The English-born artist Rackstraw Downes is finally, at the age of 71, having a long-overdue moment. After toiling for four decades making meticulous onsite paintings of landscapes, cityscapes and interiors – without the aid of a camera – Downes is enjoying his first major career retrospective. The stunning Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, which opened last summer at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island and then traveled to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, is now taking a victory lap at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, N.C.

In addition, Downes’s New York dealer, Betty Cuningham, recently put together a 30-year survey of his drawings, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Ct., mounted a mesmerizing show that used a wealth of drawings, journals and paintings to reveal the arduous process that resulted in a three-part picture called, with Downes’s typically prosaic precision, Under the Westside Highway at 145th Street. fine arts magazine

Only after coming under the spell of Downes’s art did I discover his writing, in the form of a slender volume, In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays From Three Decades, 1973, 1981, 1996, published by Edgewise Press in 2004. The best way to appreciate Downes’s achievements, as both artist and writer, might be to walk through his career by walking through this bewitching little book’s three essays.

1. What the Sixties Meant to Me (1973)

The reader is immediately aware that Downes is no literary dabbler. He received a degree in English literature at Cambridge before coming to America to study art at Yale in the early 1960s, and he’s deeply familiar not only with literature and art but also with history, criticism, art history, philosophy and, for good measure, meteorology and the movies. His writing is clear, colloquial and insightful, not only in this volume but also in the introductory essay he wrote for Fairfield Porter: Art In Its Own Terms, a 1979 collection of critical essays by one of Downes’s heroes.

At Yale, under the influence of his teacher Al Held, Downes made hard-edged abstract paintings that left him deeply dissatisfied. He felt that the 1960s art world was being hijacked by money and Marxist critics. It was, he writes, ” a decade that could hardly have ended soon enough for me.”

But he began to see a way out. He found himself drawn to such figurative painters as Porter, Alex Katz and Neil Welliver, who had started out as abstractionists, like Downes, and were now flying solo and blind against the prevailing winds. “In this sense they were moderns,” Downes writes, “that is to say, artists who do not share or observe an inherited body of knowledge, skills, or critical precepts, or specified aims. (It was Picasso who, I believe rightly, identified working in solitude and so sharing no goals, as the common denominator of the Post-Impressionists, the founders of modern art.)”

Since they lacked an inherited tradition, these artists turned, naturally, to the past. “Each had to invent his own ‘tradition,’ his own version of art’s aristocracy…” Downes writes. “Therefore the past was something to discover, as much of a frontier as California to a train of covered wagons. It had then the typically American attraction of starting from scratch.” Perhaps only a non-American student of literature and history could have written that last sentence. Or these: “For art, all the arts, are constantly looking to the past for help and inspiration. Indeed the great inventors in music and literature as well as the plastic arts have as a rule been revivalists too… Whenever art begins to feel boxed in, its norms and canons hardened, its criticism regulatory, it might be taken as commonplace that artists look to the past for help.”

Again, Downes’s literary training comes through when he describes what he was trying to do: “I wanted to get rid of style, art, artiness, everything extra. I think this is what Stendahl meant when he said that every morning before writing on The Charterhouse of Parma he would read a few pages of the Civil Code.” Downes cites E.M. Forster as another writer who got at truth by stripping artiness from his prose. After quoting the famous opening sentence of Howards End – “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” – Downes writes that Forster’s technique is “a way of cutting out the pompous, the pretentious, the grandiose, the overweight… It’s a method, in other words, of intellectual accuracy, of emotional accuracy; it says, ‘A little deflation, if you don’t mind please, in the interest of no false statements.'”

In the mid-1960s Downes saw a show by that great painter of the natural world, Charles Burchfield, “whose work combined the vision of the romantic poet with that of the naturalist. It is a vision that reads nature, for whom a wildflower is not a spot of color but a sign, revealing nature’s processes… Following Burchfield, I tried to see the landscape as including legible stories as well as combinations of form and qualities of light.”

By the late 1960s, Downes was poised for his breakthrough. Essentially, he wanted to do what writers do: make art from nature that told stories. But which stories? The answer came to him on a trip to Holland, where he was mesmerized by the narratives that teemed inside the borders of a single small canvas. His notebook reads: “Breughel’s ‘Toren von Babel’ reverses the scheme of the Impressionist and grand manner painters on whom I was reared…a thousand stories in every square inch…it is equivalent to two or three books of The Odyssey…. In every doorway (the largest is an inch and a half high) there are upwards of 20 figures, all doing something…an extensive ship-building industry…a merchant and fighting navy…a building on fire…woodchoppers…many thousands of cattle and sheep…”

Breughel has created an epic by fusing and playing against each other “the contemporary and the mythical, the literary, and the pictorial.” He has also created “a symbol of hubris, of man too big for his boots.”

Downes had arrived at his subject, one worthy of any storyteller: hubris, man too big for his boots. “A modest sense of our place in relation to the whole is the lesson we, with our power to upset it, have yet to learn,” he writes. After a decade of wandering, Downes had found his way.

2. What Realism Means To Me (1981)

The book’s second essay, an attempt to understand what realism is and how it works, draws heavily on the lessons of writers, from Shakespeare to Gibbon, Forster, Chekhov, Stendahl, Dickens and Maupassant, among others. Downes, a reader with catholic tastes, even invokes the Michelin travel guide for New York City, which advises French tourists to stand outside the Wall Street subway station at 4:45 p.m. to witness that daily tsunami of humanity known as le rush hour. This, Downes writes, is precisely what realist writers and artists do: “they look at the common, everyday aspects of life with the fresh, surprised interest and curiosity of the traveler in a foreign country.”

Downes admires Chekhov for believing the realist’s job is not to provide answers but to state questions correctly. “His artistry says, to judge is presumptuous, to generalize is glib,” Downes writes of Chekhov. “What counts is to observe intensely, and when you do so you feel not so much inclined to advocate your opinion.” This brings to mind Henry James’s advice to writers in his essay, The Art of Fiction: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

Chekhov, Downes goes on, “shines floods from all around; he shows events in their context like gold in the matrix. Differentiation between foreground and background disappears, and the real hero turns out to be the texture of life.”

Two writers who fail to live up to this demanding definition of the realist, in Downes’s opinion, are Maupassant and Dickens. Maupassant’s method, Downes writes, is “to sieve, ferociously, till he has isolated one extremely compact, clear-cut action, often exemplifying an abstract quality which in turn sometimes serves for the story’s title – Imprudence or Regret.” Downes then quotes George Orwell’s dismissal of Dickens for his “habit of telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth.”

Downes wanted to paint big truths without sieving, without telling any lies, large or small. But the early figurative paintings he made in Maine – panoramas, cows in a pasture, birch trees, school playing fields – came off as picturesque and conventional, little more than a warm-up for the main event. At the beginning Downes made sketches outdoors, then returned to his studio to finish the paintings. Before long he began to question both his method and his work’s prettiness. As he told an interviewer, “Many of us moved (to Maine) because there were beautiful hills and mountains and cows and streams and so on. But when we build a house we call up the cement-mixer man who comes from a gigantic quarry where they get all the rock to make cement out of and pulverize it and turn it into cement. That is part of your life too. And I wanted to acknowledge that. I didn’t like the idea of landscape being an escapist genre, which it has the tendency to be.”

Downes, who is no fan of the Hudson River School, Ansel Adams or other prettifiers of the natural world, made a breakthrough on three fronts: he left the studio and did his painting onsite; he started painting unconventional subjects that had narrative as well as visual heft; and he stopped relying on traditional linear perspective, which has governed most figurative art since the early 15th century.

Out went the cows and the ponds and the birch trees. In came quarries, landfills, lumber yards, scrap heaps, parking lots, oil fields, wastewater treatment plants, the underbellies of bridges and highway overpasses, anti-spectacular scenes that we usually pass without considering, or even noticing. This subject matter brings to mind another landscape artist, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who makes large-scale images of what he calls “manufactured landscapes” – marble quarries, tire dumps, baled scrap metal, oil fields, and the Third World business of dismantling the First World’s decommissioned oil tankers, an oddly beautiful bit of ugliness known as “shipbreaking.”

As Downes was preparing to give a talk at the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina shortly after his retrospective opened there, I asked him if he gets criticized for his subject matter. He replied: “As for beauty, people say to me, ‘Why do you paint such banal subjects? There’s nothing beautiful there.’ It’s not my job to paint something beautiful; it’s my job to make a beautiful painting of something. And that something is something that intrigues me. Sometimes it intrigues me because it’s very modest, very ordinary or very neglected – but I have to have good feelings about it.”

Most of Downes’s paintings, made in Texas and the industrial Northeast, are devoid of people, but they all tell stories that reveal man’s imprint on the natural world and, in a brilliant reversal, how the natural world responds. The science of optics informs all of this work. Downes wants to capture the raw data of the seen world – not the “corrected” version after our brains have processed what comes through our eyes. “I want to paint exactly the way something is,” he has said. And so his horizons bend, his bridges curve, his power lines wiggle, his skyscrapers tilt. The effect is ravishing, visually and intellectually. You feel like a tourist seeing, truly seeing, the everyday aspects of life for the first time.

We’re back to Breughel, and hubris, and the story of man getting too big for his boots. One Downes painting in the retrospective that tells this story particularly well is called U.S. Scrap Metal Gets Shipped for Reprocessing in Southeast Asia, Jersey City (1994). The painting is 10 feet long and just 16 inches tall, a favored Downes format. In the foreground is a rotting pier that once supported a pipeline that fed oil from tankers to refineries on the shore. Across an estuary, dominating the right half of the canvas, great cones of scrap metal are being loaded onto barges, which will ferry the stuff to anchored ships, which will carry it to Asia, where it will be reborn as refrigerators and automobiles. In the middle distance, slightly to the left of center, a new condominium development rises at water’s edge, the shiny fruit of global commerce. And on the far left, off in the distance, stands the World Trade Center, where the deals are made that move the waste, finance the condos and import the cars. Downes, like Breughel, has created an epic by fusing the contemporary and the mythical, the literary, and the pictorial.

I asked him about the importance of storytelling in his painting. “It’s very important to me,” he said, “and I think it is to everybody’s landscape painting. I think it’s a shame to think of landscape painting as some sort of abstractness. It’s not. It often does tell a story. I seek out those stories I’m intrigued by.”

The World Trade Center also figures, more eerily, in some of Downes’s interiors. A few years before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artists into vacant office spaces in the Twin Towers to paint the heart-stopping views out the windows. The views didn’t interest Downes, but the “strange, empty, desolate air” of the unoccupied offices did. He painted a daytime scene that’s nearly abstract, just receding horizontal slabs of sunlight on the floor a big empty box of a room. He also painted a nighttime scene of an equally desolate space lit by a few stray fluorescent lights. The paintings tell a shrewd story about a pair of soulless, superfluous monstrosities that were never fully occupied and never embraced by critics or the public. The buildings were an aesthetic failure and, perhaps worse for such brazen monuments to capitalism, a commercial failure as well. Their immolation gave them a significance they never possessed when they loomed, trivial and unwanted and unloved, over the New York skyline. It took a visionary like Downes to capture and expose their enormous, empty, desolate air. Which is another way of saying their hubris.

3. The Tenses of Landscape (1996)

The book’s final essay touches on the sense of loss societies feel when they subdue the natural world in the name of progress. It draws on history, particularly the way the ancient Romans dominated and decimated landscapes by building straight roads, by clear-cutting forests to heat their immense bath houses, and by practicing intensive monoculture that exhausted fertile farmland and turned it into malarial swamps. Such short-sighted practices would accelerate during the Industrial Revolution, perhaps climaxing with the brutally efficient eyesore of America’s interstate highway system.

“But with each step forward in the name of progress,” Downes writes, “we seem to feel that there has been an attendant loss, and it often seems to be the role of landscape imagery to assuage this feeling. It is a role assumed by some of the great masters of European landscape painting.”

John Constable, for instance. Downes admires Constable not only for being sensitive to the social upheaval taking place in the English countryside in the early 19th century, but also for the “meteorological accuracy” of the skies in his landscapes. Downes quotes Constable as saying, “We see nothing truly till we understand it.” And he quotes Constable’s brother, a miller, as saying, “When I see a mill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those by other artists.” This sensitivity to the laws of nature and the workings of human history is something Constable, Chekhov, Downes and all realists hold sacred.

Here’s a typical Constable title: Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames – Morning After a Stormy Night. And here’s a typical Downes title: In the High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front (1990). It, too, is 10 feet long and just 16 inches tall. At first glance it’s a desolate panorama of distant power lines, a few wheezing oil rigs and a ditch full of reddish water on a vast platter of Texas scrub. But as with every Downes painting, the closer and longer you look at this blasted, post-industrial landscape, the more you see that it’s telling a story. The detail is astonishing, a reminder that Downes typically visits a site dozens of times over many months while making a picture. He parses the narrative of High Island Oil Field for us:

“Cows, horses and wading birds share this 1,200-acre field with

the pumps, and when strong winds blow in from the north after

the passage off a cold front, the sediments that are pumped up

with the oil and natural gas and which collect in the bottoms of

the ditches, are stirred up so the ditch water looks red. The

perspective down the centre of this painting is the raised

embankment of an old railroad bed. The cows like to congregate

and lie down to rest on this long-infertile ground because it

dries off quickly after a rain; and so they dung it up intensively too.

So, it is gradually beginning to regain fertility and support a sparse

cover of weeds… Here the tenses of a landscape imagery which

represents what is lost or threatened are reversed; we see

decaying industrialization being replaced or reclaimed by the

progress of nature. These weeds interest me more than ancient

redwoods; they are the vanguard of nature’s forces as she wages

her war back on us; perhaps I should say, here nature re-embraces

us, her prodigal sons and daughters. These weeds give the idea of

nature not as a state we’ve lost but as a process with a future.”

It’s an encouraging thought. The hubris Downes witnessed in Breughel’s epic Tower of Babel gave him fodder for his own narratives. But hubris is not invincible, its effects are not irreversible. Nature fights back. Even the most ravaged of landscapes has a future tense. And that may be the surprisingly upbeat story Rackstraw Downes has been telling us, with his paintbrush, all along.

By Bill Morris, Contributing Writer

Visit the Weatherspoon Museum site at: http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu

Look for current exhibitions at www.bettycunninghamgallery.com