DELOS VAN EARL

Delos Van Earl was born in 1951 in Port Angeles, Wash., the fifth of five children in a classic Northwest logging family. He moved to Crescent City, Calif., with his family at age 5. When he entered Shasta College in Redding, he thought he would become a high school art teacher and football coach. But he would earn a bachelor’s degree at California State University Chico and a master’s in fine art from Mill’s College in Oakland. He lives in Joshua Tree with his wife, Jena.

Driving through the heat of the desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California, you would be lucky to come across the studio of artist Delos Van Earl. Inside the warehouse-like building you will find piles of cool steel sheets, some sprinkled across the floor in preparation for welding or awaiting cutting. There are also paintings scattered throughout: some are finished, some are still wet with the most recent application of enamel, and others have a powdery dusting on top – the smell of freshly sanded paint lingers in the air. Everywhere you look, there are bright splashes of color and an aura of energy fills the studio.

While most artists who are as established as Delos have settled on a particular medium, Delos has managed to master both painting and sculpture. He captures a sense of balance and vigor in using either steel or enamel paint to form his creationsDelos works on about a dozen paintings at a time, arranging them about his studio, focusing on one, then jumping to another. Seeds, shells, string, feathers, and twigs are embedded in the 20+ layers of oil enamel tediously applied in sessions as each layer dries and is then subsequently sanded down. When complete, the paintings are hard to resist touching. The surface appears as though the depth of the layered enamel can be felt, but the paintings are completely smooth.

In Van Earl’s large paintings, grace comes at a tremendous physical cost: the process. He applies up to 20 layers of oil enamel paint on museum-quality wood panels — many of them as large as six-foot squares or paired in dynamic diptychs. Within each thick coat, he embeds little gems from nature — seeds, dried flowers, twigs, pine needles, grass, bird feathers, and other items. This transmutation of detritus into art — in addition to the tape, rope, and even foam he buries into the layers — gives way to the physical and aesthetic challenge of unearthing the final picture. This time-consuming (waiting for each coat to dry before applying the next) and exhausting (sanding through the layers) process ultimately gives each painting the appearance of a deeply textured surface. However, his finishing process — sanding, waxing, and buffing — makes for wonderful irony: The final pictures, chock full of the stuff of nature, are impossibly smooth to the touch and a gutsy departure from the rough, often chemically corroded edges of his earlier sculptures and geometric, painted steel wall paintings.