‘WHEN WE CAME TO THESE MOUNTAINS’
Back to the Land Artist Panel this weekend
“When we came to these mountains we were poor, poor, poor starting out so innocently with flowers.” — Poet and panelist Dan Roberts
On Saturday, July 22, from 2 to 3:30 p.m., the Grace Hudson Museum will host a Back to the Land Artist Panel. Ceramicist Leslie Campbell, mixed-media artist Nancy Mchone, visionary painter Doug Volz, and poet and home-builder Dan Roberts will discuss the interweaving of their art and back-to-lander experiences in Mendocino County.
All four participants are included in the museum’s current exhibit, Something’s Happening Here: Artistic Reflections on the Back to the Land Movement. Something’s Happening Here features artwork in diverse mediums — posters, pottery, paintings, sculpture, clothing, fine woodwork and more — by 35 artists who migrated to Mendocino County as part of the movement. The event is free with museum admission.
“The back to the land movement is a hopeful movement,” comments Volz. The Bay Area native and UC Berkeley graduate says he grew up in a world that was out of step with nature, and suffering as a result. “We were taking (from the earth) and not giving back. Indigenous people always gave back.” In contrast, he observes that “many Westerners don’t have that sense of belonging.” Sensing a need to heal that alienation, Volz attended Rainbow Gatherings, yearly events in natural settings emphasizing communal living.
Volz first came up to Mendocino County to source marijuana for the marijuana brownie business he and his then-wife were operating in San Francisco. Soon he found himself sharing a Victorian house in the mountainous countryside outside of Willits. Then came the winter: the rigors of living in an uninsulated and inadequately heated house soon sent him back to town. Like many raised in urban areas, he and others who made their home in Mendocino County had to “learn the hard way” how to live in the country: kindling fires, building shelters, generating electricity or living without it.
Volz describes the ’70s as a time when “there were two very definite different groups of people in Willits”: the locals and the hippies. Having discontinued the marijuana brownie business after leaving the city, Volz trained as a nurses’ aide and later became a licensed vocational nurse. Working at a convalescent hospital, he literally rubbed elbows with locals, and realized how day-to-day life had given them something in common — a shared sense of community and of the value of hard work. Mutual respect grew as locals began to absorb some of the hippies’ values, and the hippies learned what living on the land was really like. More and more people became interested in growing and eating organic food, understanding human impact on the natural world, and using marijuana as medicine.
Like many others of his generation, Volz’s use of psychedelic (mind-altering) substances has had a profound influence on his art. His visionary art captures subtle aspects of experience — waves of energy, fields of color — that are not always available to the human perceptual field. Subatomic physicists have already declared that matter exists in an indeterminate manner — as either a wave or a particle. Visionary artists often portray both, or one form in the process of turning into the other.
Now living in Lake County with his manfriend, Volz continues to create visionary art. During the Covid-related shutdown, he completed “Crossing the Great Water,” a painting he first started in 1974. Volz portrays multiple images of a graceful figure spanning the width of the picture, transitioning from a backdrop of war, starvation and despair to a green meadow brimming with joyous people and animals. (While “Crossing the Great Water” is not displayed in the exhibit, it can be viewed at www.dougvolz.art.)
“We were just one little group of people,” Volz concludes, of his back to the land cohort. “I don’t think any of our idealism has gone away. I think it has to happen on a higher level… That’s why, as a painter, one way to affect the world is through my art. Reconnecting to the earth, my Mother — that’s my message. There is a place for everyone in this world. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.”
The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah. The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30
p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. General admission is $5; $12 per family; $4 for students and seniors; free to all on the first Friday of the month; and always free to museum members, Native Americans, and standing military personnel. For more information, please go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org or call (707) 467-2836.