I spent last week in Utah, climbing and roaming around the desert in the middle of nowhere. These posts are about the things I saw, the places I climbed, and sometimes, the drawings I made. Previous day’s journeys include climbing to Angel’s Landing, weaving through Devil’s Garden, threading the Needles to Druid Arch, and Walking through the Fiery Furnace. This post is the conclusion.
From Friday, June 5
I packed up camp this morning. After today’s hike, I would head back home.
I had one more stop to make before I left, the Island in the Sky.
Island in the Sky is the northern district of Canyonlands National Park. It is named for the plateau that extends over most of the district, a thousand feet above the surrounding desert.
I hiked down, then back up, that plateau today. 1,300 feet, from top to bottom.
I went to upheaval dome. It is a large depression at the end of the large plateau that is either caused by salts dissolving under the rock, or by a meteor. I like to think that it was the meteor. Space is more interesting than salt.
I hiked the Syncline trail. It follows the plateau around the crater on the southeast side, then climbs down the mountain and circles the outer ridge of rock that surrounds the crater (or something like that). Then it climbs back up the mountain.
The trail had a stark warning: this was a difficult trail, but I eat difficult trails for breakfast. I wasn’t concerned.
The view down the mountain. The valley below is all the way down, in the shadow of the rock wall.
The first half mile or so was flat, and an easy walk. Then I hit the descent.
I started weaving and moving my way down a rocky hill. After several hundreds of feet of descent, I came to a landing. I had a magnifiscent view of a valley extending out before me. I also had a view of the next 500 or so feet of descent in front of me. I got to work.
The climb down was steep, but it was early, and the morning sun hadn’t risen enough to beat down on me, I could climb in the shade of the mountain for most of the descent.
Eventually I reached bottom, and followed a canyon bottom for the next few miles. There was a touch of water in places, and some of the areas I walked through were quite lush with vegetation. Much more lush than I expected from the desert.
As I walked I started to think about my trip. I knew that I was hitting the road back to California when I got back to my truck — this was my last day in the desert.
The thing that I kept coming back to was that not much happened on this trip. I ate, slept, hiked, and drew. I snuck in a little reading in there, but not much. I didn’t have any great realizations, no spiritual discovery, not much of anything.
What I had was a blank slate. No requirements other than finding a campground and making sure I replaced the ice in my cooler every couple days. No agenda other than to move at my own pace and do what I had time to do.
In a certain way, the entire trip felt as if it was a long hike. Not a hike to any destination, but a process. A hike done not to go somewhere and see something, but a hike done to move through the world and feel the earth against my feet.
The last hike of my trip mirrored the trip itself. My last hike didn’t take me to a destination, like Angel’s Landing, or Druid Arch, or Devil’s Garden, or to the partition. It was a loop. I went from the top of a rock, to the bottom of the rock. I walked around the rock in a valley, then back up the rock. There was no destination or site to see, I went on this hike just to hike.
I can see clearly now, this was the reason for this trip. I didn’t go to find anything, to see anything, or to do anything. I was there merely to be there, and to exist out there for a short time.
There was no finding or discovery needed. Only doing was needed.
In my day-to-day life, I fixate on results, on destinations, on achievements. I never fixate on process. While I was hiking this loop, I could see that life is process.
Process can not be escaped, it can only be relaxed into, and embraced.
Sometimes the process will be taxing. In fact, I think that anything truly magnificent requires difficult work.
I came to the end of the valley and started to climb the mountain back up to the plateau. I climbed in the shade, which wasn’t a testament to how early it was, but rather how steep the canyon walls were. It started easy, and quickly became harder.
I had to pull myself over rocks, climb through narrow gaps, and push myself ever upwards.
The trail wasn’t always well marked, I had to blindly procede in a direction, trusting I would find the marker again to indicate the right path.
Sometimes I lost the trail completely. I had to track back to find my way again.
Sometimes, as I climbed, I had to turn down the hill, reversing my progress, to get around a large rock that I wouldn’t other wise be able to climb over.
By the time I pulled myself out of the valley, the sun was beating down on me, I was tired, and I didn’t have much water left. I reached a plateau, higher up than before, well above the desert floor. After a short distance, I found that this plateau was only a small ways up, I still had more mountain to climb.
The only course I had was to keep climbing. I put myself down into the desert, and I had to climb my way back up the mountain. At times I looked up to see how much further I had to go, other times I focused on my steps, one after the other, making sure my feet were in the right place.
I was worn out. I slipped more on this last climb than in all the other hikes I had done. I was tired, and I was thirsty.
Eventually, one foot after the other, I made it to the top. I pushed my way along the plateau back to the head of the trail.
The loop brought me right back to where I had started, tired, thirsty, hungry, this trail chewed me up.
I made to the top though, just like I knew I would.
I got in my truck, and drove home.
The view from the top of the mountain. Keep climbing.
When you find yourself on a mountain, keep climbing. That is the only way to reach the top.
.
, to figure this out.)
, sat on my window sill by the fire escape, smoked a cigarette, and read.
, however. It is a much older recording, but the performance is outstanding. I have this recording on vinyl, I haven’t gotten the remastered CD yet, but reviews I have read seem to indicate the remaster is quite good. It sounds phenomenal on vinyl. If you want to hear the 9th, I like 
. I’ve also got Leonard Bernstein’s recording of the 9th, but it doesn’t seem to have the urgency that I like so much in Boulez’s recording.
A Short and Irreverent Art History, Part 2
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010Art History is a mess of people, pictures, and strange “isms”. Some of it looks great, some of it… can be harder to appreciate. I’ve got my own take on what Art History is about, and what was important. If you haven’t read my irreverent history of art up to impressionism, You should read it first, because this picks up where that ends.
Clicking on the links below will launch a pop-over image, without taking you away from the page. Hover over the image for an informational caption, click next to the image to make the image go away.
Let’s continue the story.
…and then a bunch of upstart impressionists made all other art styles irrelevant with their sloppy smears of paint on canvas. Monet’s painting of a woman out for a walk may seem downright tame and old school today, but at the time, it was new and original.
The revolution of the impressionists is that they allowed the paint to be seen. The impressionists didn’t smooth out each brush stroke out and blend every color like artists had for (hundreds of) years before. You could see every dab of paint, and every brushstroke, on the canvas.
These small pebbles of change started the avalanche that is Modern Art, an avalanche that would end with subject matter indistinguishable from the materials used to make the art.
[A quick note about the term Modern Art - it can refer to both the time frame (1865-1950), or the styles developed in that time frame (impressionism to abstract expressionism). These art styles followed a certain progression, and explored a certain philosophy of art, which reached a culmination in the 1940s and 1950s. For better or worse.]
Impressionism made the rounds for a decade or two, until some folks started to expand on this “painterly” thing. The result was the keenly named post-impressionism, which features artistic super stars like Cezanne, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and Van Gogh.
In the early 1900’s, this Spanish guy named Picasso made a painting of some women, and depicted them out of a bunch of flat, angular shapes. The art world was rocked, and cubism was invented by Picasso, along with his buddy Braques. Picasso became super famous, even though he was still alive.
After cubism rocked everybody’s socks off, a bunch of other folks developed a bunch of “isms”: suprematism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, DaDa, etc. These were all just a bunch of new weird ways to paint things, but they all had one thing in common: the paint, and how it could be used to depict things, became far more important and interesting than the actual subject matter. (Except DaDa and surrealism, which were just weird)
This is the time when artists depicted things very abstractly, and more and more, paintings became pure combinations of shape and color, and did not depict anything “real”.
This culminated in Abstract Expressionism. External subject matter was gone completely, the subject of the paintings was the paint itself. This is the era when Hans Hofman smeared paint on his canvas with his palette knife, Jackson Pollock danced around his canvases and flung paint on them, and Mark Rothko painted cloudy squares of color on his canvas.
This is what Modern Art is all about – art became less and less about the subject matter, and more and more about how the materials were used to depict the subject matter. Eventually, subject matter disappeared entirely.
This series continues tomorrow, I will talk about what Modern Art means, and how it was just a dead end road.
Tags: abstract, art history, Impressionism, modern art
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