Redtree Times

Bottle Factory (1994)

Mama’s in the factory
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for food
I’m in the kitchen
With the tombstone blues

–Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues (1965)

A week or two back I featured an early painting of Eldridge Park, an old local amusement park here that had flourished then feel into extreme disrepair then was reborn in recent years. Eldridge Park sits in the shadow of large bottle factory in Elmira Heights. It was Thatcher Glass for most of the time but is now Anchor Glass. This juxtaposition of the skyline formed by the geometry of the factory’s industrial buildings and cooling towers (if that’s what they’re called) against the amusement park and its adjoining green space always fascinated me.

When I was beginning to work with my newly developed watercolor process in 1994, this place and that contrast made for the perfect subject on which to practice in my newly fund style. I did just these three small paintings that I call The Heights Trilogy. They include Bottle Factory, at the top of this page, along with The Heights and Factory View shown at the bottom.

The three, individually and collectively, have been favorites of mine for all these years. I think the general rough appearance of these scenes and the grittiness of the colors in their skies is a perfect fit for the subject. I was working solely on untreated paper so each of the layers of colors that I laid down in the skies absorbed at different rates, each leaving its own residue. The result of this process was not something you could predict which was the attraction of it for me. Specific planning was futile. Every step in these paintings was just reaction to the step that came before.

As do these three pieces. My memory of these pieces back in 1994 was that they made me feel like I could actually be an artist. There was something in these pieces that separated them from a lot of the other work I was doing at that time, much of which felt like practice. Haltingly learning the licks needed to play the song. These pieces felt more complete. Their own song, their time and place. They felt very much like a turning point.

All three are going to be included in the West End Gallery show that opens on October 16. I was going to call this year’s show Silver Jubilee since will be my 25th solo show at the gallery but have changed it to The Jubilee Dance. It seemed to fit a bit better, at least in my mind.

There’s also a song below from Bob Dylan, off his landmark 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. This is Tombstone Blues. Something about it feels right for these paintings.

The Heights (1994)

Factory View (1994)