Stefan is in the final year of his MFA program at Syracuse, for which he is completing a senior project and writing a thesis. The project is a body of work, newly made art in his case. And the gist of the thesis is that the artist is constructing an artist's statement about that work. It can be fairly difficult to articulate what a body of work is intended to do, to provide theoretical underpinnings, and to explain methods. Even for representational art, paintings of landscapes, say, or portraits, the artist must translate layered emotions and impulses, as well as conceptual complexities, into common language, while trying to avoid reducing the work to over-simplification. It is no wonder we often find these statements difficult to understand.
But Stefan is not representational; he is an abstract painter. The task of making an abstract artist's statement that will pass muster for a master's thesis has to be convincing as well.
When Stefan first suggested the trip to Wyoming, he noted that at some point he became aware of the family connections inherent in his paintings. His current work is suffused with these connections, and he wanted to find more, to research, if you will, by learning about a grandfather he had never met and by visiting places he had heard about but never seen, principally the old Zoller family stomping grounds out in Wyoming.
A few months later, I showed him some notebooks and drawings his grandfather had done as a young man in Wyoming, material that I had been keeping in a box. Stefan's grandfather had a long history in Wyoming and Colorado. He was born in Boulder, Colorado, but raised principally in Cheyenne. He had not only been a student at the University of Wyoming, where he met my mother, but he had also returned there to teach Engineering after his war service.
From those years, what few things of his remain include a number of schematic drawings and a number of topographical elevations from his time as a surveyor. Stefan was excited by the prospect of incorporating elements of these line drawings and mathematical equations into his work. His first efforts clearly embodied the connections he was hoping for in a way that made representational explanations unnecessary and insufficient.
The trip to Wyoming would provide a different kind of material for this on-going project that I will characterize as narrative (mine, mostly), environmental (landscape and geography), and informational.
Once we arrived, the environmental and narrative elements of this material began to unfold. We needed to be a little more intentional about gathering information, so we decided to spend the first day at the University to see what we could find concerning my father and his work there.
As we did all of our days on site, we got up early to see the sunrise. But there was no sun on the horizon, no long and haunting shadows. It rained off and on the entire day. Of Wyoming's three days of annual rainfall, we got two. I made this comment to our host, the rancher, who good-naturedly responded with a corrective about annual rainfall in eastern Wyoming. I'm still not sure whether he knew I was joking.
About 9:30, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, we headed into Laramie.
Following a city map we drove onto campus and found the Engineering building without any trouble. It is situated next to the Geology Building,where we decided to begin our search for information. I had assumed any records related to surveying would be housed there. Everywhere we went we found people eager to help us. But information was not forthcoming. We learned two things at the Geology Building: that the surveying records it held pertained to the Wyoming Geological Survey and not to the US Geological Survey. No mention of J. Harold Zoller appeared in the state data base.
The other thing we learned is that there is a rock type called wyomingite. A box of samples sat on the counter for visitors to examine or to take, which I did.
Our tour of the Engineering Building had similar results. We found people eager to help, but literally no mention of my father. There was considerable information available about the recent era in UWyo engineering but almost nothing of any help prior to the modern era. The modern era apparently began in the 1970s. The Zollers moved from Wyoming in 1958.
But while the visit yielded no immediate information about my father, it did provide, via a cornerstone to the Engineering Building, a commentary on the nature of engineering, circa 1926, in the form of a cornerstone. The saying advances an aggressive posture toward the human struggle with the environment. We found evidence of that struggle everywhere.
The engineering folks sent us to the University archives, located on the top floor of the University art museum that stands within sight of the football stadium. I remember that stadium, or a smaller version of it, from my early years. The stadium is three or four blocks from the house we lived in on Custer Street. On occasion we were taken to the game on Saturday when my parents went. They sat on the "home side" of the field with the other Cowboy fans. We boys sat for free on the small bleachers in the north end zone, in what was known as the "knot-hole" section. When the home team scored, the ROTC cadets fired a howitzer in the south end zone and a student dressed like a cowboy rode a brown and white spotted horse around the field, whooping and waving his hat. At the end of the game my parents collected us to go home.
On game days when we couldn't attend, we could tell by the noise of the crowd and by the boom of the howitzer just how well the home team was doing.
The archives proved just as disappointing as our endeavors in the engineering building had been. Yearbooks from the years my father taught at the University did not even carry pictures of faculty, so even that baseline source proved unhelpful. We spent a number of fruitless hours sorting through a box of papers and folders that "might" hold a clue, but found none.
When we reached the bottom of the box the archive staff had brought us, we decided to stop the search. Outside it was raining harder. We had lunch, visited a University themed store, and then headed back to the ranch. On the way we stopped at the Wyoming Territorial Prison, which had once housed Butch Cassidy and other, less famous inmates. We learned that the territorial penal system was both harsh and, often, unfair. Not all deserved the punishments they were given, and few were as lucky as the young man below, who was free to leave after he had taken the self-guided tour.
Back at the ranch we spent the rest of the afternoon working. Stefan set up his water-color kit and began painting. I reviewed the day in my journal. We hadn't made the information breakthrough we had been hoping for. We learned what we already knew: it is tough for any individual to leave evidence of his journey. What we would hope now to gain would have to come from the environment itself.
On the other hand, we had seen where Butch Cassidy had done time to pay for some of his crimes. We were certainly starting to learn about cowboy culture.
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