Leland Iron Works Artist Residency: The Cowboy Way
By: Linda Hutchins, Artist in Resident April ‘16
The first week is about establishing routines - for space and time and how I use them. I worry about how much time I’m taking to clean and organize and domesticate my space. I had thought I would escape that here. Instead, I’m reminded that a certain sense of cleanliness and organization is in my nature, part of my creative process.
The second week is about testing my artistic ideas and intentions and establishing the direction I will take with them. I develop a comfortable rhythm that accommodates the animals and insects, the cold water, and the swings in temperature and light. I try to make the most of them: yoga and breakfast in the morning sun on the east porch, lunch and dinner on the west side under the tall trees.
Depending on the weather, I draw inside using the textures and sounds of the classroom wall, or outside on the resonant steel wall next to Lee’s scrap pile. Occasionally, I experience an urge to check email in that momentary lapse of focus that Gigi writes about. What did we do in those moments, before there was email? Eat. Chat. Hang out with others whose focus had similarly lapsed. Nap!
When I wake it is evening. Somewhere between the rosy sunset and the blue sky is a pale celadon green.
The third week, stretching to ten days, is the meat of the residency. I produce some coherent results, push my ideas further, and see how far I can take them. For me, the real value of any residency is the ability to tackle some open-ended problem that requires dedicated time away from daily commitments. The project is defined, isolated, planned and prepared for. Supplies are chosen and the time and place are set. One of the biggest challenges - to be clear about the task at hand, to isolate it and frame it and bring it into focus - is already accomplished before the residency begins.
It helps to be in a makeshift place where nothing is given or pre-determined. No former projects, finished or unfinished, no books or equipment or materials weigh on me and keep me from getting in the zone. Nothing other than what I selected to bring specifically for this month. The raw space is a blank slate where any move I make is an improvement and I have no worries about messing things up.
Importantly, I’m not responsible for maintenance. The leaky roof is someone else’s problem, the mice are someone else’s problem, the composting toilet is someone else’s problem. I work around them, and I do basic chores - cooking, cleaning - but they don’t weigh on me and take me out of the zone.
When I first visited Leland Iron Works, I was struck by the textural richness in evidence everywhere, especially in the old machine shed. Long ago, Lee and Bonnie paneled the walls there in a geometric arrangement of boards from an old barn. A zig-zagging pattern of gaps has opened between the wide planks, and a circular pattern of saw kerfs criss-crosses their weathered grain. At a time when the world is being smoothed and glossed over, homogenized, unified, and digitized, when the glossy and glassy are everywhere seductive and soporific, my focus here is to reclaim texture and difference. Not to force it but to find it, to touch it, to record that touch, and to celebrate it in my drawings.
A steady rain makes me skip yoga one morning but still I sit out under the overhang on the east porch, bundled in my long johns, down vest, and wool hat. I want to make more outdoor texture drawings but the rain won’t allow it today. Instead, I watch two herons hunt in the pasture next door. In the distance, one strikes and swallows.
“A frog or a vole,” Lee says later. “They roost communally and hunt territorially.”
A hummingbird swoops from the evergreen overhead, close enough to amaze me with the motor of its wings. Now the second heron has success. No wonder the frogs and voles are so prolific - they have to be!
In this place, it becomes clear that ethical relations begin with the land and the animals that live on it. Lee says, “They were here first.” A happy coexistence requires respect and tolerance and wise, moderate, even minimal, shared use of resources. Around me, Lee’s sculptures give the trees character and relate them to us. We all three - humans, sculpture, trees - keep company. I pause to reflect on all that Lee and his family have created, and to express my appreciation for the opportunity to live and work here for this month. In spite of the challenges, there’s a luxury to living as a guest here, drinking in the richness of the place without the burden of its upkeep.
Midway through my residency, I reach a sense of clarity around the importance of difference and contrast. Modern life appears to me as a steady push toward sameness that deprives us of natural highs and lows. The highs are so much higher because of their distance from the lows. The samenesses I think about include central heating and air conditioning, municipal water, refrigeration, suburbia, chain stores, and national newspapers. The desire for comfort and convenience deprives us of so much experience, so much sensation. Perhaps initially the desire is motivated by fear - fear of the other, fear of pain, fear of the unknown. But I think it has become a laziness, a misguided attempt to enjoy more of the highs without suffering the lows. But it’s not possible. The highs diminish without the contrast of the lows.
I’m also aware of differences between this individual residency and the group residencies I’ve experienced alongside other artists at Caldera. Here I develop a personal relationship with the benefactors who have also developed personal relationships with the previous residents. We get to know each other, more than I expect, and they unavoidably see me in comparison with others. My desire to please them influences my behavior and the work I do in residence. There, I am together with other artists. We interact as much or as little as we want, without consequence from the benefactors who I never see. There, my relationships with the administrator and caretaker are professional, not personal. Neither better nor worse; different.
A similar summing up fills my final days. I attempt to reach closure. Failing that, I take steps toward continuing work in my own studio. Now that my basic strategy, materials, and technique have evolved, the completion of a body of work is a matter of time. That will be possible, though harder, at home.
I watch the heron in the horse pasture every morning now. Has she been there all along, while it’s taken me the month to notice? What more might I notice if I stayed longer? If I lived here, what would I stop noticing, take for granted, become accustomed and inured to?
On my last day, I find myself eating little bits of oatmeal that spill onto the counter where I know the mice have scampered.
“The cowboy way,” Lee would say.
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