MY FAVOURITE DIRT ROADS
Robert Kinmont was born in Los Angeles in 1937. He received his BFA from San Francisco Fine Arts Institute in 1970 and his MFA from University of California at Davis in 1971.
«My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969, consists of seventeen eleven-inch-square photographs, which hang side-by-side at eye level, so that one might have, in Kinmont’s words, “the experience of standing and looking down a road, which opens your mind in a way nothing else does.” (Email to the author, June 27, 2009) Kinmont avoids aesthetic virtuosity—he meant for My Favorite Dirt Roads to be “amateurish and a bit overexposed”—and combines method and subject matter to generate points of entry and discovery for viewers (Email to the author, October 25, 2008). The artist illuminates the range of association one of the roads contains:
This is my favorite dirt road. It goes up to Buttermilk and is mostly washboard and straight. It’s a modern dirt road, wider than most dirt roads. You can do fifty miles an hour on it. It’s sandy on the sides. I learned to drive on it and we used to go up it in the winter to count deer and hunt cottontail rabbits. I’ve ridden a horse up it and walked down it and lost a wounded deer by it and watched miners set dynamite charges to improve it. I’ve looked for chucker partridge, shot at quail, doves, done water colors of the rocks beside it under the trees over it, know one of the only unclaimed springs by it and watched mountain lions run away from it. It leads to a road that goes to hanging valley mine behind the top of Mount Tom, to Horton Lakes, to the artists’ cabin, to the beaver ponds, to the place where they count deer in the winter, to the cattle guard, to the miners’ cabin, to the top of the sand canyon, to the Basin Mountain Mining road, to the Rocking Chair Ranch, and starts from one of the only recorded spots of a battle between Paiutes and Whites, almost exactly where the stream that crosses the desert from Bishop Creek leads to the ranch where I grew up. (Kinmont, unpublished notes, 1967)
Descriptive and poetic, My Favorite Dirt Roads forms a rural ground-level map of Kinmont’s variety of experience and the imagined promise he perceives imbedded in the Bishop terrain.»
by Julie Ault “In Step with the Desert: The Morphology of Robert Kinmont”
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