As part of Glasstire’s partnership with Art21, the organization known for producing award-winning documentary films about the lives and work of some of the world’s best-known contemporary artists, we’ll be co-publishing a small selection of films highlighting artists who are either based in Texas or have a significant connection to the state.
Production still from the “Art in the Twenty-First Century” Season 6 episode, “Balance.” © Art21, Inc. 2012
Having painted in small-town Maine and downtown Manhattan, British-born artist Rackstraw Downes travels through rural Texas in search of new landscapes to inspire his panoramic paintings which explore the quandaries of representing the three-dimensional world in two dimensions.
“I was driving across the landscape and there was this endlessness in Texas. There’s almost nothing. It is deserts and there’s just a little bit of scrubby vegetation here and there. Then suddenly in the middle of all this emptiness were these pink mountains around the edge of it. Every direction there were these hills. Perched around in this empty landscape were these tiny little structures made out of pipe with corrugated roofs on them. Because in the desert, shade is the most priceless thing you can get, shade and water. “
Rackstraw Downes was born in Kent, England in 1939. Often described as a realist painter, Downes prefers not to use that term. He views the act of seeing and the art of representation as culturally taught, with different cultures accepting different delineations of the world as realistic. He does not think of himself as a landscape painter, but as a painter of his surroundings—his environment. Often painted in a panoramic format, Downes’s images evince careful attention to details as well as to broad expanses of their surroundings.
Watch the film below. You can see this and other films on Art21’s website and on their YouTube channel.
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