A View of the Southwest
Gallery art display ranges from
prehistory to digital age
August 30, 2007
BY STEPHANIE PAIGE OGBURN | JOURNAL STAFF
WRITER
From earth-toned spiral paintings to
technicolor digital images, the new art
show ("Spiral Series") opening at Main
Book Company / The Gallery offers
viewers a chance to wander between
prehistory and the digital age. Bluff,
Utah based artist, J.R. Lancaster opens
the three-month show at the downtown
Cortez gallery on 34 Main St. at 5:30
p.m. Friday.
Lancaster, who also creates distinctive
outdoor sculptures on his property near
Dove Creek, Colorado, informs his work
by studying prehistoric societies. He
has spent time photographing ancient
civilizations such as the Mayan in
Central America and, now that he lives
in the Southwest, the art, culture and
architecture of the Ancestral Puebloans
influence his work.
Lancaster's interest in prehistoric
structures springs from his time
studying under Santa Fe photographer
Paul Caponigro. Working in
Caponigro's darkroom he printed
images of ancient Japanese and
English architectural ruins, which
piqued his interest in the cultures that
produced these ruined structures.
"I was fascinated with the architecture
and the stories behind it," he said. "I
really became more interested in the
past than what was going on in the
future."
The works exhibited at The Gallery
employ what Lancaster called a
"metapattern." Metapatterns are
universal patterns found in nature,
such as zig-zags, concentric circles,
dotted lines, and of course the spiral,
which is found naturally in everything
from tiny seashells to the shapes of
distant galaxies.
Lancaster's calls his abstract works,
which are his predominant form of
artistic expression, a "completely
bipolar move" from his early training in
fine art photography.
Prior to studying with master
photographer Caponigro, he learned
from Ansel Adams, and devoted a
significant amount of time and effort to
producing detailed large format
photographs.
The paintings he produces now are
more intuitive than precise. Lancaster
paints with acrylics on wood panel,
incorporating rocks, bones, clay, sand,
and other found objects in his works.
He'll sometimes paint more than 200
layers of material on a panel.
"Canvas can't take the abuse that I
give, the manipulations that I do in my
work," he said.
Lancaster's art is heavily influenced by
the changes he notices in the natural
environment. His next series of
paintings addresses the topic of man's
impact on the oceans, and traces the
history of oceans from their pre-fished
state to their present ecological
condition.
As a way to reduce his own
environmental footprint, he's trying to
switch to using natural paints. Since a
lot of his work focuses on the state of
the natural environment, Lancaster
said he's had more success showing in
museums, which tend to embrace more
provocative subject matter than
galleries.
He has shown at the Price-Dewey
gallery in Santa Fe, and some of his
photography sits in a permanent
collection at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City.
Lancaster views his art as a tool for
awareness, and has donated his
photographs for use in a number of
environmental and awareness
campaigns, giving some to the Abobe
House, a shelter for abused women, a
recruitment publication to attract nurses
to the Navajo reservation, and to the
San Juan Historical Society.
In February of 2007,
noted author and Aspen
Sojourner magazine
editor-in-chief Jay Cowan
included an article
(entitled "Going Native") in
the Homestyle Art section
of his magazine.    

Follow this link (which will
open the article in another
page).
Conveying a sense of place:
Bluff artist seeks to capture the essence of
ocean, desert
By Gail Binkly
Four Corners Free Press
November 2008

The featured artist at the upcoming Bluff Arts Festival, J.R.
Lancaster, specializes in tactile paintings and mixed-media
pieces that capture the essence of the high desert. So why will
his talk during the festival focus on a series he’s done about
the ocean, called “Skeleton Coast“? This was once the Pacific
Ocean,” Lancaster said by phone from Bluff. “Three hundred
forty million years ago, the ocean came past Cortez and into
New Mexico.“It’s a cyclic thing, the changing of the ocean to
the desert. It’s kind of a full circle. And it’s not only showing the
ocean. I was able to put many aspects of the desert into this
series. In these paintings are many things from the desert -  
clay, sand, and rock art.”

The Bluff Arts Festival will take place Nov. 28-30 in various
venues around the scenic town. Lancaster will be discussing
his work on Sunday morning.The festival’s theme is the
intersection of art and science, and Lancaster is certainly
qualified to speak on that topic. Born in the deep South, he
worked as a chemical engineer in the 1970s while also delving
into amateur photography. He says he uses some of his
scientific training in his art today, “coming up with the different
materials.” “A lot of my paintings involve working with natural
materials like clay, so I mix them with various synthetic media to
get them to bond. The piece I just finished had 15 pounds of
clay on it. You have to get it so it adheres to a canvas and
doesn’t fall off. You have to know something about marrying
materials in a merger of art and science.” The marriage of art
and science is sometimes reflected in his subject matter as well
as the media he uses. “I did a series on the spiral form, which
is a metaform that shows up in everything from DNA to spiral
galaxies.”

Lancaster seeks to give his audience a sense of place that isnt
possible through traditional paintings or photographs. “My
paintings have a lot of texture stuff, very organic. There’s a
very real tactile sense of the desert. I just finished a 4-by-7-
foot piece of the San Juan River in a storm. It’s got rocks, ash
and other things embedded in the field."

“I’m always collecting sand, clay, ant pebbles, tree bark,
stones. My pieces get into you in a cellular level, almost ...You
can feel them. They are very much alive. As the light shifts in
the house the pieces start revealing different moods & colors.”
The only problem is, he said, people like to pick things off his
paintings. “And it’s not just kids. It’s old guys who want to see
how I stuck something on,” he laughed. “I don’t want to put a
sign, ‘Please don’t touch the art,’ but I don’t know what to do.
My work can be repaired, but some of these artifacts are pretty
rare.”

Lancaster has always been involved in art. As a boy, he liked
to “make little collages — I still do that,” he said. He eventually
became a photographer, “trained in the old Ansel Adams-type
school, black-and-white, very technical, precise,” then shifted
to color photography. In 1988 he was commissioned by the
Navajo Nation to photograph sacred sites for educational
books, so he moved to Chinle, Ariz., near Canyon de Chelly.
“That’s where I became interested in prehistoric art. When my
contract with the school ended, I wandered over this way. I
found out San Juan County is the richest place in prehistoric
sites in North America, so I moved to Bluff, did the starving-
artist thing and spent a lot of time in the field.” His hiking and
exploring resulted in a book, “Dancing at the Edge of Time,”
that looks at prehistoric art from a contemporary artist’s view.
Editors are considering the book now.

Over time, he has evolved from a photographer and landscape
painter to a specialist in mixed-media works and sculptures.
Part of that change was because of his own diversifying
interests, but part of it resulted from changes in the
environment itself. “Fifteen years ago, I was still doing a lot of
large-format landscape photography and paintings, but my
interests have shifted,” he said. “Plus, the landscape has
changed so dramatically, especially the atmospheric conditions.
“To get the pristine sunrises and clear vistas with coal-fired
power plants, diesel trucks, burgeoning population, well, it’s
almost impossible.”

He does some digital photography, but is thinking of beginning
to shoot again with vintage 8x10 film cameras. “It teaches you
about composition, the discipline of looking. It slows you down,”
Lancaster said. “As opposed to taking 300 pictures, using
PhotoShop and saying, ‘That works’.”

Concern for the environment is a theme that runs through his
works. For instance, the Skeleton Coast series employs
historic nautical maps as well as hundreds of items collected
from beaches. “You can smell the diesel off the maps from the
boat [the fisherman] was using,” he said. “And the things that
wash up on the beaches - some are plastic doll parts, broken
glass. It shows how we’re trashing our oceans.”

Lancaster’s wife, Krisanne, shares his environmental
concerns. She is president of the Canyon Country Heritage
Association, a group that focuses on issues surrounding off-
highway vehicles. In addition to their home in Bluff, they own
20 “extremely remote” acres near Dove Creek, Colorado.
Lancaster enjoys the contrasts between Bluff and Dove Creek.
“Dove Creek has a very peaceful female landscape of
sunflowers and rolling hills,” he said. “In Bluff, there’s a more
aggressive male energy in the desert and canyons.”

At Dove Creek, Lancaster has been hauling in pieces of
monolithic quarried rock to assemble into a giant “fractured
fairytale” that will have a waterfall and stream running through
it. The huge assemblage is partly for their own enjoyment,
partly to attract clients. “It’s an adventure. I’m living the
outsider-artist entirely and entertaining the hunters and the
farmers, for sure.” One farmer who has been in Dove Creek 77
years invited Lancaster to his “farm-implement graveyard for
the last 50 years” and told him, “It's yours.” Now Lancaster has
a plethora of heavy-metal implements and big chains to use in
his assemblage. The only problem is moving the pieces where
he wants them. “I’ve got a rock in the back of my truck now that
weighs 1200 pounds,” he said with a smile. “I keep thinking I
should have done this heavy sculpture when I was younger.”  

If you can't join J.R. for the Bluff festivities, you can see images
of his work at www.cloudwatcherstudio.com.