The
purpose of a wall decoration is to enhance the architecture of
a building. It should never ignore nor depreciate it in any
way. Moreover the artist should never deny the existence of
walls but always think of them as solid, as flat and as
absolute as they are. He should give them a special quality
and beauty of their own, making them live in their own right
and in terms of the artist's imagination.
My job in the case of the Rotunda of The Museum in Lubbock was
to draw the figures on a proper scale to fit a rather long
frieze; one in fact which occupies sixteen panels, each panel
approximately seven feet wide and twelve feet high; the panels
forming a sixteen sided room. In order to decorate this room I
felt it necessary to consider very carefully the height of the
continuous horizon line. I finally hit upon what seemed to be
the optimum height at four feet above the marble wainscote
which in turn is four feet above the floor. Thus, in having a
wide horizon I could give great scope to the vast South Plains
landscape, a pet subject of mine for many years. In that
landscape I have set the figures, buildings, vehicles, and, I
hope, the color, the life and the weather which is so
characteristic to this area. Towards the front of the frieze
are the full length figures: portraits of early frontier
people. These people do not go so very far back in time
because Lubbock is (in 1954) only sixty-three years old. The
lives of the persons portrayed overlap my own. This brings me
to a point of great importance. All my painting, particularly
this mural in Lubbock, is treated in an autobiographical
sense. To explain and amplify this I would like to say that
the many individual objects in the mural are items I have
either owned myself, or seen and often painted, or wanted to
paint. In instances of non-movable objects, such as the
cottonwood tree, I have gone to the spot to study and draw the
subject. There is a definite link between my own past and many
of the things in the mural, items which have a nostalgic
appeal to me as a person.
If a similar commissiOn Should be offered me from some other
part of the country, Alaska for instance, I would be reluctant
to accept it, lest my treatment be synthetic.
All this adds up to the fact that I am a regionalist. For
better or for worse that is what I must be, because my world
centers in the Southwest ""d it does not extend very
far "way. I find in it enough material to delight and
inspire me not for one lifetime but for several. So the
project in Lubbock was ideal. It was only a stone's throw from
where I was raised and a part of my own environment. It i, the
largest job I have ever had; however, size in itself means
little. But in it I believe I have kept the standard as high
as in any other mural I have ever done.
Anyone familiar with fresco techniques knows that you paint in
feverish haste and with terrific concentration. You strain
yourself and all Your resources during the moment of
availability of the plaster. Time slips away, the plaster
dries, and corrections are difficult. Unless the area is
completely Scraped away and redone, only minor retouching is
possible. Knowing this the painter must feel absolute
dedication to, and passion for, his task while the plaster is
wet.
This limitation, occasioned by the behavior of the plaster, is
the advantage and the challenge of fresco. The execution must
be swift and sure. The preparation requires a great deal of
schooling, a vast amount of pre-thought, and extensive
consideration of the problems Presented by the walls. I spent
four years on the Lubbock mural. (only sixteen weeks was I
actually Painting - an average of one panel a week -- but
untold, uncounted hours were spent thinking about it,
considering the decorative problems, design, arrangement, and
historical background. Then there was the matter of selection,
what to include and what to eliminate, because if we included
everything of interest the painting would begin to look like a
mail order catalogue. There would have been no design, no
rhythm, no pattern. It would have been a hodgepodge of many
fascinating things. We had to eliminate, but we did include
such things as horses, windmills, buggies, wagons, claim
shacks, early churches, school houses, children, cowboys,
freighters, farmers and range plants.
I have always been fascinated by our Southwestern botany and
by Nature's adaptability of it. Nature has made her plants fit
our difficult environment and our country has become her
proving ground, where she constantly experiments with plant
life. So we have included some of our characteristic plants,
such as the mesquite and the cottonwood, as well as smaller
plants.
One of the problems of this project was to arrange the figures
over the doorways, because each of these panels is allotted to
a certain person. So up over the four doorways we had to place
these figures and prevent them from appearing about to fall
off or even bothered with the precariousness of their
position. We have a doctor with a horse and buggy, a lawyer,
an editor and a school master, all above doorways. So we
introduced balconies and mesas into the design. Then we had to
incorporate the louvers of the heat ducts into the pattern.
All of these things and many others made up the problems of
the mural.
The mural has its own perspective, a sort of never-never land
of perspective and of life. It should be viewed with somewhat
the same feeling and open-mindedness as one would a ballet or
an opera. It should not be viewed with the ideas of complete
realism and literalness, because we have constantly violated
the laws of realism for the more important laws of design. We
have tried to adapt our pattern, our thoughts and our ideas to
the existing architecture. For instance, we have an oil well,
a doctor driving away from a claim shack late at night, and
some men beside a campfire, all within a few feet of each
other, but by what we hope is the result of manipulation of
color values and juxtaposition of lines, we have made you
consider it as a dream-like sequence and not necessarily
incongruous. Each scene is a world within itself, and that is
the way it should be viewed.
The viewer with a completely realistic and literal mind is
going to be constantly baffled. I invite him to set aside his
literalness and to look at the painting in the spirit of a
dream. Even though the objects are easily recognizable, and
there is nothing that a five-year-old child cannot get the
drift of, the literal minded viewer will find items out of
proportion in size
and quantity to what they are in reality. There will be those
who will say I put too much water in the irrigation ditch and
in the field. I know this because I have worked with
irrigation all my life and still do on my farm, but in the
mural I wanted the reflection of the sky in the water.
Finally, and I hope I speak with confidence, I have put much
in the mural which should remind the viewer of his own
experiences, as it reminds me of mine, for instance the great
thunderstorm boiling up over the Plains, such as you see only
in the Southwest. Other places have thunderstorms, but you do
not see this wonderful, miraculous sweep of rain in the
distance when you yourself are as dry as dust. Once I counted
twenty rainstorms around me yet it was perfectly dry where I
stood. These are eminently paintable subjects: the mystery and
miracle of rainwater in a dry country, the rain itself, or
well water, or any kind of water. These are things I have put
into the mural in an effort to make people feel as I do the
great miracle of human existence -- how supremely wonderful it
is that we are alive on this planet, a tiny portion of the
infinite galaxies, mysterious and forever challenging. If I
have managed to get a little of that feeling into the Lubbock
mural, I am happy.