expected changing weather and light to the more irksome, annoying occasional minivan blocking his site (this would require patiently waiting for several hours doing minor touchup work on marginal areas of the painting until the minivan at last pulled out, or negotiating with a driver to move his car slightly off to the side to leave room for painting), dealing with occasional violators of “ASOTSPRIE” (acronym for Alternate Side of the Street Parking Regulations in Effect, an omnipresent reality for drivers in the Five Boroughs of New York City, which for Downes promises unobstructed views), subway delays, and gabby bystanders. 

At one point he notes: “What a bad set-up this razor-wire fence has been, from the parked cars, to the heat on the first 2 (summer) pieces – the Sumac & the ‘extra tier’ painting (where there was no shade at all), then the concrete boys came along, & now the low sun problem.” [22] One month earlier, on a “really bad day,” a crew of city workers had begun “cleaning all the weeds – my weeds – the full length of the fence.” He realized that he had no choice but to incorporate the change in imagery – a brand new concrete sidewalk had replaced the weeds – in the two as yet unfinished parts of this four-part work. [23] But there were also “excellent days” when “all the cars cleared out, the light was perfect, no nuisance folk stopped by.” [24] The painting was begun on August 5 and finished on November 14, after fifty-eight visits to the site, including the initial drawing and sketching phases. 

 In 1987, Downes spent the winter in Galveston, Texas. When he approached High Island coming from Cameron, Louisiana on Texas Route 87, he suddenly saw a scattering of black pump jacks on an oil field, and cows trailing or clustering around them. It was this uncontrolled juxtaposition of the pastoral and the industrial that caught his eye. Initially he considered the site too far from Galveston to pursue the idea of painting this scene, but then returned in March to make a small painting and two large drawings, one of which led to the painting In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front, the other to In the High Island Oil Field; Afternoon, Late March. He rendered both paintings in an unusually long and narrow format in order to capture the expanse of the flatscape (the oil field occupies over 1,000 acres) and the numerous dispersal of the pump jacks. He worked on both paintings over a period of three years, first making oil sketches in the winter of 1988 and then working on the paintings in the winters of 1989 and 1990. 

In 1972 the conceptual artist Robert Irwin remarked: “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.” [25] 

With his onsite paintings, Rackstraw Downes has been demonstrating for the past thirty-five years the ever-expanding possibilities of painting. He continues to shape our perception of the world by decisively unfolding it into a world picture, which in the words of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, is “the world conceived and grasped as picture … to the extent that it is set up by man.” [26] Downes’s paintings evince the kind of intelligence that the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge once described as consisting of two opposite forces: “… the intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object.” [27] 

by Klaus Ottmann, Contributing Writer 

Klaus Ottmann is the Curator-at-Large of the Phillips Collection, Washinton, D.C. He was the Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y. and teaches theory of art and exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Ottmann has curated over forty exhibitions, which have appeared at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg; and the Haus der Kunst,Munich, among others. 

Find details of this and other exhibits at: www.portlandmuseum.org 

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References: 

[1] Most famously memorialized by Gustave Courbet’s painting The Meeting (1854), in which the artist depicts himself with a Pochade Box and folded parasol strapped to his back as an outdoor painter being greeted by two men on the road. 

[2] On the influence of photography on nineteenth-century painting, see Peter Gallassi’s classic study, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981). 

[3] Carl Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting: Written in the Years 1815-1824, with a Letter from Goethe by way of Introduction, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002). 

[4] Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Pierre Bonnard: Early and Late (Washington, D.C.: The Philips Collection, 2002), 249. 

[5] “Turning the Head in Empirical Space,” in: Sanford Schwartz, Robert Storr, and Rackstraw Downes, Rackstraw Downes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 135. 

[6] This is also suggested by the title of his book, In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays From Three Decades, 1973, 1981, 1996 (New York: Edgewise, 2004). 

[7] “What Realism Means to Me,” in ibid., 47. 

[8] Ibid., 40. 

[9] Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 280. 

[10] Downes had first come to the United States in the late 1950s, attracted by American Jazz, and studied painting as an exchange student with Robert Speier who had been a student of Josef Albers at Yale. He then returned to his native England to read English literature at St. John’s College, Cambridge. 

[11] Fairfield Porter: Art in Its Own Terms, ed. Rackstraw Downes (Boston: MFA Publications, 2008), 170. 

[12] Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 17. 

[13] Rackstraw Downes in conversation with the author, New York, August 19, 2009. 

[14] Sanford Schwartz, “Cinematic Visions,” in Rackstraw Downes, 11. 

[15] Rackstraw Downes in conversation with the author, New York, August 19, 2009. 

[16] “What the Sixties meant to me,” in Downes, In Relation to the Whole, 29. 

[17] Ibid., 30. 

[18] Willem de Kooning in conversation with David Sylvester. In Peter. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 196. 

[19] “Reviews and Previews,” Art News (April 1954). Reprinted in: Frank O’Hara, What’s With Modern Art? (Austin: Mike & Dale’s Press, 1999), 14. 

[20] Downes has been a frequent contributor to Art News and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications, since the late 1960s. 

[21] Rackstraw Downes, Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The Making of Two Paintings (New York: Turning the Head Press, 2000). 

[22] Ibid., 87. 

[23] Ibid., 81. 

[24] Ibid., 92. 

[25] Robert Irwin, “The State of the Real, Part 1,” Arts 46 (June 1972), 48. 

[26] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129–30. 

[27] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:286.