Fresno Consumers Ice Co.
Robert Winter, 2004 

Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
20" x 24"

Giclee Print:   $500
On Sheet Canvas, Unframed

Framed Original:  Not currently for sale

Artist's Notes

I went after a number of objectives in this painting.

For starters, it works surprisingly well as an abstract, if you stand it on its end so you can disregard the content.  That’s very much by design. 

I deliberately reduced the foreground to a pattern of simple, quasi-geometric shapes without much texture or other detail.  I wanted to put all the overlap and complexity and texture—characteristics of living things and their artifacts, in the otherwise rather stark simplicity of the scientific principles underlying our world—in the plane of the industrial buildings and the tree.  Showing life in this kind of context—like plants sprouting almost miraculously from cracks in the rigid geometry of a concrete sidewalk—is an ongoing interest of mine.

As for the rest of the scene, the sky is a color you might find in North Africa.  It’s a deep, intense, pitiless blue bespeaking the intense heat of an August afternoon in Fresno.  The single tree at the right-hand side provides a patch of shade, but it ends up mainly just emphasizing the lack of relief anywhere else. 

In this harsh and unforgiving context, the ice house becomes a kind of Nirvana.  I could only dream of the cool, dark respite provided within its walls by the shimmering substance around which it's built.

Interestingly, in the sun-faded lettering spanning the various joined-together buildings, the word “Ice” has noticeably more shimmer to it than any of the rest.  That’s not something I added.  It may have been part of what drew me to the scene in the first place.

And of course, there’s the Edward Hopper-esque character of the place.  How long has it been since anybody put up an industrial building in a downtown area, and made it out of brick?

Then again, how many ice houses are left?

 

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© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.