In a field outside of Texas City, Texas, two rainwater ditches converge beneath four radio towers and a gossamer web of guy wires. A few miles away at High Island, oil rigs crouch like insects in a muddy tidal plain. These and other scenes near my hometown on the Texas Gulf Coast caught the eye of the British artist Rackstraw Downes in the 1990s. They are part of the onsite paintings series that, since the 1970s, has drawn Downes to garbage barges, pulpmills, attic ductwork, lumber yards, and abandoned housing projects.
“Onsite Paintings” opens with Dunham’s Farm Pond (1972), a landscape with fine passages of reflective water and atmospheric sky. The curator Klaus Ottmann notes that this view of upstate New York “lacks both the spatial peculiarities and the relational perception of later paintings.” Indeed, this work is a kind of transition, showing Downes leaving behind his earlier abstract style and moving with circumspection into representation.
With The Dam at Fairfield (1974), Downes arrives at the centerless, panoramic perspective that characterizes his mature works. The long format evolved, he has written, from a desire to leave out nothing; in this case, to follow the river upstream and down. Man’s imprint on this scene also gives it a sense of narrative. More than simply a view of floating logs on a Maine river, the painting recalls the now defunct logging industry and its role in regional history.
In his 2005 essay “Turning the Head in Empirical Space,”