Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s In the Pan, by Charles Marion Russell (1915)

Here it is, a New Year, and already we at The Jade Sphinx are thinking about the past.  To be exact, the past that makes up our great American Western Myth.  We spent the holiday season happily listening to Christmas carols, reading some of our favorite seasonal texts, and, of course … thinking about Westerns.

You mean you didn’t?

This Christmas we made our way through more of the Zane Grey (1872-1939), corpus, reading more of the letters of cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), watching a western with both (and I kid you not!) Ronald Colman (1891-1958) and Gary Cooper (1901-1961)… and thinking about Randolph Scott (1898-1987).

We will look at all of these this week, but let’s open with a droll evocation of where winter is heading this year with Russell’s wry and wonderful Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, painted in 1915.  The work is oil on canvas, mounted on Masonite, and it currently resides in the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, OK.

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all Charlie wanted and he was happy.

Charlie spent his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  This delightful picture from 1915 is Charlie at his puckish best.  A man of expansive, genial good humor and a delight in a good joke, Charlie was not immune to including humor in his work.  Indeed, humor is one of the integral human experiences, and any aesthete is bereft if he does not fully embrace the lighter side of life.

Clearly our cowboy has done some winter hunting, but he was just a little too close to the edge of a gorge.  He’s bagged his meat, but how will he get it from the outcropping on which it fell?  Aside from the simple narrative of the painting, there is the sound emotional tenor of the work, which is … yeah, I’ve had days like that.

It was part of Charlie’s genius to set the work in the dead of winter; it would not nearly be as witty as a picture depicting a summer scene.  The cold, the snow and the barren quality of the landscape all conspire to make the hunter’s challenge all the more grueling.

Again, let’s look at Charlie’s simple mastery of the medium.  The dominant color is blue, but … look at what he does with it.  Various shades of blue depict everything from cavernous depths, stony distances, cloudy skies, ice on the precipice, and the snow itself.  There are even hints of blue in the rifle-barrel and upon the lighter-colored horse.  Such versatility of shade, warmth and cold, and gradation of a single color is remarkable.

Charlie is also a master of body language.  The vexation of the hunter is comically rendered without being over-the-top; the horses merely indifferent or simply miserable at being out in the weather.

Look at the circle formed by the horse’s nose pointing at the hunter, the gun butt pointing at the ram, the ram pointing to the scrub, pointing back at the horses.  Charlie’s sense of composition was unerring.

It is astonishing that a painting that so deals with death can also be so light-hearted.  Charlie creates a pyramid shape to draw attention to his hunter by having a dead steer create the left foundation, and a tangled mass of withered scrub form the right.  But it is never gloomy or dour; in fact, it only calls to mind the quote by Mark Twain, who wrote, life is just one damn thing after another.

Tomorrow: Zane Grey!

Thanksgiving at The Jade Sphinx

It is almost impossible to write about Thanksgiving this year, given recent events.  The ills that affect us as a nation and as a people seem particularly pernicious as this winter rolls around.  Predatory (indeed, homicidal) police roam both large cities and small country hamlets, our government spies on innocent Americans without restraint, and our politicians seem engaged only in political games-playing while the nation literally burns.  Our policies at home and abroad unravel around us while the criminally rich are getting much richer and the poor getting much poorer.  And the Average Man, that once-great American invention, seems to have a big target painted on his back.

Worse still, as a people we have lost many of the yardsticks that made us great.  Neighbors are balkanized into warring factions, divided by our differences rather than united in our community.  Cooperation, common curtesy, simple decency and respect for one-another have completely eroded into the ugly spectacle of everyday American life.  A ride in the New York City subway is enough to make even the most optimistic of us agree with Mark Twain when he wrote: There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

And yet …

And yet … we here at The Jade Sphinx are happy.  We are not deluded that this is not a particularly dark period in our history, but we also know that is not the whole story.  With a little digging, one can find decency, humanity and compassion most everywhere. 

We see it in parents, couples, children, family and friends who truly love one another.  We see it in those few who work for the common good rather than personal gain.  And we see it in the eyes of people who care for us, in voices when lifted in song, and in the words and images of serious artists.

The anarchy that surrounds us is not the last word; it is often just background noise.  How many of us have particularly warm memories of periods when the world seemed most dire?  The horrors of man’s inhumanity to man are often sponged away by the bright furnace of warmth and humanity in their aftermath.  The good is not interred with our bones, rather, the poison of our evil is diluted and the good remains.

And, perhaps amazingly, we here are still optimistic.  Outside events shape our lives, but our internal outlook determines whether we are happy or not.  Life constantly amazes me, and the simple fact that I am alive takes me by surprise.  Life cannot sour me because I’m still living it – participating in the arts, laughing at jokes, enjoying books, eating delicious food, leering at beautiful people.  (We particularly like that last one.)  How can life be terrible when there is so much bounty to feed upon?  Despite the many negatives that life throws at us, we are grateful for our time, for being together, and for the miracle of life.

My goal during the past year of The Jade Sphinx has been to help, to some degree, to illustrate that miracle, and to help illustrate how that miracle works.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.  You may be in the darkness, but you are not of it. 

And now … I think we can now safely think about Christmas.

Tomorrow: Back to the Frick Collection!