Art: Long Trail

In his early cowpunching days, before the turn of the century, Clayton S. (“C.S.”) Price kept a sketchbook in his saddlebag and tried earnestly to draw what he saw around him. But the Price paintings on display in a Manhattan gallery last week bore little or no relation to his early sketches. C.S. Price, 75, had long ago given up “just painting pictures” to translate his own emotions into thick dull smears of paint.

At first glance some of his smearings looked cold and tasteless as mud pies, but a little longer study showed them to be full of feeling.

Price had come nowhere near putting a frame around the forces of nature, as Constable and Turner sometimes seemed to do. Yet dark and dreary though they were, his paintings hinted at big, surging things: earth, air, wind and rock.

Sometimes they coalesced into moonlit mountains, houses or shadowy wild creatures, and sometimes not. One might question the communicative skill of Price’s work, but never its integrity.

Integrity has made the shy, white-thatched bachelor a revered figure in Portland, Ore., where he lives, and won a place for his paintings in museums across the country.

(Last week Manhattan’s Metropolitan followed the lead of the Portland and Seattle Art Museums and the Detroit Institute in adding a Price to its collection.) It has led him down a long winding trail from his early days on the range.

As a youth, Price was always making things. He learned early “from a guy just out of the pen” to weave horsehair watch chains. He made a fiddle and played at dances (“I really could bow!”). He sketched constantly, finally got to art school at 31, attended both night & day classes and won a gold medal. His instructors, he remembers, were reluctant even to discuss such subjects as “that modern Whistler.” He made a success illustrating Wild West magazine stories, gave it up some 30 years ago to experiment with the freewheeling painting he does now. To live while he learned he “made frames for other artists who were selling.”

How does he describe his present work? “I don’t lean toward any ‘ism,” Price says. “To me my work is very realistic. [The important thing is to] get away from that tightening-up feeling. You’ve got to loosen up. You’ve got to feel all over, like pitching hay.”