Rackstraw Downes
British-born painter RACKSTRAW DOWNES depicts his surroundings from observation right at the site. He has worked intensively in the New York metro area, Maine, and both southeast and west Texas. A book of his essays and reviews, Nature and Art Are Physical, was published in 2014.
In forty-five years of painting in the landscape, I only ever made one work that advocated anything. This is it. It shows a long line of wind turbines generating electricity; it’s between Valentine and Fort Davis in far west Texas. I called it True Progress, because I felt it was.
I first met Al Held as an undergraduate at Yale. I remember seeing him with a group of graduate students playing cards in the Art and Architecture building.
