http://www.readitnews.com/culture/72-prescott-artwire/1468-prescott-artwire-exhibitions-1-07-2009
One of Prescott's News, Culture and Outdoors Magazines on line features Tony Reynolds.
Tony writes withing the article:
Here, Tony describes his experience on ‘Becoming Acclimated’:
Having come to Prescott four years ago I have been assaulted and put under attack nearly everyday. The barrage, at times, seems almost inexhaustible. I can only fight back as best I can. Arriving in town in a rented moving van filled with the odds and ends of a refugee from the “big city,” I was ill prepared to face what turned out to be a greater challenge than just starting over again.
A little background material first. During the 5 years prior to coming to Prescott I had lived most of my life in my car. No, I wasn’t homeless… worse, I was a commuter. I spent the better part of two hours in the morning and probably, on average , three hours in the evening, on the freeway. Between those hours I’d spend twelve to fourteen hours within the walls of “the company”. I might as well have been a lab rat (and probably was). When I arrived in Prescott I had prison pallor, my eyes would focused no further out than the width of an office cubicle, and my taste buds would rebel at anything without Jack’s secret sauce and sesame seed buns.
The Artist’s reception will be on January 23 during the 4th Friday Art Walk.
Iarrived in mid November during one of Prescott’s rare snow storms. The unfamiliar cold and the icy roads kept me incubating inside for a few days. That was to my advantage. I could rest and decompress a bit like a road warrior after a particularly bad battle. But then it began, and hasn’t stopped…the assaults.
Mind you, commuting and then working in a cubicle all day sets your horizon to no more than maybe twenty feet. When all you see on the road is the back panel doors of an eighteen wheeler for two hours, there’s not much need to focus out further. But here! Here in this … this “wilderness”, you have to be able to take in so much more. For the first month my eyes hurt constantly as I tried to take in the expanse, and my lungs ached as the schmutz in my lungs was replaced by real air. To my great amazement the horizon kept moving further and further out. Oak and Pine trees, rolling hills and granite crags have come into clearer focus. Who knew such things existed? Who knew I would be burdened with such vistas?
My only recourse is to react viscerally, to capture and refocus on this un-urban attack , to embrace the landscape and record it. When I was younger and just back from the Army, a stodgy art professor told me I was too old to start being an artist (I was 26) and pushed me towards the fascinating and intriguing world of double entry bookkeeping. Oh, poo! Let me go outside!
Now, instead of white shirts and power ties, I dress less austerely. I take time to walk in the woods not just look out the window at the scenery as it passes by. Now I make things, beautiful things and record what Wilda Cather observed in My Antonia, “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious."
I’m finding that the assaults on my city sensibilities have become more like old friends and sources of inspiration. We make nice together now. Come and visit?