Smoke Three

Smoke Three has been in development for approximately three years. Unlike other works in the series, it remains active — Banker continues to revisit and add to it — and it is one of the few in the Smoke series that has not yet been framed. That openness is not accidental. The painting holds the quality of something still in motion.

A significant portion of the work was made on BLM land in the mountains of Montana, during a period of extended travel and outdoor living. One night, after driving farther up a two-track road into the mountain, Banker heard what sounded like a cat — far enough from any trail that the sound had no obvious explanation. He took a photograph there. It did not become part of Smoke Three, but it entered another work. That kind of lateral movement — where an experience belongs to one painting but sediments into another — is characteristic of how this body of work accumulated.

That summer, Banker was sleeping in his van and moving from place to place over several weeks. The work continued through the movement. Eventually he made his way to Highway 101 and drove south, the piece still ongoing. What the painting carries now is that accumulated time: the distance traveled, the revisions made in different conditions, the months between one session and the next. It reads as a painting that was earned over time rather than completed in one place.