FREEK-OUT at J-TREE..... Maaaaaaaaan

From the introduction - This portfolio of prints was going to be my 1st essay in landscape graphics, 1978. It was not realized until 2025. It all began 47 years ago.

As UC Riverside grad student I reluctantly took some time off from my serious and dedicated study of female anatomy to pursue other, less exhausting  interests. 

Joshua Tree national Monument was only about 50 miles from campus and the launch site of many collegiate acid trips. I visited J-tree on several occasions before and after graduation. Preferred tripping, for me anyway, was the area called ”Big Rocks”.  As the designation suggests, it was several square miles of  huge fucking rocks, sculpted relentlessly by the elements ever since the local natives hunted dinosaurs with stone axes, and probably well before that. 

My first trip to J-tree was in 1977 with a girlfriend du jour. I met many girls in college who were clever, charming and pretty. She was none of those things. She fell asleep on the ride to J-tree, woke up for an indifferent look around, ate lunch, and fell asleep on the ride back. 

My 2nd trip in 1978 was far more memorable. I went on a lizard hunt with a good friend who was both a Zen Buddhist and a herpetologist. For those of you who object to animal hunts let me assure you that all specimens were apprehended  without the slightest injury and ended up in Jeff’s heated aquarium, eating bugs all day and contemplating the universe with very few cares save for when the next jar of  bugs might be due.  

A long fishing pole and a slip-knot was our weapon. 

Jeff admired reptiles for their ability to remain motionless for hours or days, in the moment, without attachment, at peace with the great oneness of all things.  

I was always greatly impressed with the landscape and managed to take some pictures that time. I then conceived of a plan to burn a dozen, large,  8x10 landscape etchings, post epiphany, documenting  the sandblasted rock-scape. It was going to be a Morandi trip, with lots of  modulated cross-hatching to evoke the weight and monumentality of that great random, paleolithic Stonehenge. 

Back in the UCR printmaking workshop (the best one I was ever turned loose in) I was booted out of that and all other campus facilities with extreme prejudice.  Impecunious post grads, such as myself, were no longer welcome and it would be many years before an etching press was again available to me. 

I know now that my chop wasn’t up to the job, as I evisioned it, anyway. How I ever graduated with a degree, given the awkward, desultory, adolescent and  incomplete nature of anything I did those days is now unbelievable to me. 

I made a  subsequent visit to J-tree in the 80s, took a few slides and got my foot impaled on some cactus. Indeed, I’ve never  been a giddy outdoorsman. In college I was convinced by backpacking friends and national park propaganda that getting chewed to pieces by ravenous mosquitoes and sleeping on rocks had to be both fun and enlightening.  

I am now disabused of either notion, but I digress.  

15 years of commercial art, long after graduation, hammered some discipline into my modest skill set and by the 1990s my chop was almost up to the demands of a J-tree project. By  2000 however, major illness forced me to hang a hat on the crank of my home-made, 12 inch etching press and there it remains. I retired from the fiendishly hard labor and crushing disappointment of traditional printmaking forever. 

I’d had enough. 

I miss the rich, embossed look of a good etching  but I had not so much as a twinge of regret for leaving that poisonous, god awful process behind.  

And then along came Photoshop. 

I slowly came to understand that 98% of anything traditional printmaking could do, in the course of  days or weeks, could be done with photoshop in hours, minutes or even seconds.  2nd, 3rd, and 4th states could be ripped out and replaced almost as fast as thinking about it, without bloody fingers.   

More recently, well into my dotage I put together an album of old photographs. This was to include a few snaps I had taken of  J-tree.  I discovered that most of the pictures had been lost somehow as my shoe box filling system for stashing old negatives was not very efficient. Still,  the nostalgic memory of my graduate printmaking series, neither started nor finished, haunted me.  Half crippled as I am anymore, a latter day hiking trip to J-tree was out of the question but reference was easy to come by online and good as anything I lost. Besides, literal reference is only a thing to be recomposed and revised after much study. 

And so, here it is. The print series I would have printed, back in the day, had I been up to it. After 50 years I was ready for another whack at the idea.

God was certainly in no hurry, but he did some crazy shit to those rocks, and as non-objective sculpture his raw granite hulks are hard to beat. 

J-tree is now, for me, a state of mind, a place where I was rather than a place that is. J-tree is a mood and a feeling, a dream and vision. This book is the     work of an old man, doing something at last, to realize a fine youthful idea that never quite came together, until now.  

Once begun. things went pretty fast, over the course of a few weeks in the winter of 2025. A dozen more ideas came to me unbidden.   

The Zen Buddhists suggest, correctly,  that any attachment to things past will be the cause of sorrow. However, in art there is no past. Unless it’s destroyed, art is always in the moment. Save for imperfect memory, that is the place it must always be. 

Art is always present. 

Rich B/W - 54 pages - 24 reproductions - $16

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