A reprise of a blog I wrote for the RACA magazine
With a hard thunk the trailer hitch drops on the ball. I slap the hitch lock down and the Spirit of RACA is securely attached to my truck. I am hauling paintings for the next exhibit of my work in Minneapolis and this is the routine.
When he was a young man, my maternal grandfather, Jackson Rudolf Ratcliff, made his living hauling grain and selling farm machinery. I imagine him pulling trailers, loading trucks, moving stuff down gravel roads past the rows of fields. Rudy would look at the green and dream his American dream. I haul my art around, down gravel roads past rows of fields. Each time I load up my truck or my trailer, I think of my Grandfather driving trucks pulling trailers through the Midwest.
I watch the cycles of farming. The tilling, planting, tending, the harvest; all in a fixed pattern tied to the rhythms of nature. As the years go by, I sense a similar rhythm in my studio work. The winter has me hunkered down, focusing on death. The spring brings green and growth, expansion and life. Summer has a languid Italian feel, and then fall dries out, getting crackly.Our farm neighbors know I make paintings. They see me out in the yard or walking around the roads looking at things. I draw or paint outside and I like to imagine that they think I am odd. Yet probably they are just thinking, “look at him paint.” Maybe being an artist in the country has a bland normalcy—I like that. They see me load my paintings. I see them, their pickups loaded with bags of grain, refilling their planters. They plant their seeds. Perched at the edge of my window, I witness long green lines emerge from the dark earth. Initially thin and faint, they’ll soon bellow green, fecund, loamy and wet. I know that these seeds are quite calculated, the products of selective breeding and chemistry. But the green—the green has always been there. The color of spring green is luminous and infinite. It is a color that exists in dreams and the hallucinations of the mystics. It is the color of the sacred robe. In the green of spring—that vibrant and unnatural green, soft and harsh, a color of immense promise—we are all compromised.Always there is a bit of release when I load up the trailer with my labors from the past six months. I am sending my work out into the world. Are my paintings seeds? Or are my paintings the plants? Maybe they are the fruit. Or maybe they are the death before the spring. I don’t know. I do know that, like the green specks pushing through the mud, they have to be made.
The wind tosses some dust into the air. My grandfather, long gone, hauled grain and farm machinery. I haul art. Our gravel roads are the same. We both ponder a past rich with memory. We both consider a future full of hope and love. The cycles of RACA continue.
That’s my Gramps hauling some sort of farm implement