Arguing the Landscape: Artist Don Suggs Interprets the American West

Los Angeles artist Don Suggs. | Photo: Paul OConnor

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Something is missing from Los Angeles artist Don Suggs arresting landscapes: a patch of sky, a stretch of desert, an expanse of sun-warmed stone. In place of those essential elements are colorful concentric circles - abrupt visual interruptions that force the viewer to pause and reflect on what is hidden and what is revealed.

Each circular form disrupts the usual picturesque comforts we seek in landscape views, but it also informs us, Suggs writes. The thing that blocks our view is an opening in the picture to further meaning.

The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, Suggs has spent much of his career grappling with his relationship with the landscape - creating works exhibited in two recent solo shows. Paradise, featuring paintings and archival ink prints from the past two years, ran May 25 through July 1 at Venice gallery L.A. Louver. Arguing the Landscape, which ran Aug. 19 through Sept. 16 at Cuesta Colleges Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery in San Luis Obispo, collected paintings and photographs created over three decades.

Cuesta College fine arts instructor David Prochaska, who oversees the Miossi gallery, said he selected Suggs to kick off the 2016-2017 season because of the way his wide-ranging works address narrative and natural processes of awareness. In addition to Santa Barbara artist Eric Beltz, showcased in October, the gallery will host the group exhibition Vanished: A Chronicle of Discovery and Loss Across Half a Million Years, on display Jan. 19 through Feb. 16, and Arizona artist Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, showing Feb. 24 to March 24.

Don Suggs, Enid Angle (The Trees Heart)

The artists I chose this season are really exploring their perceptions of the inner and outer worlds, trying to address that duality, Prochaska explained. So much of this work is about reflection and how we construct our perceptions from natural experiences, as well as... the way that we look internally to our association to try to build some sort of continuity between the two worlds.

For Suggs, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised in San Diego, scenery - rolling green hills, verdant valleys, snowy mountain peaks and the like - holds a seductive, slightly sinister power. [Im not] immune to the charms of the landscape. Nobody is, the UCLA graduate acknowledged, but to be able to couch it in terms of what artists are required to do, it does require... a strategy of challenge, a disruptive strategy.

Rather than wholeheartedly embrace the pretty and picturesque, as past generations of artists have done, he opts for a more nuanced view of nature.

Don Suggs, Dark Girl

As Arguing the Landscape demonstrated, Suggs has found several ways to get his point across, from mesmerizing circle paintings to collaged photos of people looking at iconic landmarks. (Every three or four years I do a radical flip, he said.)

His Autochthonous Views, created in the mid-1980s, are barely recognizable as landscapes - registering rather as something more abstract. (The word autochthonous means native or indigenous. ) Suggs created the extreme close-ups of trees, rocks and other natural features by cropping grainy black-and-white photos he found in old Arizona Highways magazines, then rendering them in raw, radiant color.

If you take a picture the size of a normal magazine picture and you crop it to the size of a postal stamp, he explained, a new narrative comes into view. I wanted to do the landscape without the punchline, without the zinger or the money shot. (laughs) It was supposed to be eluding... the landscape and eluding the picturesque, he added.

Suggs Proprietary Landscapes series from the late 80s pushes the concept one step further. Part of each sweeping vista, depicted realistically in Sierra Club calendar fashion, has been replaced by flat rectangles or triangles of color.

Don Suggs, Sprite

More recently, Suggs has been experimenting with circular forms.

His Abyss Pool paintings reinterpret hot springs and thermal pools at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming as colorful concentric circles - glowing greens, acid oranges, bold blues. Each ridged ring represents a different element: water, minerals, even algae.

These are the furthest reductions I could do and [still] have them be landscapes, Suggs explained.

In the case of his Paradise Prints, the artist superimposes his circular abstractions on black-and-white photos of scenic spots such as Montanas Glacier National Park. Again, the colors come from the scenery itself.

My colors actually have a lot to do with narrative meaning, Suggs said, although he hesitates to discuss exactly what that meaning is. The worst thing about narrative in art is didacticism. I'd like there to be a narrative that is accessible without it being preached or over-explained or even explained at all.

But Suggs did open up to Artbound about the philosophy behind his work:

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How did you first become fascinated with landscapes?

The first memory I have of being interested in the landscape had to do with a Bible lesson. ...There was an image of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. And right in the middle of this green and blue landscape was this red and orange and yellow circle. It was the whirling blade of fire that was inserted between Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden to keep them from returning.

I was 8 years old. The only place Id ever se

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