They Might Be Giants

By Kelly Klaasmeyer

In their day, Thomas Moran’s landscape paintings of the American West were so influential that they helped persuade the United States Congress to declare Yellowstone a national park. This past winter, Moran’s 1892 masterwork, Nearing Camp on the Upper Colorado River, served as an inspiration for something a little different: Big Landscape, Big West, an installation at the Rice Gallery by California artist John Cerney.

Moran was an explorer as well as an artist, accompanying survey teams into America’s West. His work was included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) recent exhibition The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950. The exhibition examined ways in which artists shaped our vision of the West as well as how the West helped shape modern art in America. Cerney’s installation was presented in collaboration with the MFAH exhibition, and in it, Cerney sought to recreate the sense of wonder western landscapes evoked in 19th-century Americans. He chose Moran’s painting because, he says, “If I’m going to do my version of a landscape painting, I can’t do better than Thomas Moran.”

Big Landscape, Big West by John Cerney

Usually, Cerney’s art becomes part of the landscape rather than simply depicting it. He got his start as an artist by painting signs and advertising murals. While he was painting a scene on the side of a building—a garage with auto mechanics working inside—he decided to paint the sign that said, “We Accept Visa and MasterCard,” as a separate, three-dimensional element. Cerney liked the way the dimensional element looked against the flat painting, and the idea stuck with him. When he went back to repaint the mural three years later, he added another three-dimensional element to the building, a cutout of a Corvette.

“It didn’t take long,” he says, “before I realized that I no longer needed the building.” His paintings could be freestanding in the world, and, he says, “I could even paint my own buildings.”

Since then, Cerney has been painting giant figures that are planted in the landscape. Some of his earliest free-standing works were huge cutouts of farm workers placed in fields where the workers toiled. He garnered his widest recognition—including an article in the New York Times—for his cutout painting of a giant baby playing with life-sized tractors.

The Rice Gallery installation was the first time Cerney has executed an indoor project. Instead of placing his painted figures in the landscape, this time, he painted the landscape as well. Declaring that he doesn’t consider himself a fine artist, Cerney says taking on Moran’s work was slightly intimidating. To do it, he began by breaking the project into manageable sections, gridding off a large photograph of the work and then slicing it into more than 600 squares. Over a four-month period, he reproduced and enlarged each segment on its own 11-inch square panel of Masonite. Like the pixels of a digital image, the small paintings worked together to create a whole. In the end, there were almost 1,000 panels in the installation as Cerney expanded Moran’s image of the river and cliffs into a pixilated panorama that extended across three walls of the gallery.

And then there were the figures. In front of Sewell Hall, a cutout of a young boy crouched in the courtyard, peering through the gallery windows with a pair of binoculars. Inside, 12-foot-high figures of a family, dressed in clothing of the painting’s period, stood admiring the view and dwarfing visitors. The mother worked at her easel painting the same scenery, while the father perched on a rock and gestured to his awestruck daughter. High in the left corner of the room hung a cut out of a hawk. An audio track played the sound of wind and the echoing cries of birds, lending an sense of immersion to the scene.

Cerney may be an artist used to having the outdoors as his gallery, but in Big Landscape, Big West, he turned the tables, bringing something of the splendor and scale of the outdoors to an interior space.