For decades Sonny George's junkyard sat at the junction of
Wyoming highways 14 and 16 poisoning the ground and water, growing
tendrils of myth about buried treasure and cannibal dogs. It was the
most powerful sight in Ucross, embedding itself in the memory of
everyone who saw it. And for decades artists of all kinds came to
Ucross to paint, draw, sculpt, print and photograph, but until John
Hull, whose reputation as a major painter of our time continues to
grow, apparently no one thought the junkyard a worthy subject.
Critics and art writers, mostly urban folk, grope for the right
words to describe or discuss Hull's work. They try "landscape" and
"narrative" and "realist," and their frustration with the difficulty of
getting it right seeps into the paragraphs. But there is a kind of
literature described as "country noir" by novelist Daniel Woodrell who
coined the term to describe his own work.1 Rural noir or western small
town vernacular is a little closer to fitting Hull's work than
"landscape with figures." Hull's world is a place of mostly rural blue-
collar lives: things go wrong; sex, drink and guns are omnipresent;
trucks wreck; people fall down in the dirt; a woman sights in a rifle;
there are confrontations and fights; men kill other men; suspicious
people are arrested. In a 2001 retrospective interview Hull said "I'm
always more interested in the people that misbehave. I can't get past
what people do to each other."2 This interest in the darker side of
western hinterland life has given Hull's work an unmistakably gritty
character and individuality. Hull, who was a writer before he turned
seriously to painting, has a powerful sense of story. He says "…no
matter how many different series or narrative ideas I explore as a
painter, I think I end up telling the same story." He quotes to that
point from "Seneca in the Meat-House," an essay by Leslie Fiedler on
Robert Penn Warren's poetry.
To one who has followed Warren from nightmare to nightmare, his
new poem is a reminder that there is only a single bad dream from which
he has always striven to awake to art, a suggestion that perhaps for
all of us there is a single archetypal experience of terror, unsayable
and, therefore, forever to be said.
Hull's connection to writing is solid. When he was working on
"Family Reserve," the picture was not going well.
…I had this little study of goats that I did up at Sonny's that
I'd always really liked but never had an idea for. Anyhow I had a
fairly crude sketch of a man and his son hanging around a loading dock…
I thought they'd be perfect leaning and sitting on the red truck. The
first idea was just to have them looking at the goats but it looked
stupid. So here I was stuck again. Before I got pissed off…I decided to
take Raymond chandler's advice about fiction writing. He said whenever
you have a problem in a story with character development or plot
development have a man come into the room with a gun?and if it's a big
problem make it a big gun.
Nevertheless, there is often a kind of tenderness in Hull's tough
subject matter?the father's affectionate pride in his son's shooting
ability, the cop holding up a cloth which will serve as shroud, the
young lovers in the tryst wrecks. Many of his paintings are twilight
and night-sky scenes, the starless wolf's mouth of night splintered by
headlights, window or moon glare, the crepuscular evening hour dimming
sight and welcoming those who would harm.
There is plenty of social and political content as well in these
paintings. His treatment of landscape littered with old pipe, abandoned
trucks and tires is what photographers, dodging the glazed beauty of
Ansel Adams' work, were calling "the new topography" a few years ago,
but Hull is not as judgmental, not as propagandistic. The stuff is
there because it's there—landscape as fact. Hull's paintings evoke
visceral and psychological responses, most often recognition of the
familiar. All Wyoming people know this west.
In "Pictures from Sonny's" we see landscape as property, property
as detritus. The wrecks in Sonny's/Hull's junkyard function as rooms,
retreats, assembly halls, motels and extensions of the characters'
selves, and of what we have done with the internal combustion engine.
There is also an element of the fantastic and outré, as a monkey
perched on a tire, a boy eating potato chips for a good junkyard
breakfast, a postcard reproducing the Avignon Pietà, Hull's knapsack
and a discarded study for "A Picture from Life's Other Side."
There are different ways to look at "Pictures from Sonny's." The
most basic take is a perception of local history (which misses the
point of how painters and writers work). In Ucross, a starkly beautiful
high-plains landscape with the snow-capped Big Horns for a backdrop,
the real-life Sonny George's junkyard disturbed some neighbors' ideas
of correct landscape beauty. To them it was horrible and intrusive.
Moreover, the place, located on the banks of Clear Creek, was a
biohazard. Even more telling, many of those who objected to the
junkyard were from outside the state, whereas Sonny George was an
aggressive and stubborn local with many community relations and
friends. Lines were drawn, each side gathering its powers of aggression
and resistance which only Sonny George's death dissolved.
Local people who remember the junkyard may interpret "The Emperor
of Wyoming" as Sonny George in triumphant ownership surrounded by
wrecks, relations, goats and dogs. We get a feeling of the beleaguered
junkyard owner's intransigent rancor, his stubborn digging-in and
refusal to change his ways, his lack of understanding of what others
recognized as scenic beauty. We sense the entrenched family's stand-
fast attitude, their tight clannishness and insistence on living their
lives as they had when no one cared about their junkyard. We recognize
in our guts the dark fire of mutual resentment between newcomers and
locals, between haves and have-nots.
But this is not likely what the painter had in mind as he worked.
Sonny George's junkyard became John Hull's junkyard, a powerful setting
he peopled with imagined figures and situations in order to examine
something of rural lives in our time, lives which could illustrate
people in the Appalachians, Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, interior Nova
Scotia, New Mexico or the Oklahoma panhandle as well as those in
Ucross, Wyoming. Indeed, two of the paintings are drawn from New Mexico
and Colorado settings.
Hull comments that he has used a cast of characters in the
"Pictures From Sonny's" series: "…an older man, balding with a pale
blue shirt; a young man with curly hair and an orange t-shirt, a boy
who is shirtless. I consider these guys as three generations in a
family. There is also a woman who wears a fatigue shirt with black
shorts who is the young man's girl friend as well as a number of minor
characters."3
The junkyard is also the ubiquitous Junkyard of America and
generic representations of people who own and work in them. The people
are not the George family of Wyoming, but a rural family who came out
of John Hull's imaginative thoughts and observations of life around
him.4
…I ended up using the junkyard as a setting to create a series of
paintings about a family. The older man is based on my mother's father
and the younger man on my mother's brother. The young boy is based on
my son Isaac…. The young woman is based on my former wife. There are a
couple of minor characters who only appear in a couple of paintings?a
young man in a wife-beater shirt who I served with in the Marines and a
young boy with a strip t-shirt and baseball cap who lived next door to
me when I was a kid.
Much of Hull's work is done in series, as "Pictures From
Sonny's"; while each painting has its own strength, it is also relevant
to the others. Years ago Hull saw Australian painter Sidney Nolan's Ned
Kelly series of paintings, and was struck by the strong effect a number
of related works seen together had on the viewer. The series was larger
than the sum of its parts. This way of working, showing events
connected by a particular time and place, gives a richness of depth and
meaning to the ensemble. By looking at the whole series and the studies
we learn something not only of the way in which the painter worked, but
of class differences, of tensions between civil authority and citizens.
Sonny's/Hull's junkyard is a place where, by extension, the threadbare
idea of individual freedom so important in our myth of the American
west butts up against complex laws and regulations. Many of Hull's
paintings involve guns, many illustrate the exercise of police power.
And we can also sense here a class tension between sober, well-behaved,
right-thinking citizens and those who do not fit society's ideal
pattern.
As for "narrative," in the sense that each one of Hull's
paintings tells or provokes a story, that is true in a low-level way,
as British savant Eric Korn parodies the way soap operas are summarized
in reviews?"Bracken meets Viaduct at Sledge's pachinko parlour," and
"Viv accuses Bracken of simony."5 Hull's paintings, taken one at a time,
are a little like sections cut from a movie ?the viewer must imagine
the missing action leading up to, or following, the subject depicted.
They are like a collection of poems where each poem can stand alone but
is also related to the others enclosed within the same covers.
Something of the same relationship that exists between a reader and a
novel is here. A novel is not finished when it is published, but only
when it is read, each reader coloring dialogue and scenes with his or
her own life experience, sensitivities, observations of human behavior.
In this sense each of Hull's paintings taken singly can have as many
interpretations as it has viewers.
Footnotes
Daniel Woodrell, Give Us a Kiss, The Death of Sweet Mister, Tomato Red et al., Putnam, New York.
"Imitation of Life" catalog, Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher college, Baltimore Maryland, and the Edwin A. Ulrich
Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas.
Private correspondence.
Ibid.
Eric Korn, Remainders, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1989, 134.
