 |
I love the old westerns, partly because their world is so straightforward. I appreciate more and more the simplified environments, no-nonsense participants, sparse dialogue, clear objectives and black and white situations in an age today where everything seems intentionally multifaceted, overcomplicated and overwrought. I envy the wide open settings - negative space to wander, to see what’s coming, and to let whatever it is fully play out. It is welcome escapism.
With Desde Agua Caliente, imaginado I had no bigger objective than to render a particular view I wanted to see and then invite some other influences in to skew it. It does have its origin in a film western, the explanation of which I decided to share below. If you want to take this one at face value without the taint of context (what I usually advise), skip the next couple of paragraphs.
There is a brief scene in For A Few Dollars More where Clint Eastwood’s man-with-no-name character (Manco in this film) is put to a test by a bandit chief (Gian Maria Volonte’s Indio) whose gang he recently infiltrated. Manco is told to ride into a dangerous town alone so they can see how he can handle himself. The discussion is brief and we get a pointed shot of the approach to the town, called Agua Caliente. The composition there was nothing special but I do like the dirt road, lined thickly by century plants and winding back and forth uphill. It is the typical inhospitable spaghetti western setting. Desde Agua Caliente shows the reverse angle, with artistic license, from the very top of the hill. I don’t know why I spent the time painting this other than I like the meandering path and the exotic feel of the setting.
In the painting the road winds downhill further and more exaggerated than it does uphill in the movie. The real-life pueblo blanco where they shot the scene is called Los Albericoques so I had to drop some small apricot trees in the middle distance. The riders are silhouetted in the center of the layout at the base of the hill about a couple hundred yards away. Beyond them is an expanse of imagined landscape - receding foothills, seacoast (there always has to be a shoreline these days), and distant mountains under a De Chirico sky. I had remembered a road stop on a trip to California with my parents when I was probably about 5, somewhere on a high altitude road where you could see for many miles. I remember the distant colors and banding that seemed unreal and extending forever, and I tried to reflect a little of that in the distance where the land and water start to run together.
Sometimes I don’t have much rhyme or reason behind what gets on a canvas, and sometimes these things are nothing more than mashups of images or ideas I was interested in, which reminds me of a line from another fine classic, Billy Madison. At some point in kindergarten Billy is coloring and tells the teacher he drew a blue duck because he never saw a blue duck before and wanted to see one. Desde Agua Caliente, imaginado was my blue duck for that week.
