Walk the streets, even if there’s discomfort
❚❚
Weatherford’s work radiates with resonances of the distinctive central California landscape where Bakersfield rests. Plastic coated wires gracefully droop from the ends of her neon tubing, fading into the painting like endless power lines reaching into the darkening horizon of a receding sunset.
Icouldn’t help thinking of “Streets of Bakersfield” (both Buck Owens’ country song and the actual location) while observing Mary Weatherford’s 2017 “black painting” in the Anderson Collection in Palo Alto.
Like the faint memory of an old neon bar sign in the night, the painting balances the incision of an electric blue neon light against the murky, dark and aggressively smeared vinyl paint residue beneath it. The distant bittersweet twang of Owens’ guitar licks and the steady galloping rhythm of drum brushes on his track echo within the lyrical twang of Weatherford’s neon light and her shadowy washes of black, brown, orange and blue paint, sharp and soft all at once, like the best kind of country tune. The distant warmth and wistful longing of both works recall the nostalgic pleasure of staring into the sunset on a warm Bakersfield evening, reminiscing like a lonely cowboy of the modern era.
It’s not altogether arbitrary to draw connections between Weatherford and Bakersfield, considering her 2012 residency at Cal State Bakersfield, during which she first produced a widely acclaimed series of massive, neon-laced paintings that signaled a major breakthrough in her career. As testament to her success in the Central Valley, her paintings are now shown and appreciated all over the world.
In my own personal fiction of Weatherford’s time in Bakersfield, I’d like to imagine that as she exited the mountain pass into Bakersfield from the Interstate 5 North into the vast, sun-soaked expanse of the San Joaquin Valley, the first lines of “Streets of Bakersfield” could have wafted through her stereo:
“I came here looking for something I couldn’t find anywhere else
I don’t want to be nobody
I just want a chance to be myself.”
Perhaps it was evening in downtown Bakersfield when she arrived, and as dusk set in and the sunset gave way to night, she noticed the bleeding glow of a neon sign reading “PADRE HOTEL” against the darkness. At that moment, a nascent realization could have flickered in her head.
Hypotheticals aside, Weatherford’s work radiates with resonances of the distinctive central California landscape where Bakersfield rests. Plastic coated wires gracefully droop from the ends of her neon tubing, fading into the painting like endless power lines reaching into the darkening horizon of a receding sunset. Her washy, sweeping handling of paint evokes both the vast western night sky and the slick muddied blackness of the oil that courses beneath Bakersfield’s surface, a comprehensive indication of the landscape’s variety and a subtle reminder of its industries. The blue neon, sharp yet feeble against the looming surface of the painting, suggests something of how the urban, and perhaps the human, may factor into and struggle against a land such as this.
Weatherford staunchly refers to her pieces as “pictures of places” rather than “paintings” or “landscapes.” This is an acute distinction. She is interested in the experience of a place, not just its appearance, and so in “black painting,” one can feel equally the presence of the natural sublime and the jangling humanity of the honky tonk.
During her residency in Bakersfield, she learned of “The Grapes of Wrath” and of oil rigs, of the wayward children of the Dust Bowl and of the country legend Owens himself, all inescapable parts of Bakersfield’s culture that implicitly shape its daily life. She studied the endless valley and the varied fields, the vast gradient sunset, the aging buildings and bars of historic downtown and their glowing neon signs.
Weatherford came to know Bakersfield, and create work from it, through an experience that involved much more than just looking. Her work’s success is gained from its ability to transcend the traditional bounds of landscape and expressionistic traditions, allowing culture and history and experience, most of all, to seep into place. She, in her intense and obsessive involvement with this place, lived the humble philosophy of Owens’ “Streets of Bakersfield,” which concludes with simple inquiry:
“How many of you that sit and judge me
Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?”
Owens’ song and Weatherford’s painting both ask their audience to suspend immediate judgment and walk their streets for just a moment. Rather than just passing through (a phrase most of my Californian friends have used to politely, but dismissively, describe their interactions with Bakersfield), experiencing Weatherford’s work requires you to consider the whole of a place more thoughtfully.
To take on the experience of a place, as Owens notes in his song, wears blisters on your heels. It isn’t necessarily comfortable or idyllic. But I’ll stand to argue, bolstered by the experience offered through Weatherford’s “black painting,” that a blistered heel is worth where its journey might take you.