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| Marci and I stand next to Lloyd's painting, 54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50 at Valley House Gallery |
Travel Date: September 11, 2018
It had rained. We dropped down the wet black asphalt drive to Valley House Gallery tucked deep in woods rattling with the sound of cicada by the banks of a slow-moving black-water creek. Great trees arched over the drive and the noise from the outside world of the city was all but hushed by the all-absorbing greenery alive with insect and bird song. Only the sound of our car door slamming and the distant hum of a weed-eater broke the natural reverie.
As we crossed the wet parking lot, my eyes took in wet leaves clinging to the still damp pavement. Although the leaves were not yet gold, and there were no puddles left, the scene reminded me of one of my brother's paintings, S & K Dairy Cup, Hoagland, Ohio, US 50, a painting of a small town drive-in on a wet fall day. In it, low clouds hang on the horizon. There is an electrical pole and a sign for a school by a green sports field. There is a golden tree that has lost half of its leaves to the soggy weather and a green tree next to it that has been more determined to hang on to its summer load. And then there is the drive-in: classic American red, white and blue; large plate-glass windows; a tall, stainless steel soft-serve machine inside. You get the picture (and if you don't--there it is below). Then there's the obsidian-slick black pavement out front littered with wet fall leaves. It's so real, you can almost feel the mist in the air and hear the distant swish of tires breaking water on the highway. The image transports you. You're now in slow, rainy-day heaven. The type of day that makes you just want to sit in your car in an otherwise empty parking lot as you read a book and occasionally look up from the page to watch beads of water break into twisting rivulets that stretch and distort the world outside. It's the type of day that you're there but not really there, always moments away from putting your book down in the passenger seat and sliding into a deep sleep only to be woken-up by the sound of a distant semi-truck putting on its Jake brakes.
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| S & K Dairy Cup, Hoagland, Ohio, US Highway 50, acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2018 |
I was not with Lloyd when he photographed the S & K Dairy Cup. I did not go along on that epic trip across Highway 50 to the east coast. Around 1988 our lives started to diverge. Although we now live less than a city-block's distance away from each other, and see each other almost daily, that has not changed. We each have our own lives now. However, that was not true back in the mid-eighties. Family-wise, there was just us living in a metropolitan area of three million people. Almost every journey we took, we took together, and so, although I was not in this particular wet parking lot, there are so many similar scenes I was there for, that I might as well have been.
Steamy drives east towards the big thicket were frequent, as were cold, winter drives headed north in the vein hopes of finding snow. Once, on Christmas day, instead of finding snow, we found the Talemena Mountains of Oklahoma glazed with ice after dark. Oh that was stunning. And along the way, so often, there'd be a street scene of a convenient store, a drive-in, or a cafe reflected in a wet highway. A 7-11 in Gainsville, Texas was one such place. Roads and rainy days form entire albums in my recollections of life with Lloyd. The swoosh. That slow slightly depressing serenity of low clouds dragging across deep green horizons. A cup of coffee. A doughnut or a Dr. Pepper. Time and distance. Water on the windshield.
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| Frisch's Big Boy, Milford, Ohio, US Highway 50, acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2018 |
This particular great, gray day, however, was spent with Marci, and we were off to see art, starting with Lloyd's one-man show, Cross Country on Highway 50, at Valley House Gallery. We walked into that quiet, sacred interior that I love so much, where your only obligation at the moment is to truly see. Well, usually. This time we had barely started looking around when a woman came out from the other room, "You must be Lloyd's brother." Lloyd must have let her know we were coming. And so began the introductions. Thank goodness Marci was beside me. She is SO MUCH better at that social stuff than I am. I am never at ease around others beyond family and a few very close friends, but I'm more at ease being beside someone at ease than I am by myself facing the voice inside my head that screams Get out of here now! Get in a car. Go find a wet, empty parking lot on a rainy day and sit in a mild stupor watching the world bend and stretch through runs of water. And if you can't find that, just find any place where you can be anonymous.
The woman was Cheryl Vogel, the co-owner of the gallery, and not exactly a stranger. But it had been a long time, a very long time, and I'd only met her a half-dozen times. Her and her husband had taken Lloyd and I out to dinner once--I remember that--but if I saw her in a mall I'd walk right on by with no clue that I'd just passed somebody I knew. She was, however, incredibly nice, and gave us a personal tour, sharing stories about Lloyd. Not surprising some of those stories had to do with his shyness. Both of us once struggled greatly with it. I still do at times. He's either conquered it, or has created an effective mask to hide it. I see him in public these days and think, Is that my brother? Don't get me wrong; he's no extrovert. But, he seems at ease with himself and the world around him. That was definitely not the case back in the 1980s when Valley House Gallery signed him up as one of their artists.
Cheryl walked us around and took our picture next to 54 Sky Panels from Holden to Sevier Lake, Utah, US Highway 50, the largest piece in the show. And then she left us to wander and look, as would have been our privilege at any museum.
Ultimately, the true impact of any good museum or gallery is that it allows you to forget yourself for a while as you become absorbed into the images before you--almost literally pulled into the lines, colors, and textures.
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| Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50, acrylic painting by Lloyd Brown 2014 |
And so we were pulled into the work of my brother. Lloyd plays around a lot with line, form, surface, texture and perception. He spent some of his career creating mixed-media three-dimensional dioramas to enhance the sense of space in his work. In the process, he discovered it wasn't the literal, physical dimensions within the diorama that created the sense of space, but rather getting light and visual weight right. The sky has to feel lighter than the ground. The detail on a distance mountain has to be there--our eyes pick it up in real life--but it has to feel softer than gravel at your feet. So, he spends a lot of time not just getting the form and color of the images right, but also getting the weight and surface light right. Because of this, in my opinion, he has surpassed Edward Hopper in capturing America. Hopper operates on simplification, abstraction, archetype. He gives you enough to recognize a similar scene in your own life, and your mind fills in the rest with emotional connection. It's mighty powerful. But Lloyd gives you surface-weight and light in such exquisite detail the picture plane all but disappears. It feels like you can walk right into what you're viewing regardless of scale. The picture above, Amtrak, a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50 is a perfect example of this illusion. The piece sits on a shelf like an open book, and so the left panel literally comes forward in space towards the viewer, while the train appears to continue back towards the horizon, in the process sucking the observer into the scene.
Basically, Lloyd has become such an effective painter that the surface he paints on no longer matters. He could paint a scene of a straight Kansas highway on a 50 gallon oil drum, and despite the obvious curvature of the the "canvas" contradicting reality, you, the viewer, would still be able to walk on down that highway towards some distant horizon.
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| Steve Calls Home on the Loneliest Phone in America, US Highway 50, Nevada, multimedia by Lloyd Brown 2014-2017 |
Although I think Cheryl truly tried to leave us alone so that we could just spend time with Lloyd's paintings, she couldn't resist popping in again as we viewed the painting above, one of my personal favorites, Steve Calls Home on the Loneliest Phone in America, US Highway 50, Nevada. Lloyd and I had planned to create a book about Highway 50 from central Utah to Reno, a route we traveled often when we were younger, going back and forth between our mom's home in Utah and our dad's home in Reno. Lloyd succeeded on his part of the project; I failed on mine, and the book was never completed. The written part was a dialogue between our one-week trip across Nevada and my then current life as a teacher on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. And so when Marci and I moved, so much happened so quickly, the piece seemed to just get bogged down in long runs of exposition in a vein attempt to explain what was going on in my then current life. In the process, the writing lost its immediacy, and with that, I lost the will to write. Perhaps, that is why I'm so determined to finish this book. I want to complete some written record of at least one journey that I've taken in this life before I die. The road, thanks to both my father and Lloyd, is a big chunk of who I am today. There is no I without the highway.
After viewing Lloyd's show and purchasing several copies of his catalog, Marci and I wandered around the lush gardens surrounding the gallery and the Vogel's home. It's such an amazing space. And the day was fantastic. Cool, moist and driven by bird song. It was hard to leave, but, of course we did, because that is part of what you do when you travel--you leave behind what drew you to that space in the first place. Ultimately, that only intensifies the experience. We travel so we can leave behind something that matters deeply to us so that we can pine for it years afterwards.
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| The grounds at Valley House Gallery, September 11, 2018 |
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