spaces and places
Spaces and Places
One, the other or both; spaces I’ve inhabited or moved through; places I’ve lived in or visited…from early on I’ve been interested in and influenced by both in kind of an ongoing feedback loop; place and space.
Working space, for instance; a room of one’s own and over time these rooms have evolved into something fairly specific; Wall Spring being typical; south-facing, a chair a couch a table to paint on [after my knees started swelling and I had to give up crawling around on the floor, anyway] another table for drawings, 16 X 24’, south light…well, usually…actually since 2000 in Benicia I have a larger room, 24 X 30’, table for painting, table for drawing, couch, chairs, beat up chest of drawers with supplies, but windows, trippy glass block and vaguely northerly.…in 1985 at Radar Ranch I started out with a mine shack ten minute walk downhill from the house [everything was downhill from the house]… tin over plywood, 10 X 16’; cut windows on the south facing Buena Vista Valley 3000’ below…we later towed it close enough to run electrical but by then I’d built a 16 X 24’ tin building with cliffhanging views down Grass Valley to the Tobin Range; that worked for five years until Wall Spring happened. The work that came out of Radar, all oils, all 14 X 14” or 14 X 48” [designed to fit in slatted boxes fitted to the back seat of the ‘70 Challenger kept for the commute between Winnemucca and SF] are as close as I’ll ever come to capturing what that country feels like.
In 1964, already spoiled by a series of improvised workspaces in Palo Alto flats, cottages, or carriage-house lofts I was bewildered by the miniscule cubicles Yale, or Paul Rudolph, tried to pass off as graduate painting studios and, not understanding what the whole deal was about, moved my stoned operations out Elm Street to, yes, the front rooms of a Victorian flat, never to return…living in mind spaces influenced by fifty-hour cross-country drives whose most emblematic moments always DO occur in the dead of night, 1964-66…never to return; there was an attic in there somewhere, too, mainly nocturnal, then I went West; front room of a third floor Victorian flat high above the Noe Valley, 66-67, and a brief sojourn in steamy Menlo Park overlooking a creek, then south.
Many years later, on Guerrero Street, last SF studio, the studio was bigger, no heat but had that south light, big walls…south light on Carl street, almost first SF studio [1970-78], a long narrow attic with five foot walls; two years in a basement garage after that [but the doors opened south]; 1980-82 in Dogpatch – tore out eight rooms [with sinks!] of a transient hotel to make a space, noisy by day from third Street traffic, quiet by night, windows east and west…followed that up with the unused lumber-drying loft of a small mill in Oxford Connecticut for a couple of seasons and then a garden carriage house in the Haight…south light there, mid-eighties, working in the garage space and living upstairs until Guerrero from 1986 to 2000 when we moved to Benicia, closer to Nevada, anyway. Closer to the Huerfano, in Colorado, too; 14 x 28’ second floor room there, home built, looking south dozens of miles across the high valley to distant peaks; an easy place to fall into working. Places with spaces, imagining other spaces and places, conjuring the far-off from memories…
The space of the west has always been key to what happens in those interior spaces, from desert and sea [nine months in a garage north of Zuma, hazy Pacific Ocean light…only a tiny north window but lots of electricity…1967…] to the interior little-noticed reaches of the Great Basin, the so-called “inter-mountain” West out along US 50 from Fernley down to southern Colorado, twice a year every year for the last two decades plus all those exploratory voyages up around the interstices of Oregon Idaho and Nevada from mid-seventies to now; memory voyages…locations and real estate; landscape and memory…
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© michael s. moore 2009