Call of the Wild
Taos Magazine
COVER STORY
By Denise M. Spranger
Upon the newly built walls of Charles Ewing’s Antonito studio, a grizzly scuffles through blueberries along a slice of mountain lake. A herd of buffalo thunder toward you. Wolf cubs scrabble between the paws of their mother. And beside a campfire, an old bearded man tells his story.
Rolling back his denim sleeves before he pours a cup of coffee, Ewing might be a younger version of that man beside the fire. Through his striking images of Old West wildlife, haunting figures and rustic villages, Ewing tells his own story with ink and oil. Most mornings you’ll find him capturing that story at his easel—unless he happens to be on horseback somewhere above timberline.
“Our goal is to paint as many of the high lakes along the Sangre de Cristos as we can,” says Ewing, who enjoys painting trips with other artists. “Of course,” he adds with a grin, “there’s usually room for a fishing pole.”
Throughout Ewing’s life, a spirit of adventure is as bound to his artistic career as the fistful of brushes tied to his saddle. After graduating from college with a degree in Wood Technology, the Albuquerque native joined the Peace Corps on assignment with the University of Chile in Santiago. Ewing relates that prior to his journey, he suffered the loss of his father, artist Frank Ewing. Although the elder Ewing had never encouraged his son to embrace the “hand-to-mouth” existence of an artist, Ewing decided to bring his father’s art supplies along with him. During his stay in Santiago, Ewing began his study of art with well-known Chilean artist Thomas Daskam. His efforts—and natural facility—proved to be especially timely.
When political upheaval in Chile eliminated Ewing’s university position, Ewing was hired by the Chilean Department of Wildlife to illustrate a Field Guide to Chilean Mammals. Working with Peace Corps biologists, Ewing spent the following two years camping throughout the Andean Cordillera, recording indigenous wildlife in pen and ink and oils.
“We traveled the length and breadth of Chile. It was like a paid vacation,” says Ewing with a smile.
After completion of the project, Ewing filled a stateside position as a Wildlife Field Illustrator at the University of Washington before returning to New Mexico. Back in his home state, Ewing owned a gallery in the town of Cimarron until fire consumed the building, prompting him to re-establish himself in the cabin he had built with his father on the Conejos River in southern Colorado. In 1981, Ewing and Barbara married, settling in the nearby rural community of Antonito. The couple bought the old adobe—which dates back to the early 1900s—in which they currently live.
Since his time in Washington, Ewing had been working with the “scratchboard technique.” “I loved it,” says Ewing, “But I had trouble with the fragility of the medium. It wasn’t very amenable to the use of water…it just melted. So I went to fiddling and developed a thick clay coating that adheres to a sheet of masonite.”
Initially, Ewing intended the clay board solely for his own use. “We were fumbling around trying to manufacture this stuff in an adobe shed,” remembers Ewing, “We were up to our eyeballs in lack of expertise. And we were coated with clay.”
Fortunately, the business acumen of a neighbor’s family member eventually led to the industrial manufacturing of Ewing’s homemade product. Now known as Claybord®, the new medium has generated interest from artists worldwide.
Selecting a raw piece of material from a stack, Ewing offers a demonstration.
Beginning with a few lines sketched in pencil, the artist fills his brush with a mixture of India ink and water. Having laid this wash across the board’s surface, Ewing picks up a scrap of steel wool and lightly works the ink.
“With steel wool, you can manipulate the ink, or completely erase it. It gives you the ability to experiment on the page,” explains Ewing, “The India ink doesn’t remix or dissolve when you put additional water over it. So you’re working back and forth—making shadows, adding highlights. You can go over it as much as you want…pushing things back in space and pulling them out. This is the only surface in the world that you can do this with.”
On Ewing’s easel, a commissioned portrait is still in progress. Drawing attention to the subject’s long beard, Ewing discusses his process.
“Here I’ve put a wash over the highlights to gray it slightly. I then come back with individual strokes and scratch again to bring out some of the hairs that are catching the light.
“It’s a whole different mind set in drawing because it’s almost like sculpture,” says Ewing, who has recently begun to explore the three-dimensional medium. “Ink on Claybord® is a very sensitive technique. You can treat it as softly or as sharply as you want.”
Such contrasts appeal to Ewing’s aesthetic sense.
“So many artists over the years have used black and white, Ansel Adams, for one,” says Ewing, “His photographs have always amazed me for their drama. That’s what Claybord® work has as a potential: drama. It’s somewhat like impressionist work in that the viewer participates in creating the objects. Here you participate in creating the color that you want to see.”
Over the years, several lines of Claybord® have been further developed to accommodate the use of watercolor, pastel, lithographic and photographic printing. In his fully illustrated book, The New Scratchboard, Clay-Surface Techniques and Materials for Today’s Artists (Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001) Ewing details the evolution of scratchboard work as well as the step-by-step application of new techniques.
As compelling as his Claybord® work is, his black and white pieces evoke only half of Ewing’s story. As evidenced by the oil portrait of a young girl in Chiapas, autumn-hued mountain lakes and abundant figure work, Ewing clearly enjoys the different moods and possibilities of both mediums. Driven by his love of the natural environment, Ewing has carried his oils into just about any wilderness he can find.
“In nature there are so many elements that enter in—the changing light, the wind and the dust—maybe a deer running through. There are things you forget when you’re in the studio, like what wind does to an animal’s hair. Out there, you’re part of the landscape. It’s invigorating.”
As Ewing’s gaze drifts towards the tree-fringed pasture just beyond his window, he recalls the 70-mile canoe trip he took with friends into Alaska’s back-country. One morning as they were floating downriver, Ewing relates that he had found a moose antler in the water.
“Later, we stopped for lunch and I caught this beautiful salmon,” says Ewing, “So I laid the salmon and the antler in the water and painted a still life—which turned out well.
“And then we ate the salmon,” Ewing adds with a chuckle, “It was a good day.”
Walden Fine Art will feature “New Works in Ink and Oil” by Charles Ewing July 1st through August 31st, with an Annual Artist’s Demonstration on Friday, August 19th, 2005 from 1-5 p.m. Walden Fine Art is now at its new location at 106A Paseo del Pueblo Norte in Taos. For more information, call (505)758-4575 or visit www.waldenfineart.com