The High Water 96 Detail Oil Painting,
A study of the affect of time:
Click on areas of
painting for details
-- For example, the old smokestack which
now oddly stands alone in the mid background.
A use of realism, the computer, the internet and oil paint to study a phenomenon.
mills along the Sugar River in Claremont of New Hampshire, high water from the thaw of Spring of nineteen ninety-six, painting of a New Hampshire scene by Paul Hall, the Claremont section of the Sugar River, labor became cheaper elsewhere, a work force that is too costly to employ, dependence on military industrial complexes, older American Cities, New England, the Love Building, Third World, the endocrine theory of learning, classroom environment, agrarian background, Java island, pushed out by the plantations, rubber plantations in Malaysia, sugar plantations in Fiji, Woody Guthrie, the misconception of monoculture, village, half the population now lives in mobile homes, tuna packing plant in Tutuila Island in Eastern Samoa, deciduous and pine forests provided the material for the masts
A lot of work went into this one; seven month's worth. Though I have often worked in "plein aire" in the past and perhaps will again, this one was done from a photograph which I shot of the river running through the city of Claremont, New Hampshire called the "Sugar River" which runs from Lake Sunapee to the Connecticut River. This river is normally hardly a trickle on a mid-summer's day, but it can be quite something in the early spring after the snow accumulation begins to thaw. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
Claremont is one of the older American Cities built originally around this locale that you see in the painting as many New England towns of the 17th and 18th Century were, around the power of a stream or river. In this case it all started with the construction of a grist mill over which, upon it's completion, the inhabitants got together and had a celebration. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
Finally the last mills on the Claremont section of the Sugar River took to the very thing that would start them away from their centuries' long tenure there by the river. -- By the river and the street on the other side of the large building on the left (on the other side of the dilapidated foot bridge), aptly called "Water Street": electric power. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
Now as we all know, there is only one basic thing that ever made the 20th century anything more special than the others before it. And that was cheap power. The cheap power of petroleum. It almost replaced slavery as the means to empire. Well, it seems that we are running out of the stuff and we may have to go back to water power again. It's as my old pun says: "Water you talking about!"
All that petroleum didn't go away. The wisest thing mankind could do was use it up. All that carbon is still there, but now instead of hydrocarbon, it's oxycarbon. I'll digress to cover this briefly. Oxycarbon is the renewable side of petroleum. Here the fuel comes from the fractional distillation of the oil pressed from seeds of plants that extract the oxycarbons from the troposphere.
So how are you going to do that, bunkie? Well, looks like you're going to have to let that workforce get back to the farm. You think I mean the 16% of the world that is global farmland still existing?
No. Man is by nature a digger. I'm talking about the 45% of arable land emerging from the terracing of mountains above the timber lines and the production of topsoil using the same types of mountain-eaters now used for making the dust mixed with tar in road production. You complain it would take armies to do it? That's one thing that nations have enough of.
I might add that I don't expect to see the initiative in mankind to do it. That's the problem with psychoeconomics. The so called merchants of cool. It's like poison gas in world war one in that it eventually floats back to your side, too. The unrenewable resource is a country's intellectual base, which, since it cannot be predicted where it will come from next, usually is enscripted to become the teenage cannon fodder for the military industrial complex's next generation of weaponry.
So the other scenario is that man may have to revert to the iron age of family forges powered by water. You can see the remains of one such unit in my drawing of the Blacksmith covered bridge (click to go there). And man may have to revert to the mills concept of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But these days you're going to have to have a much better benefits package than they did then.
I had the fortune of talking to one of the ladies who once worked in mills (such as the mill relics you see in this painting) and my neighbor across the street once worked in the Love Building (Center of painting) which though now abandoned, still has a workable hydroelectric generator system at the base of a large dam just out of sight from this view behind those rocks (right foreground). The lady whose name I don't recall was at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital waiting for a cat scan as was my elderly mother, which was why I was there that day. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
I remember competing with the television quiz show noising in the background to be able to hear her as she talked of life in the mills long ago. Most of the women came from the farms in the region and worked all day long for low wages and they apparently, from what I could glean from our conversation, had no breaks and no time off for lunch. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
It was an extremely difficult life, apparently, fraught with hazard and long hours of toil. Of course, I haven't been privy to any further information as to how the working conditions might have improved after awhile, but the mills met their demise first of all because labor became cheaper elsewhere and secondly because electric power enabled industry to move away from the waterside. Going farther and farther afield in search of the cheaper and cheaper labor force. Until finally, the production facilities are now mostly found in the so-called "Third World" on the farthest extreme of the world. [RETURN TO CONTENTS]
I paid a visits to many of the areas of the "Third World", or developing nations, which had the cheap labor used to make so many of the products we use today. I spent about seven months in Indonesia where I supported myself teaching English and French and was able to complete the first draft of my own English text book and also complete my first preliminary experiments to prove my "endocrine theory of learning" which would theoretically enable most human beings and maybe even some of the other forms of intelligence such as some species of primates which can use sign language to be fluent in some rudimentary form of English in the time span one half of one year to two years without having to learn grammar. RETURN
It was my first and so far only attempt to get the classroom out of the stone age. It's the classroom environment. Apparently the student needs a lot more stimulus for the brain to begin to form the nerve tissue necessary for a memory that constitutes something learned. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
But to report my findings on the labor situation, from what investigation I was able to perform, since most of my time had to be taken up with my teaching, I found that the population emerged over the centuries from an agrarian background to find themselves, in the late 20th century, thrust into a post colonialist combination of plantation systems and lately more and more, industry. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
The illusion that Java island, one of the most densely populated areas of the world, is crammed from shore to shore by struggling masses of overpopulation is served by the fact that most of the visitors to that Island usually rarely venture out of urban areas such as Jakarta, where a walk down the wide city streets at midnight reveals large families sleeping in clusters on the sidewalk. What is not apparent is the vast amount of empty terrain devoted to cash crops. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
Click here to go back to the "Realization" article.
In fact, just in my neighborhood in Jakarta, which my associate nicknamed "Coconut Alley", the streets nearby were lined with mobile booths lit by kerosene mantel lanterns, where retail items were sold by, once again, whole families (parents with several children usually) who, upon closing, slept inside these places in the small aisle not wider than a couple of feet. I find that these people could have continued in their agrarian life, but it appears that they have been pushed out by the plantations. I saw the same with the rubber plantations in Malaysia and the sugar plantations in Fiji. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
This is not really helpful to their economy. The difference between an economy with a backbone and one that's not more than a spineless ameba is simply this: the independence of the individual family farm. It seems that even though the financial success of a 50 percent plus agrarian nation causes a vast increase in wealth, it does pose a problem for industry and that is where to find the labor. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
It reminds me of the song by Woody Guthrie about a farmer's neighbors in Oklahoma in the thirties that "Got tractored out by the cats". That in tandem with the misconception of monoculture such as was observed in the rubber plantations of Malaysia. In fact, concentrating one species in such large areas causes the organisms to be susceptible to such things as disease which I understand is happening to rubber plantations in monocultural plantations throughout the world. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
I would argue that a five or less percentage of a nation's population in agriculture is counter productive and perhaps extremely so. I noticed that not only in the United States, but also in France and Spain, and would have had more input on other nations if I had the time. Fiji threw me out with only twelve hours to leave the country. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
That coupled with an extreme and ever growing dependence on military industrial complexes such as the one I observed in Bandung, Indonesia, where the Indonesian armed forces worked closely with the United States to train with an ever growing stockpile of American armament and aircraft, leads to an increasing demand for laborers in an industrial and less and less agrarian based economic environment. [RETURN]
This goes with the contemporary idea that a work force that is too costly to employ in a developed nation must buy it's sneakers from a developing nation; countries like Indonesia. Items routine for everyday life in a largely wealthy nation which once were made at home in that nation, but now come from a poor country where a successful family pools their meager incomes to pay their thirty dollars a month rent for that corrugated metal home in a village on the outskirts of some urban area or industrial site. [CLICK TO RETURN]
Meanwhile, the poor family in the wealthy nation pools their income to afford their five hundred dollars a month apartment. And in Southern California it can be one thousand a month, and you can only rent if you have an acceptable credit rating. Often it's more affordable to live in a motel room than an apparment.
Or if the apartment is too elaborate for those treated by the wealthy as the peons, there are nations as developed as the United States, where, I understand, half the population now lives in mobile homes. They are only mobile for limited distances, because of the expense of highway charges for large loads. I can't say that the new billeting relocation of whole populations is engineered, but otherwise it is indeed fortuitous, considering the global scale at which it's happening. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
Of course, while abroad I had little opportunity to inspect the industrial sites, but I had a chance to look around a little bit. The trips I was able to make through the Indonesian tea plantations or the sugar plantations of Viti Levu or the tuna packing plant in Tutuila Island in Eastern Samoa (where I did some thirty or so drawings that are now lost somewhere) helped me to get a perspective on the workforce that fuels the production of Western goods. Bear in mind that the Samoans have some recourse in the beautiful coral reef that still exists where in Tutuila alone they can go out themselves and collect seafood. In 1988, when I was there, they gathered an average of forty tons per year. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
So that takes us back to colonial America, the "Third World" of it's day, except that during those times a lot more people knew how to make things from scratch. And that takes us specifically the area of the Sugar River with it's auspicious sets of rapids in various areas along the stream running from Sunapee to the Connecticut Valley where the Connecticut river divides New Hampshire from Vermont. Here in the Claremont area from the time that that first grist mill was, perhaps painstakingly and perhaps perilously, finally assembled until nineteen ninety six, when you see this scene. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
The New Hampshire area and all of New England figured in heavily to the industry of the eighteenth century, when the timber from the excellent sylvan deciduous and pine forests provided the material for the masts and timbers of the wind powered shipping of the day. The wet climate and semi mountainous terrain lent itself to the water powered industry of that time as well. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
As the industry grew around the umber brick of Water Street and others like it throughout New England, so did the labor force that worked for those industries. The factories grew and grew until Claremont became quite prosperous. [CLICK TO RETURN TO CONTENTS]
One of the famous manufacturers there was Mr. Moody, who made shoes in the late eighteen hundreds. He also did a lot more for Claremont, including constructing an elegant hotel, the "Moody Building", today an office block. Mr. Moody was also an inventor, and the relics of some of his ingenious devises are still in evidence at his former mansion on Arch Road in the southern section of Claremont. [CLICK TO RETURN]
Eventually, the shoe works moved south of the Mason-Dixon line for the cheaper labor there and of course, the rest is, as it were, history. In fact, I think the painting is most about the one thing that I find extremely fascinating and that is time itself. There in the work, between the rocks in the foreground and Mount Ascutney fading in the distant mist, one can almost visualize the dimension of time. [RETURN TO CONTENTS]
I wrote a song in Paris back in 1980 called "Torrential Time", one of many I had penned examining the temporal subject, and if your computer has the ability to play background music you might have just heard it.
The use of this kind of representationalism that you see in this painting affords me the chance to take a deep look into object frozen in a moment of time by the camera and then symbolized by the mind. What took so long was the fact that each square inch of the work became a painting in itself. The only thing I did quickly was the sky and Mount Ascutney. That part of the work was done in one day, the rest took seven months.
Click here to return to "The Bridges of New Hampshire".
Click here to return to Voice Introductions, Page One.
Click here to return to the drawings from in and around Claremont, New Hampshire, page.
Click here to return to the Stage Coach North article in the Cosmos section.
Click on the thumbnail to see the digital artwork used in the background,
"Image114pastel1".
Click on any of the following to go there:
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
A study of the affect of time.