"GREY & GOLD"

“GREY AND GOLD” 1942 by John Rogers Cox

A copy of this painting hung on our wall when I was growing up. It was an icon signifying my father’s boyhood in South Dakota. (My mother had her own, a photograph of sheep in the hills of Douglas County.) The book cover I’ve scanned here is called “Illusions of Eden, Visions of the American Heartland.” It’s actually a catalogue to accompany a show of art works and was sponsored by Phillip Morris. It’s in three languages: English, Hungarian, and German. I haven’t sat down to the read the book, but I did read the bio of Cox (1915-1990) and the information at AskArt.com, much of which is on the bulletin board section as messages from friends and former students. His work is considered to be “magic realism,” realer than real. His later years were spent in Washington State, in Wenatchee, though he was born in Indiana and taught in Chicago at the Art Institute for a long time. The example of his work on AskArt.com shows he detected a twisted and demonic side to the prairies as well as this orderly but foreboding landscape. Surrealists always seem to have a kind of horror-film side. Or is it the other way around?

This painting won the second medal in the “Artists for Victory” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years later the same painting received the “popular prize” in the exhibition, “Painting in the United States, 1944,” held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. This painting now resides in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I don’t know whether my father knew all this stuff or what he made of it. His connection was just straight from the heart and my mother honored it. Over our fireplace was a “painting” (actually a print with a nice frame) that my parents bought together. I was present for the discussion of whether to buy it, but had no input. I was very small, but was impressed by their seriousness. A swan swims in a pond, looking very much like Laurelhurst Park, which I thought it was until I was grown up. It was to stand for their joy at living in Portland, Oregon, where we often picnicked in this park. My Aunt May and Uncle Doc also had a nice “painting” on their wall that looked very much like the prairie parkland of northern Canada. It was poplars in winter with snow and when the family gathered there, they would discuss whether the light was meant to be winter sun or moonlight. That signalled the beginning of the stories about Manitoba.

I tell all this as an illustration of how art weaves in and out of the lives of even fairly ordinary people -- without any discussion of modernity or political implications or ultimate value. My father’s art form was, of course, photography, which is why I have all these photos of houses to springboard essays off. My mother leaned a bit more to crafts but could do a respectable watercolor. My youngest brother has an MFA in metal-smithing, my other brother is also a decent landscape sketcher, and I dabble around when I have the inclination. My Aunt May filled her house with paintings. This gives me quite a different point of view from the new rocket-propelled art sales, which they say are fueled by hedge-fund millionaires. (See the latest “Vanity Fair” magazine.)

Instead of having a “picture window” out the front of my house so I could look in the “picture windows” of the house across the street (it has two), my picture window looks out the back and up a dirt alley with telephone poles alongside, just like “Grey and Gold” except that there are backyards instead of wheat. However, there is a wheat field at the end of the alley, which ends in a ridge that looks like the end of the earth, just like this painting. (A couple of miles beyond the ridge is the missile silo, aimed I know not where.) The cats spend much of their time on this windowsill since it faces east so it gets a lot of sun. They never tire of the view and neither do I. In fact, I get impatient if someone parks in the alley so that all I’m looking at is some RV’s rump.

We talk a lot in words about writing that has affected us, but art images can be powerful as novels, influencing choices, helping us interpret our environment and lives. Certainly “Grey and Gold” has caused me to see the world a certain way and to welcome the prairies, their electrical potential, their stored wealth. Part of my happiness in living here comes from this “magic realism.”