Above the Valley (2024) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson¹

Transfixed by the growing swarm of reports of climate collapse, global war, nuclear arming, violent factionalism, capitalist greed, and my own nation’s deep complicity,² I again seek refuge in nature, the hills above my town. In times past, artists and poets similarly sought refuge in the far outback, the distant places, the far edges of the city. Yet when I try to do so I find it, however remote, strongly askew. I seek escape, yet I hear the earth’s spinning on a now-changing axis. I hear its growing moan. While abstraction helps articulate central truths, I seek a voice more expressive of the not-me, some song the earth now sings. How can I better speak to these looming changes, outside and within, in my writing and my artwork?

 

Singing a New Key

I enter again my ancestral, family land, avoiding the public parking area on the eastern side, and take the more direct route from the south. Leaving my car at the foot of the hill, I climb the steep fire road up to the top of the ridge. It has been months since I’ve returned, and I tire more easily. Yet the most recent threat of the disastrous Bridge Fire calls me back to reconnect.

This southern, direct approach taxes muscles and lungs, but gets me to the rolling top land—the scattered pines and grove of eucalyptus planted by my family generations ago. I’m also freed from most of the now too-intrusive visitors, who do not wish to walk this far. Since the city bought the land from developers, and set it aside as a wilderness park a decade or so ago, and since the L.A. hiking buffs advertised its proximity and rough beauty on social media, the place now teems with hikers, their bikes, dogs, and mounting litter and trash. Like its overflowing litter bins, the Pasture strains its seams from over-use and over-love.

As I stop to rest in a patch of rare shade, and wait for the familiar sense of calm assurance of this formerly wild place to return, I sense something amiss. The leaves seem dryer, more dusty and frail than is usual even for this Southern California, early October heat. Deer and bobcats remain hidden. The birds seem more frantic. The place reflects a tiredness beyond me, perhaps worn from conflicted attention. Even in the midday glare, some light seems to be fading.

Almost a decade ago I wrote of this place, and of my connection to it. Published by the local historical society, my book included archived newspaper clippings, photos, abstract paintings, prose memoir, and poetry.³ Now I’m here to revisit Johnson’s Pasture, to capture it again, through a different perspective.

But to do that, I must see beyond childhood memories and the autobiographic lenses that conditioned my previous attempt. The Pasture still speaks to me, but in a different way. I must see it again from its broader perspective, hear its new music and changing message. I have to tap into it in a different, more reflective key.

 

Tonal Ridgeline (2016) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson⁴

 

A Brief History of Tone

I wonder about similar times in the past, when the world created unease, times when writing and art gave voice to people’s need to point past circumstance, and look toward a hopeful beyond. The abstraction of post-war New York was such a time. Another was during the displacement following the civil war and transition from small town America to urban industrialization.

The Hudson River school of landscape painting enjoyed a brief few decades in the middle of the 19th century. The romantic vistas of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt symbolized a grandiose and growing nation, with its wild majestic mountains, tangled forests, and sweeping rivers. Such displays of natural wonder, bold, bombastic and boastful, nevertheless missed the needs of the moment.

The implied patriotism soon fell flat against the needs of a nation struggling to come to grips with the aftermath of the Civil War. With the economic scarcity during recovery, the patriotic fervor had gone stale for returning veterans, families of those not returning, and a citizenry to whom the war had revealed too much division and the too many “lesser angels” of the human spirit.⁵

War highlights the inhumanity of the human animal on all sides, as does tolerance of intolerance—revelations of the smallness and depravity of spirit. Industrialization was spelling out the end of shared small town community; makers and buyers of art wanted to be transported to a quieter world that reflected their own inner searching. They saw through the clamor and longed for peace and transcendence. Spectacle proved, for a while at least, less attractive than reflection.

A group of landscape painters seeking such calm migrated from the United States to France toward the turn of the century, and mixed with a similar group of French artists who, tired of the splash and dazzle of Impressionism and the growing anonymity of industrialism, had decamped to a village south of Paris called Barbizon to paint quiet, moody scenes of the rural outdoors. Upon return to America, the Americans’ work had become smaller, darker, and evocative. They favored the simple, the suggestive, that which brought viewers closer to themselves, not some external cause. They were eventually called Tonalists. Their work scratched a deep itch common to the uncertainties of post-Bellum America. They sought refuge from strife, and return to a restorative order.

Tonalists abandoned flash, favoring a limited range of color and lack of definition, throwing interpretation back on the viewer. Inspired by the dark and gloomy landscapes of Whistler⁶ and Ryder,⁷ and the luminous scenes of George Innes,⁸ they sought to channel the literary transcendent visions of Emerson and Thoreau into rich, underlying glow. The wild was redefined as a source of reflection, of solace.

While Tonalism is typically identified as an American school of art and has traditionally been associated with male artists, both of those assumptions are distortions. The tonal aesthetic has had female proponents internationally. Canadian Emily Carr⁹ has long painted in a tonal style, as has Ellen Thesleff in Finland.¹⁰

Carr could be labeled an Expressionist due to her emotional renderings of Canadian wild spaces, or possibly Fauvist because of her highly subjective and dynamic depictions of nature. Indeed, she is hard to categorize. I prefer to think of many of her paintings as Tonalist, especially the darker ones, given the organicity, moodiness, tonal subtlety, and obvious spirituality of her work. Her darker pieces, such as Western Forest (1931) and Deep Forest (1931)¹¹ for instance, use overall dark tones and rich colors, avoiding direct juxtaposition of contrasting colors, in order to emphasize the essential harmony of natural settings.

Further, Australian painter Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett has been recently “re-discovered” as one of Australia’s foremost landscapists. Initially and tragically ignored by a misogynistic art establishment, like so many in the male-dominated field of fine art, her works now grace Australia’s national and state galleries. Beckett’s nuanced and sophisticated tonal landscapes are visionary and stunning.¹²

Tonal suggestiveness triggers recall of the mysterious and mystical side of nature. Much as we congratulate ourselves for a scientific understanding of the workings of the world, all it takes is a dark night without artificial lighting, or a sudden overwhelming storm, or the shock we feel when surprised by unintended consequences of our poorly conceived actions, to remind us that there is much of the world we still haven’t mastered. Prioritizing gradations of light and dark rather than intensity of color, focusing on surrounding atmospheric qualities, teasing with soft-edged shapes, and abstracting forms and features all lead to an overriding inwardness, an interiority to external scenes. The quiet contemplation and healing evoked by tonal artworks account for the resurgent popularity of the style today.

 

Fire Songs (2023) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson¹³

 

Liturgies to the Everyday

Tonal painting, like transcendental writing, continues to pull on our hearts as vagueness of representation, harmonious color selection, tweak moodiness and emotion suggesting reminiscence and even forgotten specifics of memory. Contemporary Tonalist painters range from the more traditional, like Maurice Sapiro, to the more abstract like Don Bishop.

Maurice Sapiro’s Old Oak Tree, for instance, leans heavily toward a rich red/brown foreground with multi-hued, though gently subdued sky.¹⁴ Sapiro uses loose, approximate brushstrokes to move around the mass of ground and tree, allowing the dark earth to infuse the vaguely defined tree, yet the horizon and branches themselves dissolve into the rich, complex, and encompassing sky.

Don Bishop’s work ranges from subdued layers of rich color suggesting earthbound compositions,¹⁵ to series characterized by minimal anchors to actual landscape, set against broad, suggestively mystical, toned white space.¹⁶ His Warm Over Cool (2020) could pass as a piece of abstract art, but “feels” clearly grounded in the earth. It is a dramatic statement about the earth, however, one that points beyond the rocks and stars of the here and now. Solidly within the original Tonalist impulse, Bishop’s work listens closely to the transcendentalist tradition which sees the divine manifest. The world is not limited to empirical strictures of consensus. Reality does not wait for everyone to agree; it lies beyond the culture of the lowest common denominator. We all await the vision of the few who see more. Bishop paints the suggestive world, the deeper reality that infuses the surface, the reality that could very well be just beyond our limited perception.

 

Tone Echoing Beyond

Two other contemporary Tonalists take this even further. Wolf Kahn and Richard Mayhew, while differing significantly from each other, both lean more heavily into color to carry their message. Eschewing the Tonalist propensity to limit their vision to orchestrated shades of gray and overall quietude, Kahn and Mayhew both welcome the emotionality of color breaking through and balancing the depth of solemn mood. In so doing they explore the interaction between the external world and the tonal landscape within.

Wolf Kahn¹⁷ draws from abstract forms of hill and tree line, using the density of interlocking branches and brambles to cohere stands of trees or configurations of rocks and hills into defined near-singular masses that together speak from a geometry of place. The overlay of such abstracted forms meld apparent chaos seen up close into sensible, unified compositional elements when seen from a distance.

Mayhew¹⁸ utilizes the vagaries of organic form in indefinite compositions not dissimilar from previous tonalists, in that a few telling compositional masses are then ramped up with both contrast and hue in novel ways. His colors may or may not correspond with what others might perceive; instead they sing vibrant, metaphysical tone.

Both painters, in differing ways, are reminiscent of Japanese Sumi-e, black-ink brush painting, which aims to capture the essence of their subjects instead of replicating their appearance.¹⁹ The goal of the spare strokes of brushed ink and intentional balance of negative space, is to allow the viewer’s imagination to construct the fuller picture. Similarly, Kahn and Mayhew’s use of color—however bright or intense—evokes the meaning of the space in between.

 

Wind Shear (2023), detail. Copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson²⁰

 

Implications for Writers

Tonalist painters, whether tending toward figurative or abstract, unbounded by the constraints of the camera, use interpretation freely. Their work suggests, evokes, even provokes. As writers we attempt precise description, to lead readers to our perspective, our message. Yet in our haste to show, not just tell, the Tonalist painters remind us of the limits of showing. They point indirectly to spiritual and emotional dimensions that, in modern times, are either downplayed, or take the form of declared belief. Yet as the Tonalists suggest, clanging cymbals and banging drums may not meet the needs of a people drowning in contrived spectacle and hard sell.

We seek a more quiet assurance, a suggestion that despite the surrounding darkness of the times, there may be some grounds for hope. Or if hope appears unrealistic, there may be grounds for appreciating the things that remain. To show that requires more than declaration by writers—it requires an interpretive leap. The power of interpretation—the slant we suggest—does not just lie in the freshness and novelty we provide; the real power lies dormant in the imaginations of our readers.

 

Painting the Dark

Many of the early, and some of the contemporary, Tonalist painters explored painting the night. Such exercises, often called Nocturnes, explore the world that reveals itself more subtly in dim light. In the same way that tonal studies of the day-lit world reveal deep mood and sensitive feelings, so nocturnes themselves—in music or in paint—reveal dimensions we easily miss. The world of night can illuminate our days.

It can safely be said that both the Post-Bellum period following our tortuous Civil War, and the post-WWII midcentury period, were times that prompted both experimentation and reflection in many areas of life. The arts were no exception. In the same way, the time we now inhabit invites fresh approaches to exploration and sharing. We travel this precarious moment together, however fractured we feel. If adaptation to the realities of natural life—human and otherwise—proves possible, our unique role as artists and writers has something to do with forging fresh vision and lighting dark pathways.

Artist, art critic, and poet Christopher Volpe pushes his work to the forefront of this emerging awareness. Volpe combines a keen awareness of the threats to our survival, with a willingness to address that which most of us would rather deny: the looming darkness of extinction. His collection of paintings in response to Herman Melville’s first chapter of Moby Dick is one such project.²¹ The title of that chapter and his series, Loomings, foreshadows its message.

Melville’s story reads like a sailor’s yarn, but like so much fiction it reflects deeper truths. In tragic irony, the success of the frenzied New England whaling industry decimated the whale population upon which it was dependent, leading to its own end.²² Volpe draws the obvious parallel: our inability to reduce our hunger for the whale oil of our time, petroleum, may well lead to our own demise. He pairs his dark paintings of Ahab’s mad quest with quotations from Melville’s chapter “Loomings,” to make the comparison both lyrical and clear. His choice of medium neatly underscores the irony. He thins his dark oil tar, the main pigment he uses, with petrochemical solvent. Most light areas are wiped away, releasing the wild light within. Toxic, inextricably linked, and supremely ironic. The results are powerful: dark tonal abstracted paintings that portray the danger, the darkness, with hints of the sublime beyond.

In his latest project, again with a dark ecological theme, Volpe is currently painting the rapidly shrinking polar ice fields. Dark Ice—in process—deploys his painting strategy of tar with petrochemical solvent for similar symbolic underlying meaning, resulting in stark, dramatic imagery with a message. The subject matter is ice, specifically the melting of the earth’s polar ice caps due to global warming. Fitting content and, importantly, equally fitting method to convey the message.

 

Starry Night (2023) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson²³

 

Our Work, Now

As creators—whether we work in music, dance, visual or written arts—we face a different world. The combined threats of widespread war, nuclear exchange, environmental collapse with irreparable damage to agriculture, and starvation collide with our demonstrated inability to put our own interests aside and collaborate for our collective survival. The few pockets of the privileged are likely to last only marginally longer than the rest of us.

We must ask ourselves this: In the face of the likely end of that which we know, what of our work? Is there reason to persist in the pursuit of goodness, beauty, value? Does what we do still matter? And if so, what is it we can do that makes any sense in this time of gathering darkness?

As I prepare myself for revisiting a place of beauty and meaning, and ask how, given the probability of its demise as I know it, I must admit that it will not be the same place I painted and wrote about a decade ago. No, it is not. Nor am I. The issue is whether I am able to respond to the Pasture with my heart open to the place, in spite of all I know about how it’s likely to be affected by the next decade. Will I be able to see, to move past the despair—in order to feel, and paint, and write in a meaningful way and with purpose?

 

Beauty and Joy Against Darkness

In an age of cynicism and fear, an age of manipulation and conditioning, it is hard to look away from spectacle and induced panic, to look critically at our sources of information, and to remain open to options not yet manifest. More important, though, is the simple fact that we must keep our own heads clear in order to do so.

When I trained my crisis team members in the principles of self-care in the midst of disaster, I would remind them of the lesson every airline passenger has heard a hundred times: “If you are traveling with a child and the cabin loses pressure, put the oxygen mask on yourself first.” Children are better off if their adults have not passed out. Part of staying alive is breathing, and reminding ourselves to breathe is job #1. Breathe and persist.

In the midst of such dark thoughts, I receive two forwarded messages in my inbox, one written, one a video, from friends who thought I might find them useful as I write about despair and being in the world. The first concerns an exhibit review of the Tonalist Richard Mayhew (already discussed above). Mayhew was a member of Spiral, a group of black activist artists in New York beginning in the 1960s who were addressing issues encountered by the civil rights movement. Yet instead of painting the expected signs of protest and brutality, he delivers scenes of luminous transcendence.

Just days after the October 7, 2023 horrific attack by Hamas, writer Bridget Quinn wrote of visiting Richard Mayhew’s exhibit Inner Terrain at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.²⁴ Troubled by seeing such visionary work just after the attack, she asked:

What’s the point of looking at art in a time of terror, much less the point of art criticism?

She then went on to answer:

... to experience the pain and injustice of the world, acknowledge it, endure it, and love it anyway. Mayhew, without a whiff of the saccharine or sentimental, opposes trauma with transcendence. His protest is a kind of oppositional beauty—the small but essential triumph of art over despair.

The other message I mentioned above arrived after a recent memorial service that affected me deeply. A minister friend of mine forwarded an interview of theologian Willie James Jennings, who spoke directly to this question of finding meaning in the midst of darkness. In a nutshell:

I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces—all the forces of despair.²⁵

 

Cynthia (2014) copyrighted © by Kendall Johnson²⁶

 

 

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults.

Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work a few years ago to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written a book on art history, and six books of artwork and literary poetry, including most recently Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets, a collaboration with poets Kate Flannery and John Brantingham released on Christmas Day, 2024 by MacQ.

MacQ also published Dr. Johnson’s hybrid collection of essays, memoir, poetry, and visual art: Writing to Heal: Self-Care for Creators (May 2024). His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023).

His shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef; and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Seeing Beyond the Clamorous Now, an essay and paintings by Kendall Johnson in Issue 25 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (September 2024); nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Through a Curatorial Eye: The Apocalypse This Time, an essay and paintings by Johnson in Issue 19 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2023); nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from Kendall Johnson’s memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)