"Field" - Class October 24th

My drawing this week is of the Tahquitz River in Palm Springs. I used a snapshot that I took this summer (below) as a reference. My partner and I had just arrived that day in Palm Springs from Boston. We were days away from beginning our 700 mile hike north. After stopping for some Mexican food we walked with our 30 pound packs in about 95 degree dry heat from the airport about five miles to the Vagabond Inn, where we stayed that night. The next day we walked from the motel to the aerial tramway that we would take up into the San Jacinto mountains. It was unexpected to see this dry riverbed at this point in the trip. We had been walking through neighborhoods and then, unexpectedly, the landscape sort of opened up and we came across it.

I knew I wanted to draw something related to Palm Springs after we looked at the painting by Albert York in class last week of the palm tree. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time but I think that what I like so much about the painting is how difficult it is to see a palm tree beyond it just reminding you of what it feels like to hang out at the beach. This painting reminds me what it felt like to arrive in Palm Springs that first day. I had left Boston and it felt like true freedom. And it wasn't going to be short-lived; I had found my way back home.

The word for this week is "field." Tony shared an essay by John Berger with the same name from a book called About Looking published in 1980. The essay describes the way a field looks, and also how it feels to look at a field. I bolded the parts that I especially like.

From the beginning of the essay:

"Shelf of field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky, through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop."

From the end of the essay:

"You relate the events which you have seen and are still being to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events you have seen primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events which are taking place within it...Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life."