If you've never been to Terlingua, Texas you can't taste the true flavor of the place while browsing  a travel brochure or a few photos.
 
The borderland  locale known as "Terlingua" is disputedly also recognized as Study Butte. Then up the road,  there's Terlingua Ghost Town. Local lore provides numerous arguments as to which is where. It's easier to think of the three as one and the same place. Anyway, the backyard of Terlingua/Study Butte adjoins Big Bend National Park, a land in which vastness takes on a vastly expanded meaning. Things die in the desert, National Park or not.

Deserts intimidate most of us, anyway. Deserts are uncomfortable. Desert life, whether plant or animal implies a definite ruggedness alien to those devoted to air conditioning and lattes.  At first glance, this borderland habitat is also stark, colorless, empty. Summer temperatures are commonly 110 degrees or more, unless there's a heatwave. Nights, you can freeze to death. Terlingua once hosted a large mercury mining industry, so there are those of us who don't feel comfortable rolling around in the white Terlingua dust that coats everything, and winter/spring sandstorms don't make it easy to keep out of that dust. The nearest hospital is a couple of hours away, and WalMart is only a whispered dream spread by those who vacation there.
 
The obvious conclusion is that anything and anyone living in such a place must be touched in the head.

Far from it.  Although there are the usual small town misfits living in isolation because they can't cope in society, the majority of folks living in the area are extremely intelligent, capable and self-reliant. At first glance, you might not be able to tell these two types apart, but never judge a west Texan by his hat. (And during Terlingua summers, staying scantily clothed and frequently wet is the fashion norm. This is not Manhattan. In the desert, shoes are tools, not fashion statements. I suspect you could spend a whole summer down there with less than a backpack full of clothes, and not wear half of what you packed.)

Scattered across the desert you'll find crumbling adobe ruins, discarded tools, broken things that would've cost the users too much energy to carry any further. Tumbled cairns pointing the way to who knows where anymore. Remnants of hard-lived lives. Some were failed lives. Most, I imagine, were not. "Hard" doesn't negate happiness.
 
Residing on the border is still a dramatic life choice. There are, after all, easier places to live. The thing is, many Terlingua residents have lived in those places and wouldn't go back now, not even for all the water in their radiator.

Terlinguans, man and beast alike, regularly enjoy softly painted sunrises and sunsets uninterrupted by the silhouettes of man-made structures. When you've been down there awhile, the colors become more vivid. It's kind of like being in a dark cave - deprived of visual stimulation, your hearing becomes acute. There, in the white vastness of the desert, every speck of color screams for recognition. In the apparent absence of animal life, seeing a line of ants marching in the heat can feel like a wildlife adventure. The cry of a hawk, the yips of coyote pups can send chills of joy down my spine. It means something is out there. Something besides me.

Some animals, like some humans, are more cheerful survivors than others. For that reason, around Far West Texas, we admire burros a lot. They're hardy, kindred souls who've shared the desert with us for generations. We came upon one just at sunset one December evening. At a glance, the lean old burro seemed pathetic. Nothing to graze on, no shelter, no protection from the large scary predators who rule our desert. But as the spotted burrro trotted toward a broken down wagon, I noticed spring in his step. The day was cooling. The sky splashed subtle color over the alkaline hills of dust and tuff and who knew what else. On closer inspection, I saw tufts of green clawing from the ground, purple tumbleweeds, lacy mesquite fronds. The burro saw us. Brayed. Swished his moth-eaten black tail, then trotted on about his evening business. Hard? You bet. Happy?
Who knows. But he's a Far West Texan.  I doubt he'd take kindly to being penned in some green Kentucky pasture about now.  What fun would there be in that?



"HAVING KNOWN BETTER TIMES"    12" x 15" pastel copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
oldspanishtrailstudio.com

        

Remember how you first entertained yourself? When you were a toddler, I mean. A preschooler.
Remember which things in your young world first shaped who you've become?

An archaeologist unearthing the world that is Lindy would find a stack of people, of loves and loathings, of experiences so deeply intrinsic to my current self, I can't map therm all. I certainly don't remember them all. First memories are, at best, fuzzy memories.
 
We burn early personal memories for a reason, though: First memories give us a template to expand our lives on. In my case, devoted parents and grandparents assured the tiny me I was a being of value. I took it from there, and my second memory involving family is of willful rebellion against my mother, a personally thrilling episode involving a water faucet and new white shoes. That experience also taught me I tolerate pain well.

I learned very early that I liked chocolate and hated mayo, loved super-sonic jet planes, feared snakes of any genus. Nothing in subsequent years changed my mind about those things, although I later added single malt Scotch to the love list and I now accept mayo in tuna salad, but never on bread.

I learned to mind my mother most of the time, my father, all of the time.  Without the benefit of siblings, I learned to play alone before learning to play well with others. Years later, remembering that I was a being of value, I chose wisely and joyfully added Jim to the top of my "love" list. (My retired jet pilot mate doesn't like mayo or snakes, either.)

But before there was a Jim, before airplanes or chocolate or single malt, even before crayons blessed my days, there existed in my world a thin stick of graphite encased in wood: The Pencil, my first best friend. Paper was nice, but, optional. I'm sure the closets in a couple of rent houses still bear my mark.
 
With a pencil, I could go anywhere and never be alone.
 
Speed forward a few years. My favorite jet jock is currently spending his golden years as a volunteer fire fighter in a place where wildfires are as common as covered dish dinners (way too much mayo) and rattlesnakes. This leaves me with large blocks of time on my hands. I'm happy in my own company, but one of the rules of firefighting is that fires never erupt when I want to be alone. Not to mention three long nights a month when these waterhose-wielding wilderness warriors train for proficiency.
 
Also, since we live up in the mountains, we often end up in town together with back- to- back engagements, which inevitably involves one of us waiting in the truck...

Jim escapes into a book. He's so low maintenance that I miss him when he's away.
I don't enjoy evenings spent without my husband. And I sure don't sit still in a pickup truck very well.
My parents would've scolded the preschool me to find something to do with my time.

So, in a flash of inspiration, I dug out my sketchbook. When we were flying, I used to sketch almost daily. Nothing grand. Just people, streets seen from hotel rooms. My toes. Somewhere, I lost the habit, despite now owning an entire case of pencils and several sketchbooks. Re-forming the drawing habit has been like reuniting with a lost love, except easier on one's marriage. Being stuck in town has become an adventure, and the subjects of my pencil intrigue more than views from urban hotel rooms. There's the historic fort, scenic Davis Mt State Park, local Sleeping Lion Mt., all within ten minutes of the firehouse. Interesting faces abound in Fort Davis and Alpine, so faces sketched from my photos help fill the nights and keep the worry level to a dull roar on nights Jim is off in the mountains, fighting fires.
 

SLEEPING LION MOUNTAIN AT THE OVERLAND TRAIL  FORT DAVIS, TX
11" x 14" pencil      Lindy C Severns   2009

I've even found the perfect platform for plein air drawing. I perch on the toolbox in the bed of the pickup, far from the slitherings of any reptilian locals. (It's not the way Monet did it, but it works for me.) Often I have the animals with me, and the truck bed contains the dog while the parrot prances around the railing. Odd is the norm in Far West Texas, so the only stares I draw are from tourists, folks I'll never see again anyway. It isn't the most comfortable seat in the house, but remember, I'm pain tolerant. Time passes too quickly. I race the sunset. I haven't forgotten to pick Jim up yet, but I've been late once or twice.

Funny, the things we forget to remember.


 SPILLIN' THE BISCUITS
12" x 16" pencil   Lindy C Severns  2009      

To see more of my drawings and paintings, or for a virtual vacation in Big Bend country, please visit my website!
lindycseverns.com

        

Much of my art and thus, my writing about my art focuses on the Scenic Loop, a 76-mile circuit around the Davis Mountains. Well worthy of its descriptive name on area maps, this sightseer's delight starts in Fort Davis, then weaves southwest past us all the way around the mountains. A majestic, rugged volcanic formation aptly named Sawtooth Mountain marks the major change in direction, the psychological halfway point. Past Sawtooth, to the north and east, the road winds by McDonald Observatory, Davis Mountain State Park, the historic frontier fort, then back into Fort Davis.

This usually deserted two-lane road circles lands ranched by the same ...<< MORE >>

A favorite professor of anthropology, Dr. Evelyn Montgomery, often lectured our class in Man and the Supernatural on a theory she apparently clutched close to the core of her own understanding of humanity. Dr. Montgomery suggested that in all that striving to better their hairy, half-naked selves into the supremacy of modern man, our ambitious and hardy ancestors gradually forfeited something immeasurable but absolutely vital to our well-being: our spiritual umbilical to nature.
 
For lack of a scientific term, she called this elusive and now-missing spiritual appendage a sixth sense, a connectedness to the earth that once encompassed both knowledge and intuition in a protective, portable chassis planted deep within each of us.

This favorite prof of mine claimed humanity's design includes an intrinsic connection to nature. Over millions of years of massing intellectual lore, she theorized that man allowed one of homo sapiens' most precious traits to atrophy. That leaves sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. Those bold senses we've got down pat. We email and twitter and blog. We download our favorite tunes, IM, leave voice mail. We obsess over the darkness or lightness of our third cup of coffee before nine, proclaim our Cabernet has dark chocolate undertones, our Chardonnay hints at grapefruit. We wear leather and silk and sumptuous velvet that begs to be stroked as we dance the night away under faceted crystal globes that spin and sparkle. It's not a bad life at all.

Okay. So we aren't so good anymore at feeling the eyes of a mountain lion follow us on our morning hike, at sensing an earthquake before picture frames crash to the floor. We're even less adept at intuiting our neighbor's silent pain, at living our lives in moderation, at being still and knowing our God, and thus, ourselves.

We escape to nature now. We even call our getaways "escapes" and we go to places we can build fires with twigs and perhaps just a cheat of lighter fluid when no one's looking.  We fill our living and working spaces with tropical plants and pump-driven waterfalls. Consciously or unconsciously, we seek to regain that which we've lost.

You'd think that life in a small town in the mountains would satisfy the missing sense for those of us lucky enough to enjoy such a life. But small town life is busier. We fill our days with activities. Meetings. Clubs. Lectures. Dinners. Benefit auctions and pot luck luncheons. Volunteer-ism rules a small town, where saying "NO" can mean something doesn't get done because there aren't enough willing hands to go around. Good causes, good people, worthwhile activities. But it's easy to get ensnared in a web of busy-ness. And I believe that along with living in cozy homes and not having to forage for our own food, its that busy-ness that disconnects whatever remains of our sixth sense. Even we must get away sometimes, and, we do. Jim and I take frequent drives, and our front door is the scenic loop through the Davis Mountains of far West Texas. We hike almost daily. (Today, we saw a new spider web spun between rocks on the ground. How do they do that?) But even that isn't enough.

I would add to Dr. Montgomery's premise. I think to be whole, we have to regularly recognize and experience silence. I believe silence reconnects us. Silence implies stillness. Introspection. Awareness. Appreciation. Intuition and Knowledge enter our spirits through silent corridors. I get as busy as the next person, but I've hiked some of those corridors, even flown through some. So I ask you to take five minutes from your busy day (do it now, if you can, or return for an escape later). Walk into this painting of the natural world south of Marfa, Texas. Study the mantle of cloud that cloaks the landscape in peace. Be still and listen to what nature says to you. Listen with that buried sixth sense if you can. But for me, silence is also brilliantly colored.



THE COLORS OF SILENCE 
ranchland south of Marfa, Texas

 a 24" x 36" oil on archival gesso panel by Lindy C Severns 2009
available at Midland Gallery,  Midland, TX   $5800 (plus framing) contact the gallery for final pricing
for an enlarged image, go to my website oldspanishtrailstudio.com

        

Big Bend National Park isn't for everyone. I suspect the majority of visitors oooh and ahhh and snap tons of pictures, then never return—especially those who vacationed there during the sweltering summer months. Summer in Big Bend lasts eight months. The rest of the year, it's just miserably hot in the afternoon. Unless it's windy and frozen.

Thirty-some years ago, we planned our first Big Bend adventure to last two weeks. We left after ten days. We would've left sooner, but we were visiting friends who worked in the Chisos Basin and we didn't want to look like wilderness wimps. Admittedly, it was a mistake to tour Big Bend on the heels of a Maui vacation. Hawaii is soft. Green. Easy. Wet. Big Bend country is harsh. Brown.  Potentially deadly. Arid. People are the only things that hurt you in Maui. Everything in the Chihuahuan Desert either pricks, sticks, stings or bites, and there, even a tiny lapse in caution can prove fatal.

We didn't really leave early—we fled toward the comforts of home.

I can't remember the stream of conversations that prompted us to return to Big Bend the following year, but we agreed we needed to give the desert another go. Our friends were still there, but that wasn't the only reason we returned. This second trip, we made it the entire two weeks. I remember driving away slowly, savoring our last moments in the desert. On this second trip, we camped in the same site up in the Basin. But we no longer felt the need to spend most of our time perched on camp stools precariously balanced atop our picnic table. (This first seating option had offered protection from the packs of javelinas that cruised the campground at dusk. We felt sitting on top of our table also kept us farther from the fangs of those rattlesnakes we believed to be hiding under every rock..) We returned year after year. We still do.

What changed for us? Why did we return to a place we'd fled from with a sense of fear laced with aversion?

Knowledge helps insecurities. Thanks to friends Beth and George, we'd learned a lot about the Big Bend, despite our initial temerity. Nothing killed us that first trip, and that was encouraging. But I think we returned because the Chihuahuan Desert, the Chisos Mountains, the Sierra del Carmens had quietly pierced  their way into our souls, the way a cactus spine impales a hiker's calf right through his jeans. It starts with just a prick, something you ignore. It burrows into your flesh while you're busy being thirsty. It hides deep in your muscle, eventually festering up to remind you of that splendid hike, of the perseverance that got you over rocks... through catclaw...past tarantulas, scorpions, giant lizards. It feels good when you pull the needle-like spine out. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth a little discomfort along the way, because cactus is part of the package Big Bend offers. The older I get, the more miraculous nature seems. Exploring a landscape that can kill me makes each breath a little sweeter. Respecting it isn't the same as fighting the desert. It is what it is, and when we travel there now, Jim and I become part of Big Bend's unchanging while ever-changing persona.

 I often get so involved in a place, I'll paint several landscapes in a row from there. For example, Jim calls this winter my Big Bend phase. We spent three weeks down there over the holidays, and I've done as many paintings since returning to the studio. So it's ironic that a painting that sold yesterday, while of Big Bend, isn't one I produced during this "phase".  I did it last spring after a day trip there—we were hunting bluebonnets rumored to be in bloom near the river. We saw one spindly bluebonnet. A view toward Mexico enchanted, though, and I painted it because it seems to represent spirit of the Big Bend, a land of harsh contrasts laced in rugged beauty. The pastel shows the woven blues and pinks and mauves of the Sierra del Carmens behind starkly white akaline rock from which spindly ocotillo stretch spiny trunks and red blossoms toward a blue sky. Hard and soft. Nothing matches, nothing blends. Each piece of the Big Bend is on its own, struggling. Surviving. Inviting us in.

I love this painting, loved painting it. I held it out of the gallery, entered it in a couple of national shows, hung onto it longer than I usually keep a painting without offering it for sale. But after selling several pieces right before Alpine's ArtWalk/Gallery Night, Kiowa Gallery suddenly needed it on the wall for that show. I understand it found a good home yesterday, and I'm glad someone else appreciates the Big Bend enough to live with this image I created.

There is a saying around here that after God created the heavens and the earth, He tossed whatever materials he had left across the far west of Texas. That's how He made the Big Bend. That's why it's so special.

I'm so glad He didn't use a standard template. Anyone can appreciate Hawaii. I think He offers Big Bend country to those of us who feel the need to stretch the boundaries of our souls a little farther.


WITH LEFTOVERS FROM CREATION       Big Bend National Park, Texas
 10" x 20" pastel on archival paper    $1750    (SOLD)   Lindy C Severns 2008

If you feel safer on top of your picnic table, pile those lawn chairs up there and enjoy the view. No one will laugh at you.
Not to your face, anyway.
Okay. I lied. The javelinas will laugh. It gives them something to do. Stretches their boundaries...

        

The past three years, Kiowa Gallery in Alpine, Texas has represented me and sold my paintings. Many, many of my paintings. We've been such a good match, I can barely keep finished work in my studio. Okay, admittedly, this is a great problem for an artist to have, and I'm hugely appreciative of Kiowa for creating it. I seldom hear a discouraging word from that quarter, and I hope our relationship goes on as long as deer and antelope play under the cloudy skies I love to paint.
 
Trouble is, I paint professionally, almost daily. I plan to do so for many moons. This ambition dictates showing as much work as I can to the largest audience I can stir up. Frankly, Alpine isn't the crossroads of North America. Plus, Kiowa shows only regional landscapes. Sometimes I like to paint water. Green things. People. Animals. I've known for a year or more that I need a second outlet for my paintings, and I've worked toward that goal. Painted diligently. Updated my brochure and lovely portfolio. Asked around about galleries. Checked their websites. Asked collectors. Read all that's printed about approaching a gallery. I've done my homework.
 
I narrowed my quest to two Texas galleries, names that kept coming up. Kiowa recommended both as good fits for my work. (Yes, I've been upfront with my present gallery about expanding to a second one. My goodness, why wouldn't I be honest about it? Manners, manners, manners.)  Since fall and winter are my busiest times for showing and selling, the logical time to make a move on Prospective Gallery #1 was late winter. Which would be now.

See how methodically I've approached this? An artist/gallery relationship can last a lifetime. It's a marriage.

I hope you're impressed with my master plan to woo a new gallery.
Because that's not at all the way I did it.

Artists, like normal humans, get sick. I like to think I can either ignore or beat anything that hits me. It's an ugly arrogance of mine. Life laughs at our arrogances. In late November, a rare genetic trait, huge bony growths under the tongue known as tori mounted an insurrection against my body. These key lime-sized knobs rudely started breaking up and cutting their way through my skin. This happened the week of Alpine's ArtWalk/Gallery Night, so I ignored the pain as long as I could.
 
The short version of my subsequent medical saga involves a systemic infection in bone, four rounds of antibiotics, four months of mind-shattering pain and fever interspersed with holidays, a painting vacation, two major art shows, myriad art-related cocktail parties and receptions, and several pastels produced while subsisting on chocolate Slim Fast shakes. My husband will tell you exactly how bad it got. I understand he was pursuing plans to sell me on Ebay. Finally, I agreed to an extensive surgery in Midland to remove the excess bone on each side of my mandible.  A very possible side effect of the surgery would be severing the nerve to my tongue, which could cause permanent loss of taste and speech.  ( By then, nothing I said was pleasant anyway, so this potential complication might have actually enhanced my starting value on Ebay.)

Gallery #1 is in Midland. (Which is why I placed Midland Gallery at the top of my list. Midland is home to people who buy art like I buy grapefruit. Also, I'd rather show my art somewhere I don't mind traveling to, and besides having roots in Midland, its only three hours from my studio.) Somehow, my feverish mind related gallery representation with oral surgery. Brilliantly,  I decided that the day of surgery would be a good time to inform #1 Gallery of my existence. By now, my husband wasn't arguing with me about anything, so he did nothing to dissuade me from my mission.

I emailed the gallery owner, whose name and email address I'd filched off his webpage. Instead of politely giving this busy and very important person the option of setting aside time for an appointment, if he was even interested in interviewing a new artist, I told him when I'd be coming.  This lapse in manners I deemed necessary because I had only a twenty-minute window between the time the gallery opened and my surgical appointment. (This actually made sense to me, at the time.)  I did not receive an answering email. I took this as a "yes". When I realized that the oral surgeon, who I had thus far only seen in Odessa, would do the surgery in his Midland office a few doors down from Midland Gallery, I took it as a sign from God— on both counts. (Location, location, location.) 

Once an artist gains an appointment to a prospective gallery, everything I've read suggests the artist take half a dozen pieces representative of one's art. I packaged up one pastel landscape. At 38" long, I think I figured he might be able to visually break that one up into several smaller paintings. I forgot to take my meticulously updated portfolio. Forgot to take even one of my lovely and professional-looking brochures. Didn't even think to take a printed artist's bio. We arrived ten minutes early, parked and waited for the gallery doors to open. Then, painting in hand, I walked in and introduced myself.

I take a lot of pride in my appearance. For this occasion, I had agonized over what outfit would still look okay splattered with blood. The two and a half hour surgery would produce a lot of blood, I was told. I felt a little tacky in my thrift shop t-shirt, but not so tacky I was willing to sacrifice a nice blouse. Also, I'd been warned not to wear jewelry into surgery. I feel a little naked without jewelry, but my neck was so swollen, it was probably better not to call attention to my face anyway. I remember sticking out my hand to gallery owner Mike Crume. "I'm Lindy Severns," I said, not smiling because I physically couldn't. I forgot to mention to you that I was still in the afterthroes of an allergic reaction to the antiseptic mouthwash I'd been prescribed right before Trappings of Texas. My tongue, which was by then merely brown and blistered to twice its normal size, had been black all through the Trappings weekend festivites. My throat was no longer closed, so I could breathe normally again as I feverishly introduced myself.

I showed Mike my painting. He showed me his framing area in the back. We danced around details a bit, talked prices and commissions.  Thinking he might object to black-tongued artists, I assured him I was a nice person who was having a bad day. I didn't mention surgical terror, but later, he said he saw it in my eyes. I was glad to hear this, because that meant he hadn't paid too much attention to the tacky shirt and lack of jewelry. Jim came in to herd me down to the oral surgeon. Mike kept the single painting and asked for half a dozen more by the end of the month. "We can handle anything else through email," he assured me.

My body was producing a lot of happy endophins by then, which helped see me through the surgery. When I woke up, I was thinking not about bone amputations but about pastel landscapes. I had my first hamburger yesterday. Two weeks after surgery,  I can taste, and I can speak, more normally than when I had a mouth full of bony mushrooms. I've delivered three more paintings and a stack of brochures to Midland Gallery. I'll take the rest when I go for my next surgical follow-up early in April. I sent Sanjay Reddi, MD, DDS a box of my oversized fine art greeting cards with a note of thanks. Because of him and his staff, I have my life back.

Mike Crume could've turned me away. And/or I might be speechless now. I might sell well in Midland. I might not. The tori might grow back. That's simply life. Even the best planning takes you only so far in life. My Daddy, Coach Dave Cook once coached a group of gangly young basketball players into a State Championship for Lubbock High School. He used to tell me you can only make a basket if you shoot for the hoop. No guarantees of success, no sure shots.. But if you don't shoot?
 
Not shooting is what failure is.

Here's the first painting I took to Midland Gallery. It's of sunset on the last day of the wonderful Big Bend painting vacation we took over the holidays, so it means something special to me and to Jim.  I did it while experiencing fever, pain, and the joy painting brings me.  God in his wisdom gave me the gift of art right along with those wretched tori. That's life.



A TERLINGUA SUNSET   18" x 38" pastel on archival paper   by Lindy C Severns 2009 
available at MIDLAND GALLERY  4610 N  Garfield  Midland, Texas   www.midlandgallery.com

        

TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS, the annual invitational juried western art and cowboy gear show at the Museum of the Big Bend is a premier show for collectors and artists. The location: a recently restored stone building on the lovely Sul Ross University campus in scenic Alpine, Texas. The ambiance: genuine, honest-to-God western, as Trappings is held in the heart of cowboy country in conjunction with the Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The exhibit: intimate, well-lit, tasteful, attended by discerning locals and loyal collectors.
 
I took Best of Show in Art there in 2007. I'd love this show even if it wasn't so well-executed.
 
2009, my third year of inclusion in Trappings has me looking forward to it as a reunion with other artists and patrons of western art as well as a venue for showing my paintings to a broad audience. Museum Director Larry Francell and his assistant, Liz Jackson, along with curator Mary Bones and the rest of the small, dedicated  museum staff work overtime to pull off the party of the year—a lavishly laid out spread of food and drink hosted at the museum the night before the exhibit officially opens. (I hold that food and drink sell art better than no food and no drink. One woman's opinion. Think about it—shrimp, strawberries and wine, as well as anything involving chocolate cannot be wrong when one is contemplating an investment in art.)

Behind the scenes, these tough-skinned museum folks juggle the sometimes petty, sometimes critical needs and demands of us artists, our collectors, and the show's generous sponsors. A working cowboy who spends untold hours tooling one leather belt or casting a set of silver spurs while the cattle are sleeping doesn't necessarily want the same thing from the show that I do. It's up to the museum people to see to it that our offerings complement each other. Beyond the aesthetics, this fun time for all is a money-raising event that funds annual programming for this remarkable little award-winning museum. Food, conversation, fine art  brings money for the museum to sponsor kids programs, special exhibits, more fun things. Who can beat a deal like that? All the museum asks of us creative types is a donation for Saturday morning's live public auction, or a very reasonable commission on any sales.

Some artists and gearmakers opt to pay the commission if they sell. To me, donating a nice painting to this worthy cause is a no-brainer. I gladly pay my gallery a hefty commission for every painting sold directly or indirectly through their efforts. Because Kiowa Gallery—also there in Alpine, just down the railroad track a ways from the museum— represents me so diligently and with such integrity, I also pay Kiowa that same commission on my Trappings sales. I don't have to do that. But I believe you get what you pay for, and thus far in our relationship, gallery owner Keri Artzt hasn't proved me wrong. If you've been adding this on an abacus, by now you realize that I don't get all that much money from my paintings, so don't wait for me to pick up your dinner check unless maybe we've dined at Nel's Coffeeshop in Fort Davis, that because it's so reasonably priced and also, because Nelda and Jerry are good friends and I want them to stay in business a long time. A little digression there. Maybe I'll get one of their chocolate chip cookies out of this plug. Anyway, I hand over commission money all the time. In this case, I have a chance to put one more painting out there.

Because I don't do prints of my work (my fine art greeting cards do frame up handsomely, but even those are hand-produced by my own little fingers)  I'm darn stingy with my paintings. I rarely discount them, because that isn't fair to the collector who pays full price—and trust me, I'm not running a garge sale out here.  It follows that if I give you an original, you are way more than special to me. Or else, I've sadistically decided to curse you with something you must quickly drag from the closet to hang when I visit. (You know who you are. Those mothballs stuck on the frame are a dead giveaway.)

There's only so much of me to go around. In my lifetime, no matter how hard I work at it, I'll produce a finite number of finished paintings, and not all of them will be good. When asked for a donation (and I'm asked all the time, so when I say no, don't take it personally) I choose my causes wisely. I donate one or two pieces a year, maybe three...and the Trappings auction gets first dibs.

By being extremely discriminating who I donate to, I can afford to give nice paintings.  I'm a hard-core advocate of donating not just my work, but work I'm proud of.  When the auctioneer holds up one of my paintings to open the bidding, he's holding me up there. "Here's Lindy's soul. She wants to know what you think its worth today. Do I hear five...?" Some auctions go better than others. Last year, my donated piece went several hundred dollars higher than retail, making it the highest selling auction item. That's the exception. People love to get a bargain. But I don't want someone to get a bargain culled from my colorful stack of "I learned about painting from this"  works. I plan each Trappings painting, paint each the best I can. I don't then go through them and choose the weakest one to give away.



CATTLE COUNTRY   14" X 18" pastel by Lindy C Severns   $2350 retail
Trappings of Texas 2009 Live Auction donation

Like the other three Trappings paintings, I planned this year's Trappings auction donation to fit my chosen theme of isolation in open spaces. I cut my canvas (I only use Kitty Wallis museum-grade pastel "paper") to a size equal to my largest entry.  Okay, it is more modestly framed than the three that will hang. (Kiowa Gallery graciously donated that piece's framing to the museum.) Framing's the only difference in quality, and it's still quite nicely framed.

Maybe it's the colors. Or because this painting depicts my home turf,. I think this is my favorite of the four.

No, I won't get any money from this sale, but when the auctioneer opens the bidding, I won't cringe, embarassed at being represented by something less than I'm capable of.  I won't worry that someone will buy this one for pennies, deduct it from their taxes then stuff it under moth-eaten blankets in a forgotten closet.

I know how much my soul is worth, and I won't sell less. The rest is only about money.

To see my other Trappings paintings, or to browse through other paintings that I do get money for, visit my website at OldSpanishTrailStudio.com.  For information about Trappings, preview party tickets, the auction, whatever, email ejackson@sulross.edu

And don't forget to visit Nel's Coffeeshop when you're in Fort Davis. Use my name and I may even get a cookie out of it.

        

June a year ago, a massive wildfire swept Jeff Davis County. Volunteer firefighters, including my husband, fought the stampeding  blaze all week. This wind-driven inferno raced within a mile of my studio, and that's way too close.  While the firefighters and Highway 166 kept the fire from charring our corner of the world, some sixty thousand acres immediately opposite us burned. I glumly resigned myself to seeing and breathing soot for seasons to come. Silly me.

All it took was rain.

First, charred survivors of branching cholla bravely sent out new growth, even a few pale blossoms. Within a month, you could drive the route from town to my studio without realizing there'd been a fire—-that is, unless you knew there used to be oak trees lining the mountains. Or how many antelope once roamed there. The grass on the fireswept side of Hwy 166 came in noticably greener than the grass that hadn't burned. One stretch of grassland sprouted a deep turquoise color, the likes of which you associate with glacial lakes. Had I painted it, the color wouldn't have read true. By late July, all the burned acreage was a lush jungle of renewed vegetation, and those of us who'd witnessed the fire appreciated every speck of color that presented itself in the landscape.

One hot summer evening post-fire, we drove out to visit our friend Boogie. This socializing involves trucking five miles off the highway on washboarded, potholed dirt, a half-hour adven ture that took us through the heart of the burned zone. Halfway there, grazing cattle blocked the scraped surface that passes for a road in these parts. The large hairy mammals guarding Boogie's road seemed miffed at being disturbed by our diesel truck.  (You know a ranch cow is miffed when he lowers his head to one side, rolls his eyes until they show red, then makes a loud noise bearing zero resemblance to the pleasant "moos" Old McDonald hears from his farm cattle.) I can't say I blame them. There they stood, thousands of pounds of beef chewing their cuds, lifting their tails now and then to fertilize the land, flicking away flies and watching the sun go down. Then up we drive, a silver ton of noise and fumes and waves of dust.. "We're intruding , aren't we?" Jim said. "They belong here, live here, do cattle things all day. We're the outsiders..."

Even as distinguished members of the much touted species homo sapiens, we felt as if we'd rudely crashed a family dinner.  We convinced the lead steer to move off the road before he could shout "Remember McDonald's!" and lead a stampeded charge against our truck. We drove on, scattering cattle, feeling a little like peeping Tom's. We discussed the myriad unseen worlds around us, pockets of nature that care nothing about us humans with our petty vehicular activities. I mean, we're the center of our own universes until a herd of surly cattle block our road.
 
We came to a familiar stock tank. The previous month, we'd seen it lined with cracked earth and rimmed by brown grass and dessicated cactus. Now, it held water. Amazingly, strung around its perimeter like a jeweled necklace grew a jeweled lushness of vegetation: mesquite, cholla, catclaw, prickly pear. Deep footprints—most unidentifiable, so many layers had been superimposed on one another—etched its muddy banks. Nothing bigger than birds moved, yet the tank vibrated with life. This flat place between the mountains, so depressingly desolate even before the fire, now thrummed with life. I thought of musicians tuning up their instruments before a concert. Waiting.

What creatures did that tank wait to host that night? Who drank there? What crept in its shadows? There would've been death there, and birth maybe. I don't know. I was an outsider, only an observer. All I know about that place is that at dusk that day, it was there, waiting for whatever might want its water. Seeing that tank decorated with the products of wind and fire and rain made me feel serene, excited, good about life. And so, I painted what I felt there.

What would an observer feel, looking in on the pocket of world I inhabit and claim as my own?
I can't answer that. I do know you can learn a lot from irritable cattle on dusty roads.


"AWAITING NIGHT VISITORS" by Lindy C Severns   copyright 2009 
12" x 18" pastel on Wallis museum-grade paper   $1900 framed

One of three Lindy Severns 2009 TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS entries on display at the Museum of the Big Bend, Alpine TX
on the Sul Ross University campus. The invitational juried western art and gear show, held in conjunction with the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, opens the last weekend in February and runs through April. For information or to purchase tickets to the opening reception and preview party contact assistant director Liz Jackson, ejackson@sulross.edu.

You're always invited to visit my website at oldspanishtrailstudio.com where you can learn more about Trappings and my Far West Texas landscapes.

        

During our weekly half -hour drive into Fort Davis on Sunday mornings, we count animals. It's a rare Sunday that we don't start the count with mule deer and javelina, hawks, sometimes an eagle. This initial collection is followed by a handful of surly open range cattle, more deer, rabbits. Once, we saw a bobcat. Antelope are common. Coyotes aren't, so we get excited when one trots along the fenceline. We almost always interrupt our count to say something like, "This drive never gets old, does it?" or, "We don't take this for granted, do we?"  My husband and I once sat a few dozen stories high, in a rooftop bar in uptown Manhattan counting wrecks as they occurred. We are easily entertained.

Living inside the scenic loop around the Davis Mountains entertains us greatly.

When the familiar landscape decks itself in Sunday clothes, we take note of that, too. On one particular winter Sunday, we drove from sunny blue skies right smack into all these mystical feathery boas of fog. Jim is generally very patient with my compulsive picture taking — I go nowhere without my trusty Canon digital camera— but after years of marriage, I know when not to beg him to stop. Like, on our way to church. Sunday mornings.
 
Going to church, I'm usually running just a teensy bit late as it is. (On this particular Sunday, I'd washed my hair, a time-intensive act that automatically throws my mate into an obsessive/compulsive bout of clock-gazing as he paces the floor muttering how he hates to be late. I think it's a male Presbyterian flaw he has. I'd also wriggled into hose and heels, something surprisingly difficult and time-consuming after wearing jeans and hiking boots all week.) 

On Sunday mornings, I may gaze longingly at a lovely sky or dazzling shadows crossing the mountains, but I bite my tongue and let that photo go unsnapped. Now the wrapping of fog on those familiar mountains had me squirming in my seat, spilling coffee down my hose and into those wretched heels that I only wear to stay in practice. 

This fog was enchanted.  The lonely windmill, the red grassland, the frozen cholla, the layers of mountains. The icy, floating aloneness of the draped mountain landscape made me glad I wasn't out there on horseback. And, a little wistful that I wasn't out there on horseback.

Jim said, "Do you need that picture?" even as he slowed and pulled onto the shoulder.
Proof, of course, there really is a God, even on days I wash my hair.



MOUNTAINS ABOVE THE CLOUDS          7" X 18" pastel on Wallis museum-grade paper
Lindy C Severns   copyright 2008    2009 TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS     Museum of the Big Bend   Alpine, TX

This scene wasn't only magical. It fit the theme I'd chosen for this year's Trappings of Texas paintings. (Trappings is the Museum of the Big Bend's annual Invitational Western Art and Cowboy Gear show and sale in Alpine, Texas.)  I want the four paintings I hang there to speak of solitude. Silence. Spiritual moments in places seldom seen... 
I want these paintings of mine to make the viewer stop and image seeing them from the saddle...

When I paint, I don't know where my viewer is coming from. I certainly can't make my viewers feel what I feel.
But I can try. I can try to make someone sitting on a rooftop in Manhattan and listening to sirens hear the silence of fog-wrapped mountains. I can try to make you smell the ozone-rich clouds float their dampness down into crusty-dry grass and dessicated cholla stalks. I can even hope you see an eagle disappearing past layers of magical clouds as he climbs past an island of mountains.
And once, we saw a bobcat spring through high red grass, right about there.
Look closely. Be very quiet.
You might see one, too.

For more of my paintings or more about Trappings of Texas, visit my website! LindyCSeverns.com
For ticket information to this year's preview party and wall sale, email ejackson@sulross.edu

        

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A painting, in my mind, begs both an internal viewer (that would be me, the artist/creator) and an external viewer (that would be you, the critic/admirer, a busy person who thankfully bothers to pause when they encounter fine art).  I paint for myself, but it pleases me just silly to show my work to you.

Now, in my mind, any viewer is a good viewer. People's taste in art varies so much, a given work of art will reach some viewers, repel others and leave the majority walking away in kind indifference. People have preferences, which keeps life interesting.  Even within the small circle of folks who collect my art I see preferences. Animals or no animals. Cloudy or clear sky. A familiar mountain or a shadowy valley. A favorite season. Blues or reds. Sizes. Shapes. Price ranges. Frames.

I'd go crazy if I thought about all that before I started a painting. Way too analytical for me. Since I'm my first viewer, I start by choosing a subject emotionally.  A scene must speak to me or there's little chance it will speak to you. I start with a gut feeling, which leaves me a Texas-sized choice about what to paint next.  Because of this, I consider it a luxury to know my audience before I start a painting.

The Museum of the Big Bend's annual western art and cowboy gear show in Alpine, Texas offers a custom-made audience. Trappings of Texas is an invitational show. It expects its invited artists to exhibit new work within tightly fenced boundaries.  Art must be either (1) authentic cowboy art (working cowboys doing cowboy things) or (2) traditional landscapes of Big Bend country. Each lucky artist knows precisely what the people who buy tickets to the buyers' preview party or folks who wander into the museum to view the two-month long show want to see. And who they want to see it from.

Tempting as it is to revert to my pencil drawing roots and shoot off a finely detailed cowboy figure, or to paint my friends Bill Max roping or Tom in the smoky cloud of branding, I leave that to the real cowboys who paint real cowboys, like my talented neighbor Wayne Baize. I live on a ranch, but I'm not a cowboy. I've been inducted into the small circle of Trappings artists because I paint the land of Far West Texas, where cowboys do their cowboy things. I can draw cowboys, sure, but on my own time. Trappings gives me the privilege of capturing the rapidly vanishing landscape those cowboys ride.  Done correctly, it's a big job, and a worthy one.

I get to enter three paintings, plus another that I donate to the live auction. I don't believe in hanging paintings together without a plan. This year, I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to paint. Before selecting this year's subjects, I imagined all this historic ranchland covered (shudder) with subdivisions and condos and pavement. And, with people. What intangibles would be lost, if that happened? What of the cowboy's world do I have a chance to preserve on canvas?  I have the audience. The responsibility is mine. I don't want to disappoint by painting the wrong things.

It's easy to paint beauty, but it isn't only the beauty out here that begs to be painted. There's the vastness of this country, the stark isolation and aloneness of spirit that both haunts and comforts. There's the big sky that covers a cowboy like the dusty hat he's never without. The subtle thorns. The deep shadows. The promise and mystery of danger and of distant horizons.

My husband likes to say, "To experience this country, you have to get off the pavement."  That's where I chose to go with my first and largest Trappings painting.

We drove through Marfa and headed south, where the rocky peaks and volcanic outcroppings of the mountains melt into rolling grassland as far as the eye can see.  Walk a few feet in any direction, turn, spin under the bluest of skies: You see no houses, no automobiles, no man-made structures save a few weeping strands of barbed wire strung between crooked posts. Stand there for hours, days even, and nothing changes but the sky and the shadows. You have the sense of being alone with God, responsible for yourself and nothing more. And nothing less. The cowboy myth isn't a myth out here in Big Bend country. It's a fact.
And now, it's a painting.



"MILES AND MILES OF TEXAS"
14" x 18" pastel on Wallis museum-grade paper
by Lindy C Severns copyright 2008

$2500 professionally framed under museum glass

see this painting during TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS 2009  at the Museum of the Big Bend  Alpine, TX

Buyers Party Fri. Feb. 27th 6 pm (for ticket information, please contact the museum  ejackson@sulross.edu
Live Auction  Sat. Feb 28th 10 am
The show will open Saturday Feb. 28 and run through April 26 2009

Go to my website for more information about Trappings and other exhibits. As I did this painting, I realized it begged to be done on a larger scale, That second piece, at 28" x 36", is titled "The Road Less Traveled" and is offered at Kiowa Gallery (kiowagallery@sbcglobal.net)  And check back soon for the stories of my other three Trappings of Texas paintings.

        

Whenever coyotes wake me with their yipping and yapping and howling and all those nocturnal carrying ons, I almost always smile. Usually, I'll raise the window, then listen awhile before going back to sleep, a little bit happier and more content than I felt before the coyotes' riot of a serenade.

A long time ago, I went to school to study animals. I understand that my rowdy neighbors are simply predators going about their lives, canid types struggling to survive and hunt another night, wild critters driven to feed the pups, hairy, mangy and without the house manners of our terrier. I get all that about instinct and survival. I do.
But coyotes seem to enjoy their requisite night adventures a little more than they must to survive. (I suspect coyotes refuse to read all those textbooks about their habits.) Coyotes populate much Native American mythology. It isn't surprising that they are known as "Tricksters". Scoundrels. Notice how often they're depicted with smiles on their scrawny faces. I think coyotes enjoy what they do. They hunt, they eat, then they wisely spend the hot afternoon in their dens, belly up, just scratching the occassional flea and waiting on moonrise. Not a bad way to handle the stress of surviving.

If you still doubt my theory, contrast the embarrassing passion of coyote songs with those mournful, complaining brays burros so diligently provide. (If you've never heard a burro bray, imagine stripping the gears of a semi while stomping a sleeping tomcat's tail. Repeat five or ten times to complete one bray cycle.)
I like burros. I even paint them.  I suspect that if coyotes were stuck in the sun all day, penned up in a dusty, grassless corral, their songs might be more abrasive on the ears. But I truly think burros, by nature enjoy belly-aching about their lot. Much like the rest of us.

I haven't led a charmed life, but mostly, I've been lucky enough to spend the bulk of my days doing what I love. (Notice I didn't make a bold statement about being lucky enough to consistently make money doing what I love. That's another braying burro entirely.)  I love to do a lot of things, so neither have I spent much of my life being bored with my days. Just the opposite— I tend to do so much of what I love to do, periodically, I need to hibernate. This, so I won't start braying at every passer-by.
 
The symptoms that induce braying come on slowly. My back starts aching from standing at my easel so long.  I begin snapping at my husband and scolding the devoted dog for her devotion. I'll cuss nastily when the phone rings, then scold the parrot for cussing. I skimp on exercise. All mail gets tossed into my to-do box, which, of course, increases the stress level. I find myself consistently serving meals on paper plates and thinking about what wine to serve with microwaved Spam.  I avoid social obligations, or participate by going thru the motions, which means I forget good friends' names and excel mnore than usual at social blundering. Painting becomes, if not a chore, at least something else on my growing to-do list.

I can start braying, for sure. But that doesn't endear me to my friends and family. Better to join the coyotes.

This holiday season proved especially hectic. Painting had consumed much of my time for several months. I'd done zilch in the way of Christmas shopping. (Not a smart plan when you live three hours from the nearest shopping mall and enjoy a less-than-high-speed Internet connection.) Not surprisingly, I got sick and spent several weeks on antibiotics. I couldn't get excited about decorating, cooking, or partying.

We decided good as normal life is, a real vacation was overdue. Time to retreat to the den and go belly up awhile!




We spent Christmas in Big Bend country. Okay, we live in Big Bend country. We chose to travel our backyard, to explore the quiet, empty borderlands south of us. New landscapes to paint, places we can only scratch the surface of in day trips from Fort Davis. We used to spend the week before Christmas camped in the Chisos Mountain's Basin of Big Bend National Park. This was like returning to our roots, revisiting special places in our own (immense) wild neighborhood.

Silent places. Country with spotty phone service and no dress code except for wide-brimmed hats and sturdy boots. Places colored with history, wrapped in yarns, populated by ghosts and by delightfully eccentric people who, like Jim and me, used to be someone else in some other place. (We 're not running from the law, mind you, but we are a long way from city life and the cockpit of a jet.)




We made the right call.  Coyotes woke me last night. Then, the coyotes woke the burros.
Oh my. What a night it was. I guess you could call last night's symphony the best of both worlds.
There's a saying in Terlingua:  once you cross the old cattle guard on the road into town, you can be anybody you want to be.
I've chosen to be a coyote again.

Happy New Year!   (And may you be anybody you want to be in 2009!)

To see what I do when I'm not listening to coyotes and burros and the like, please, visit my website!

You might also enjoy a local's take on Terlingua— Ara is a chef turned biker-nomad-photographer who bases out of Terlingua and Study Butte. We never bumped into him this trip, but his musings and his photos go way beyond mine. www.theoasisofmysoul.com

        

The sun is setting on this balmy evening in Alpine, Texas. The street music is silent; the sidewalks and parking lots are empty of thousands of people milling,  visiting between shopping . Gallery Night signs and banners are coming down. Many of us have feet still aching from standing on them while wearing our best boots all weekend. The last drops of wine have been poured, and the flowers are beginning to wilt.

But even with aching feet, I can still hear the weekend's music.



Fort Davis musician and songwriter Crain Coffey entertains in Kiowa Plaza.
The talented 16 yr-old had to choose between traveling to Alpine, where he'd earned a slot to peform the songs he writes, or to head to San Angelo with his friends to see the Fort Davis Indians continue their championship football quest.
He must have a future in music, because the show went on (to rave reviews from the crowd.)
(The Indians won their football game, despite young Coffey's absence.)


It was another successful ArtWalk/Gallery Night for little Alpine, Texas. And we were there.



That's me, Lindy Severns (in white) with Kiowa Gallery owner Keri Artzt. We're congratulating each other here in my niche at Kiowa. Keri and I run mutual admiration society of sorts. She's a great businesswoman. Makes it easy to be an artist, because she takes care of the details, while all I have to do is paint.



My favorite Texan Jim uncorked dozens of bottles of wine. Now he waits for Kiowa's doors to open.
I enjoy being associated with Kiowa because the gallery is eclectic , a downright fun place to visit. None of the intimidation of padded walls and dimly lit rooms here. We're in the far west of Texas and it shows.



I don't have pictures of the friends who came to see what I've been up to for the past several months, I shot no pictures of new and old collectors, people who adopted my creations. I don't have a shot of Nel and Jer, or Jan and Jim, of sisters Elaine and Adele and Laura clowning around, of photographer/chef Ara and his dog Spirit, of Eman theTurkish rug guy, or fellow pastelist Dina Gregory and husband Brian, of Todd Overstreet and Peggy, Martin who have consistently worked so hard for me at the gallery. Or Roxa, with her constant encouragement.  I missed being able to snap a shot of my sister Kathy, who couldn't get down from Calgary this year.

I didn't get ANY pictures once the doors opened. Visiting about my work, meeting new folks was more important than documenting the moment. But all those people touched a place in my heart.
Painting is a solitary pursuit at best. At worst, it can get downright lonely. Viewers are my reward.
People make an event like this one so special to me.

I sold well. No, I sold REALLY well,—so well, we're a little worried about those big blank spots on the walls, once the buyers pick up their pieces. I sold enough to continue being a full-time artist, and Keri can keep her wonderful gallery open another year. I enjoyed hearing the ooo's and ahhh's of admiring art fans and somewhat surprised friends, who'd never seen one of my paintings. I basked in the acclaim of being the premier artist in the premier gallery in the region. Keri and Jim and I screamed and shouted after the first sale, because we'd all wondered if the current economy would support art.  It does, and then some.

People need beauty. Beauty doesn't depreciate when the stock market plunges.

It was a heady weekend. I'm more than grateful to a lot of people for making it so. Jim and Keri are at the top of that list.

Tears only came to my eyes toward the end.  Jim nudged me shortly before closing the second night. He pointed to a young couple admiring my Chinati sunset pastel, which had sold before the show even opened.  I've learned not to prejudge my buyers, so forgive me this assumption. but these kids looked like paying their electric bill each month taxed their budget to catastrophic levels. But they were young. In love.
They had that freshness about them that comes of still knowing what you're passionate about, before the world barges in to announce what should be your passions.
The girl took the young man's arm, and with her right hand, she slowly traced her way across the painting. Her hand floated into the depths of those canyons I'd created. She wove her hand across the sunlit ridges. Caressing her hand across the glass, she spoke softly to her guy. Intensely.
We couldn't hear what she said.  I like to think she was promising the boy she loved that they would walk that majestic path together.

That's the moment the gala weekend, the demanding past six months, my lifelong career as an artist is all about. I feel that moment.
That girl is why I paint.

"If I had but two loaves of bread,  I would sell one and buy hyacinths, for they would feed my soul."  

I think that quote is from the Koran. I'm not sure whre I got it. But it's been included in every brochure I've ever printed about myself, the artist.
 
You don't have to buy my art. But please, take a moment during this crazy week  in this crazy world to buy yourself hyacinths.
Hyacinths are what it's all about.

Happy Thanksgiving
Lindy

        

 
My man Jim (a pro at waiting on me) waits for the sun to set in Pinto Canyon south of Marfa, TX.
If it doesn't set soon, we won't get back through Marfa in time for pizza.

This place we call Far West Texas is big country.  You think you've seen it all, then someone says, hey, have you driven Pinto Canyon? And suddenly, you have someplace new to investigate. In this case, Pinto Canyon was on the short list of places Kiowa Gallery owner Keri Artzt suggested I consider painting for this year's Alpine's ArtWalk/Gallery Night collection.

If you've followed this blog, or conversed with me in the last couple of months, you'll know Keri requested a giant-sized sunrise and an even larger sunset, pastels to hang side-by-side on the gallery's main wall. Not just any landscape translates into super-sized pastels. And the road never (yet) traveled beckons, always.

Pinto Canyon falls about 75 miles south of home (less than that as the turkey vulture flies, but the vultures didn't build the roads around here). The next 35 miles is on dirt. On a roadmap, this scenic route (if it appears at all) is a faint dotted line through vast, deserted ranchland. Its single lane is notorious for turning suddenly impassable (mud) and for relentlessly shredding tires. No towns, no people, no phone service once we left Marfa. An adventure in a land of adventure.

We decided this meant traveling way too far before sunrise—my dedication to my art goes only so far, even with Jim and a Thermos of hi-test at my side. To get to Pinto Canyon, we'd skirt Fort Davis, then pass through Marfa before we dropped off the map of the civilized world. We'd also pass by Marfa's Pizza Foundation before venturing into the wilderness of the borderlands. If we timed it right, that meant passing back through Marfa as the aroma of pepperoni and oregano wafted from those pizza ovens. Sunset it was.
              
After much exploring on the ranch road, I return to plant my feet. 
The sun is still too high.
We wait.

We left home mid-afternoon. The winding pavement narrowed as we meandered south at 45 mph across rolling hills broken by rocky bluffs. Cattle country. Miles and miles of Texas grassland framed by toothy mountains. We hit the dirt road. The rugged landscape became more unexpected by the mile. More spectacular. Wow.
 
One of the hardest things,in country like this, is chosing what I want to paint. How to zero in on one scene when there are millions out there, scenes that might work just as well. Sometimes it comes down to a single interesting plant, or a rock, or the way a cloud formation shadows a hill. Jim has a good eye for composition, and together, we pinpointed three "wow!" vistas along our route down into the canyon. We had time to be selective—sunset was still an hour away. We continued downhill, heading to the river (the Rio Grande and the Mexico border define one end of Pinto Canyon). I am perenially obsessed with what might lie around the next bend. In this case, more spectacular scenery. The choices got harder, not easier. (I took 650 digital pictures on this one excursion.)

We reached our go/no-go point before we reached the river road. The sun was low now. We had to either continue on and hope for a scene better than the ones we'd already selected, or U-turn and return to one of the chosen views in time for the spectacular light I anticipated. (At our crawling five miles an hour, this wasn't a decision we could postpone.) I decided not to get greedy. We'd follow the darkening road to the river road another day. I got out of our very long truck to direct Jim's dicey U-turn. As I frantically signaled "no further this way!!!" I realized that if any little thing went wrong, we'd spend the night straddling that one-lane road. We'd taken jackets, water, the usual desert survival supplies. We'd be okay, but I didn't want to miss that sunset vista. Skillfully, Jim turned, carefully balanced between a rock and a hard place to land, should he slip off that road. The dog and the parrot, our usual companions, relaxed as we headed uphill to get the shot I wanted.
 
We waited. Took more pictures. Waited. The last light painted Pinto Canyon and its Chinati Mountain. It was worth the wait.




"Sunset Paints Chinati"  60" x 40" pastel by Lindy C Severns  copyright 2008
Featured at Kiowa Gallery, Alpine, TX
Alpine's ArtWalk and Gallery Night Nov 21 & 22 2008
SOLD

We stood there a minute, savoring the sense of falling into the infinite shadows of Chinati Mountain. Feeling small at the foot of magnificence. That's the feeling I tried to convey in this painting—an infinity of magnificence.

Man (nor artist) does not live by spirit alone. The sun abandoned us to our hunger. Jim sped down the the road we'd so leisurely driven hours before. We had our pictures, but we didn't have phone service. The Pizza Foundation would close soon. Our stomachs growled. I kept checking for phone service.

We made it back to Marfa in time to sit and eat pizza under the stars.
It was a good day. No, it was a magnificent day in a world bursting with magnificence.
I can't paint that. All I can do is marvel at it over pizza, then share my shadowy impression of what I know is really there.

Go to my website  or   Shop the studio store for greeting cards of this pastel

        

Wow, do I feel good today!
I mean, today, I'm the woman.
An artist.
A real, paint-drunk, pastel-toting artist. And I have the finished work to prove it!
Over bowls steaming with green chili posole, Jim and I just celebrated this morning's completion of a major pastel painting. Wow. It's done!
 
What qualifies one of my pastels as "a major painting", you ask? Size. Complexity. Subject. Regardless, it all starts with size. This painting, at 24" x 48", is twice as big as any of my 2008 pastels to date, and it began as a speechless roll of Kitty Wallis Museum grade paper, curled and waiting and rudely intimidating to its potential creator.

When it comes to pastel painting, realize I'm no conventional blender. My pastel technique more closely resembles intricate pen and ink crosshatching, layer upon layer of short, crisp lines. Ever calculated how many tiny strokes it takes to cover eight square feet of blank canvas? It's like Anne Lamott says in her insightful guide to creative writing, BIRD BY BIRD: when writing about birds, you must do it one bird at a time or you'll never pin all those birds down on paper. Or, you can think of it as eating an elephant, an overwhelming, if do-able experience, as my friend Matt is fond of describing. The finished pastel still on my easel was this month's elephant, this week's colorful aviary of fleeting heartbeats.

Painting on a grand scale pleases the exhibitionist in me. I love passionately smearing pigment across a big canvas. I also love depositing checks of any size into my bank account.  And there's the gallery to consider— are they infatuated enough with my work to build an annex just to house it? See the problem? Big paintings are harder to sell than smaller ones. Not only must the right person happen across that one special painting, hear it speak as if only to them, fall in love... this ardent admirer of my work must also have a few thousand uncommitted dollars handy to exchange for it. Plus, a big, empty wall. 

I'm going to paint, regardless. That said, I'm no purist when it comes to marketing my creations. Selling has proven better for me than not selling.  So I'm generally better off painting in sizes my friends can buy without going into debt, selling blood, or refinancing their homes.  Likewise, it's proven economically more sound for me to paint sizes my collectors can hang somewhere more intimate and accessible than the Louvre or their corporate jet hangar.

That doesn't mean I don't jump at the chance to paint big. When Kiowa Gallery (Alpine. TX) owner Keri Artzt invited me to claim the main wall for this year's Gallery Night & Artwalk in November, I couldn't accept fast enough. "I want a WOW painting," she explained. "In pastel."
Define "Wow!" I asked, but she'd already gone on to "Make that two WOW paintings."

This request thrilled me. I had a big wall, waiting to wow, and Keri doesn't hang pieces she doesn't think she can move back out of her gallery. Knowing my passion for skies, and with the instincts of a natural entrepreneur, Keri had murmered something about sunrises and sunsets. A few weekends later, Jim and I woke at 4:30 a.m.  bundled the animals into the truck, grabbed the Thermos of coffee and set off to capture a sunrise for Keri's wall.

Five miles into this adventure, it started raining. Light rain. Intermittent rain. The kind of rain that threatens colorful sunrises and thwarts sleepy photographers. We poured coffee, continued around the Scenic Loop (Texas Highway 166), told ourselves we'd enjoy the ride, even if we didn't get any pictures. (This with diesel topping four dollars a gallon in our neck of the woods. Oh, my.) The dog and parrot, having already lost all spirit of adventure, had fallen asleep in the back seat. We remained optimistic. Jim skillfully dodged the skunk streaking down the dark road.

Sawtooth Mountain rises about twenty miles west of home. We'd planned our morning to reach it at dawn, and so, we did. In clouds. Between showers. My Canon Digital Elph ready in my lap. Hope fading.
We passed Sawtooth. I turned around in my seat to check the animals, and there was my sunrise. Wow.

It lasted less than a minute, long enough for me to snap half a dozen dimly lit shots.
Enough to create a big painting from.


GOLDEN RIBBONED DAWN ON SAWTOOTH MT      24" x 48" pastel  by Lindy C Severns  
   (SOLD)

We drove another 250 miles that morning. Those few of Sawtooth were the only satisfying photos I took all day. Wow. Lucky we took the time to fill the Thermos, lucky Jim dodged for that skunk, lucky it was rainy, causing Jim to drive slower than usual. Serendipitious that the animals started raising a ruckus in the back seat. A minute earlier, a minute later and clouds would've obscured Sawtooth as we passed by. It wasn't even the view of the mountain I was aiming for. But it was the one I was given.

I don't know how Keri defines a "WOW painting", and I can only hope she's pleased to hang this one. But as I put chalk to canvas, I tried to share the joyous sense of surprise I felt that morning when I turned around and saw the gloomy sky shatter into fingers of light and soft ribbons of sunlight strike old Sawtooth. Sometimes, it takes a big canvas to convey the sense of awe intrinsic to nature's fleeting moments. And sometimes, those myriad strokes of pastel end up expressing what I wanted to say when I started the painting.
Wow. It's fun to be an artist!

And please—- brake for skunks. It's the right thing to do.

Visit my website or shop the studio store for greeting cards of this painting

        

Prolific and persuasive Fort Davis, Texas artist Ann Pratt has been on my case to enter the Kate Hoffman Art Association Juried Show, held annually right here at home. I don't enter many shows. Lots of reasons for that.

One:  Kiowa Gallery in nearby Alpine, Texas offers me such a ready-built platform for sales, I don't wander far afield. My work sells regularly at the gallery level, and that's a great problem to have. Also, the past couple of years I've been out of town for the KHAA show, or busy, or unprepared with uncommitted new work. Lastly, once upon a time long ago, I exhibited so consistently unsuccessfully in the sometimes quirky university art environment back in Lubbock, I'm wary of judges who think representational art is a backward bastard cousin to cubism and minimalist art and the like.

Anyway, this August, a week before the deadline for entries, Henry Moon, owner of OLD FORT COUNTRY, home to this year's KHAA exhibit, added a twist to my arm and passed an entry form across the counter. (Jim and I were busy purchasing homemade fudge at the time, so my resistance was down.) My watercolorist mother does enter art shows, in Lubbock, no less. So I snatched an extra entry form for her, which I promptly mailed, seeing as how the deadline was only a week away. The deal I cut with Mom: she'd come down for an overdue visit, deliver her three entries to me; I'd pick them up when the show ends and deliver them back to her. It was an excuse for two visits. With a deal like that, we couldn't lose!

Mother, at 81, belongs to several art associations and is a founding member of the Ransom Canyon Splash Gals, a merry band of watercolorists who boldly paint, travel and otherwise stir up trouble in the neighborhood. Known to most of the world as Bettye Cook, Mom hasn't embraced the world of CD's and digital images, and although she briefly tried email, she turned her back on that in favor of phone calls and letters. But entries to this show had to be digital. Mom agonized over that. So did I when I tried (in vain) to explain the nuances of pixels and KB's to someone content to watch only local TV off an antenna. Since neither my landscape architect brother nor I were around to shoot digital pics of her paintings, she had to take her three paintings to a professional photographer to get images emailed to Ann Pratt by the deadline.

Ann emailed me when they arrived. Have you seen what your mother sent? she asked. The portrait is especially wonderful!


GOATHERDER'S GIFT TO THE WEDDING  14" x 18" watercolor
Bettye Cook     $250 (framed)   
1st Place   Portrait Division   KHAA 2008 Juried Show

Your mother's paintings are fantastic! Henry Moon confided when we returned for a refill on fudge. Her cactus is great! She's good!


STICKY BUSINESS    14" x 18" watercolor   by Bettye Cook
1st Place   Still Life Division   KHAA 2008 Juried Show
$250 (framed)

Of course, I already knew that, even though I'd seen only two of the three paintings she entered. I knew Bettye Cook when she was drawing cartoons on my lunchbags and stitching felt poodles on my skirts.

Mom brought her paintings, along with watercoloring cronies Debra Clark, Sher Hiner & Joyce Runyan. We delivered her entries, did the tourist tour of Far West Texas, visited. She drove back to Ransom Canyon a few days before the show opened, leaving Jim and me to represent her at the reception Saturday night. Mom said something about hoping she didn't embarrass me. I have a long history of not listening to my mother's cautions.

I took Best of Show with my pastel landscape, WINDSWEPT COLOR :



WINDSWEPT COLOR   12" X 24" pastel  by Lindy Cook Severns   $1950 (framed)

Best of Show  KHAA 5th Annual Juried Art Competition
     OLD FORT COUNTRY    Fort Davis, Texas    

My pastel minature placed second in the landscape division!



THE FAR WEST OF TEXAS    4" x 6" pastel by Lindy Cook Severns
$200 (framed)  SOLD  
Second Place  Landscape Division  KHAA 2008 Juried Show

It lost First Place to Mom's winning PICNIC PARADISE. I can live with that loss!



PICNIC PARADISE   14" x 18" watercolor by Bettye Cook  $250 (framed)
1st Place  Landscape Division    KHAA 2008 Regional Show
Fort Davis, Texas    (Hanging at  OLD FORT COUNTRY  during Sept. 2008) 


And she embarrassed me, after all. As her proxy at the reception, I kept having to accept prizes for her. She won so many gift bags and certificates and wine and ribbons, Jim had to bring the truck around to load them up.
This could be the end of my show career, because between Mom and I, we swept the show and may not be invited back next year.

Or, perhaps the powers that be will smile and agree that two artists are better than one. Especially when they share the same genes.

I'm one proud daughter. And grateful for the genes I drew!

If you're in the Big Bend in September 2008, drop into OLD FORT COUNTRY and see our work hanging together. You can't miss Mom's—they all have big blue ribbons attached. To learn more about Mom, watercolorist Bettye Cook, visit her page at OLD SPANISH TRAIL STUDIO.  Want to purchase an original Bettye Cook?
Email me! I'm happy to handle cyberspace technology for Mom. After all, she spent a lot of time and effort drawing on my lunchbags all those years.

        

There's nothing like living in the high desert to make you seriously appreciate rain. Worship might be a better word for the reverence we feel for wet stuff falling on our land. You'd be hard pressed to find a Big Bend country native complaining about a succession of foggy mornings and drizzly afternoons. (We CAN find something to do when our softball games and picnics get rained out.)  We always love a good rain.  Even a bad rain is okay by folks out here.  We brake for frogs and we invite mosquitoes inside for dinner. And that's how we, the citizenry of ...<< MORE >>

June has been a month for homilies. Three have haunted and comforted me.

My friend Stessa has a plaque over her kitchen sink: "WE PLAN: GOD LAUGHS".

My friend Roxa, recently involved in the painful task of sorting through her mother's belongings found a scrap of paper dated 1930 or so, on which her mother had penned a quote from an author I haven't yet traced:
     "LIFE IS MOSTLY FROTH AND BAUBLE.
       TWO THINGS STAND AS STONE:
        KINDNESS IN ANOTHER'S TROUBLE,
        COURAGE IN YOUR OWN."

Tolkein, in one LORD OF THE RINGS book, eloquently explains it isn't our job to control the weather — it's our job to tend the fields we're given, in the climate in which we find ourselves living. (Tolkein said this much better than my pedestrian paraphrase, but hopefully, you get the point.)

On June 4, 2008, while I searched the basement of the historic Presbyterian Church  in Fort Davis for a fan ( this to prevent heat stroke from wiping out half the membership of the Wednesday Matinee Good Time Readers, who were upstairs, sweltering over FOR THE TIME BEING by Annie Dilliard) I got a call from my husband Jim. No need to worry, he explained, BUT the Fort Davis volunteer firefighters were being summoned to a grass fire near the Marfa highway, 10 miles or so from home. (Seems the Union Pacific Railroad had been cutting rails on a friend's ranch on a day posted as extreme fire danger. But that's another story. I detest negligence.)
The BUT part meant that my husband, the same man who received two new hips for Christmas, was seriously contemplating donning his newly issued brush gear and riding a fire truck to the scene of the conflagration.

Jim and I respect each other's passions in life, even when we don't share them. I wouldn't have signed a guy with two brand new, still sparkling titanium hip joints up as a firefighter, but then I'm the gal who once took up martial arts as therapy for the broken back I sustained while crashing an airplane. You gotta do what you gotta do. I think my mistake was in not believing there would ever be a fire. Not here at home.

We Readers got through Annie Dilliard before Jim called again. I'd started cleaning out the church basement with Linda Allen, who'd driven in from near Prude Ranch. We'd PLANNED this cleanup session for days. The fire was growing, Jim reported, reminding me his gear was in the truck I drove. He might need to report for duty, if it spread. (We're so far from town, by the time he makes it to the station, most fires are out. So he specializes in fires near home, where he can join up with the firetrucks on the highway.) Just let me know, I said. No hurry, he said. BUT.

Next call, he could see smoke. He calmly suggested that I might be more comfortable at home, with the animals, and said he needed to go firefight. So I left Linda in the basement, breathing the dust of ancient hymnals.

By the time I passed Blue Mountain, smoke blanketed half the sky. I could barely breathe for smoke. I sped the rest of the way home. Sped fast. We loaded up the dog and parrot. I drove Jim and his bag of brush gear out to highway 166, the scenic loop around the Davis Mountains. He  cautioned me not to stay way back in our canyon, not to get caught there. He jumped on the first firetruck to pass by, and the man I'd nursed only months before vanished up a smoke-obscured ranch road.

There are lots of stories from that point. How the animals and I parked upwind of the smoke, then saw chorus lines of flame leap across familar ridgelines; how I realized that one of those lines of flame was dancing straight toward neighboring artist Wayne Baize's lovely ranch home and studio; how I saw Tom and Bill Max bulldozing a firebreak around Eda's house. How I calmly (?) raced back to the studio for my pastel cases and the stack of unframed originals I've spent the last few months creating...
How I packed up our RV in half-a-dozen five-minute shifts, which I alternated with trips back out to the highway to check the status of the fire.
How I tried to console the animals. How I wondered if I could hook up our large RV, tow it out of the mountains, alone...
How Jim called next. "We just saved Wayne Baize's house. We petted his dog...the one that jumped out of the truck....Fire's heading for Boogie's now. Have you talked to her? Susan and Dick's place is burning up...Meet me on the highway and we'll get the RV out."
How Jim hitchhiked from crew to crew to get back out to the highway where I waited; how his fellow firefighters lining the highway shot him "thumbs up" as he towed us out of the smoke-filled canyon, past the fire line to safety in town.
Boogie still didn't answer her phone, but we saw her truck parked at the entrance to her ranch road. She was safe, somewhere. The landscape I painted in "LEAVING HOME" was burning. The fire, driven by forty to fifty mile an hour winds, ravaged the county now.

The ridgeline at Warbonnet, across the highway from Crows Nest.

We're pretty self-sufficient. That didn't mean we didn't weep tears of gratitude every time a friend called or e-mailed their concern or an offer of a place to stay. I didn't know there were so many spare bedrooms in the county. Larry and Beth offered their tranquil garden to just sit in. The manager of the RV park we evacuated to wouldn't take Jim's money. "Thank you," she said. "For all of us." My phone burned hot from calls.

We unhooked, immediately raced Jim the twenty miles back to the fireline, where it appeared our neighbors across the highway in Warbonnet, the Poindexters and the Fields in particular, were certainly about to lose their houses. Jim, separated now from his crew, drove food and water up to the fireline on the mountain. We drove the highway to spot and confirm new fires. We watched the flames spread. Our animals, still in the truck with us, watched in what must have been silent horror. I took comfort that we were all together again.

It was a long night. And the next day our neighborhood fire raged on, threatened historic Bloys campground with its hundreds of cabins and cook sheds and the wonderful old Skillman oak grove, named after the first colorful mail carrier out here. For a painfully long few hours, the fire raced straight toward town, sprinting before high winds blowing in exactly the wrong direction. Jim and Matt (also known as minister of our Presbyterian church and husband to Stessa of "God Laughs" fame) fought flames and set backfires around the vast perimeter of Bloys campground until the Forest Service relieved them at midnight. Hip surgery is no picnic. Jim has had two in the last six months. Jim. The rookie volunteer firefighter. My man. Out until midnight again, fighting fires in the mountains.


On Friday morning, the sky in town was clear. The weather we had to sow our fields in that day was, well, just better. The Forest Service tankers were dumping water from Balmorhea springs and from ranch tanks on the still vast backcountry fires sweeping Besa and Roy's land, Barrel Springs, the Hughes ranch, others. We remembered to eat breakfast. We drove to see what remained of home. We'd lost nothing. The hummingbirds were hungry.

Exhausted volunteer firefighters recovered while professional crews moped up. The Santa Fe Hotshots and Zuni Hotshots can pretty much write their own tickets with the citizens of Fort Davis—they came to the rescue, hiking back in the mountains to put out hotspots after everyone else was ready to drop.

Almost sixty thousand acres of some of the most spectacularly beautiful land in Texas burned to a crisp, a state of burned that makes charcoal in the bottom of a grill look medium rare. Thanks mainly to a handful of well-trained volunteers with a lot of guts and a devotion to their neighbors, no structures were lost. No lives were lost. There were no serious injuries.  Ranchers opened fences for each other, and there may be some mixed breed calves next spring, but there were no livestock losses, or none reported as of this writing.

Cowboy Artist of America Wayne Baize still has his studio filled with wonderful western art. And his five dogs. And the house full of memories where he and Ellen raised their four kids. Boogie sat on her porch a few nights after the fire and reported to Jim "it's kinda nice outside tonight". She didn't mention the scorched view where once was beauty. I just spread my pastel cases in the studio, so I'm ready to start a new painting in the morning. I'll find something here in these parched mountains to paint. Much survives out here. In fact, Bob and Rae Field have invited us to a gathering of "The Survivors of the Fire of 2008"; they promise food and wine will be provided. (Bring Your Own Tall Fire Tale.") The church basement has miraculously been cleansed of dusty hymnals, through no effort of mine, but I suspect Linda is still coughing up moldy paper. Jim is ready for the next fire, and I suppose I am, too. And the land? Some things are lost forever. But in the big scheme of life,  fire is good for the land. We'll will green up, first rain. And I can't even imagine the wildflowers we'll enjoy after the next wet spring. Already the cholla are blooming.

Jeff Davis is a big, beautiful, wild county with very few people in it. But they are good people. Strong people.
People here are a lot like the landscape. We'll all recover, and we'll recover sooner than anyone could've imagined back on June 4. Like the land, though, we won't be the same.
Too much kindess and courage has been passed around for that.
As for the weather?
It's my job to paint the fields I am given. The weather? The weather must take care of itself.

        

Dramatic blossoms fill the Chihuahuan desert.  Our regal agaves, better known as Century plants stretch stalks laden with dozens of ochre bouquets fifteen feet skyward. Spanish daggers lavish the foothills with spikes of orchid-like white blooms. Prickly pear and other cactus flower the mountains and the alkaline lowlands with an unapologetic riot of pinks, reds and yellows. We see prickly poppy waving its large and elegant white flower; tall penstemons whispering delicate pastel hues; wild verbena weaving a carpet of purple; Indian paintbrush painting splashes of red-orange along roadways. Though loathed by ranchers, even the legume locoweed produces splendidly colorful lavendar blossoms that resemble faded bluebonnets. (Oh, do we have bluebonnets.) And the multi-armed cholla sends forth such a mass of fushia blossoms that the underlying mountains seem to be auditioning for a slot in the Rose Bowl Parade. There's diversity out here to rival any greenhouse garden, and then some.

Trouble is, unless we get more than our allotted dollop of rain, we don't get to enjoy all of these flowers each spring. It's like they hold an annual drawing to decide which of them will be the season's star bloomer. Maybe the desert can support splendor from only one plant at a time. Maybe they simply enjoy not sharing the spotlight.
Whatever the reason, it seems like each spring, one desert species explodes into blooming supernovae while less fortunate flowers struggle into being.  Last year we marveled over the Spanish daggers and all their yucca kin. The year before, we admired the magnificence of mile after mile of Century plants in lush bloom.

This year belongs to the ocotillo.

An ocotillo is a spiny, twisted jumble of unbranching stalks, each rarely more than an inch or so in diameter.  Except for being a gangly ten or twelve feet tall, an ocotillo plant resembles one of those dessicated, starkly bare-root rose bushes sheathed in plastic. (You know—those cheap, half-dead bushes you periodically buy to prove your optimism.) Ocotillos spend most of their lives brown and leafless. Most people probably dismiss standing ocotillos as pathetic remnants of dead something-or-others doomed to life in an unfortunate location. Even when the plant greens up and fingernail-sized leaves finally break out up and down its collection of stalks, an ocotillo seems more dead than alive. I often add an ocotillo or two to Big Bend landscapes in compositional need of a vertical element. (Except for mountains, there isn't much else out here that breaks the horizon.)

But the blossoms! Oh, my. A blooming ocotillo looks like God swept through the desert and stuck scarlet bottle brushes to the end of each dry stalk while no one was looking. Magnificent in its spareness, embarrassing in its color, an ocotillo in bloom is one of those twists of nature that makes a walk in the desert overflow the senses.

I've spent much of my lifetime sneaking up on ocotillos in bloom. Seeing one in full bloom feels sort of like finding a hundred dollar bill in the forest. The more you think about it, the more you know you deserve to enjoy it.

I spend most of my creative life doing pastels. That's by choice. I like the feel of pigment on my fingers, like the challenge of layering color over color, like the planning that must precede each stroke. I loved the Century plants that year, and I painted them in pastel. I loved the Dagger blossoms last year. I painted them in pastel. The plants relate, the paintings relate.  I loved the year of the chollo blossom, and I painted them in pastel. Green spears with thorns and bright, rose-like blossoms. Same joy.
I loved this spring's unusually magnificent outpouring of red ocotillo brushes.
They relate to nothing. Brown stalks with incongruously vibrant brushy-feathered odd-shaped things stuck to the tips like something a first-grader would draw.
They relate to everything.

Seeing ocotillo in bloom is a spirit-gift.
I painted them in oils, not because oils are more serious than pastels—if anything, the opposite is true. I painted them in oils because I usually do pastels.
Nothing in nature says you must do things the same way every time. It's like at the Annual Meeting of the Desert Plants: Choose one, and all will be lovely; change to a different one sometimes, and all will be special. 


OCOTILLO AT SAN JACINTO PEAK    by Lindy C Severns       
                                                  9" x 12" oil on archival Russian linen
available at Kiowa Gallery Alpine, TX    June 2008  ~ about $750 framed

        

Whether I'm painting or not, I'm passionate about nature, time spent outdoors. Two hundred years ago, I would've enjoyed being a mountain man, except I wouldn't have been able to support myself because I wouldn't have had it in my heart to trap furry critters for hat material. Certainly, I could've followed Lewis and Clark across the country. My (very distant) Native American ancestors would be proud of tbe soft steps I take across leaves, of the instinctive prayers I whisper over dead things, of the reverence I feel when I stand atop a mountain.

I'd paint on location all the time but for one thing: I don't like being uncomfortable. Call me a woose, but I don't do temperature extremes, full sun, rain, snow, or (especially) wind. I admire more hardy plein air painters, those so dedicated to their art that they ignore gale force winds sandblasting dirt into their oil paints, pastelists with frostbitten fingers, watercolorists who cheerfully work raindrops into their washes. But I think if God had meant for me to be miserable when I paint, He would've staked me out in Houston or Dallas instead of steering me to  the arid mountains of West Texas, where we scarcely even run our air conditioner. (Nothing against Houston, or even Dallas. If green is what turns you on, somewhere humid is the place for you— our natural color out here is brown. I think brown is beautiful, but brown isn't becoming on everybody.)  So I have a warm, dry studio, and I use it year-round. But whatever the season, I try not to let perfect painting days slip past without going out on location. Painting weather calls to me like a Siren to a sailor.

I keep a Soltek easel (I love this easel for plein air painting, and highly recommend it) packed with pastels and pads of Wallis pastel paper. All I have to do is grab it and go. Once I'm in the locale I want to paint, I search for shade, and for snakes. Once shaded in a snake-free zone, I seek a level spot. Shade is the most critical, though. I've set up on slopes so steep, I had to hang onto my easel as I painted, but at least I didn't have to fight the sun while dodging serpents. I'm not a total woose. Any other comfort, such as a rock to spread my paints on is gravy. I even handle biting insects pretty well, once I'm working. Once I'm working, I toughen up.

I hate the wind, though. And we've had wind constantly this spring. The old-timers say this is the windiest spring they've seen in twenty years, and that usually, a windy spring means a rainy summer. A rainy summer would be good, so I hate to complain too much about the wind. But it has seriously limited my plein air painting, and I've gotten a little claustrophobic in the studio.

Painting on location is an exercise in discipline. It challenges an artist to be extremely selective and very decisive. Like any discipline, it must be honed and practiced. The less I paint outdoors, the harder it is the next time. I hate the wind.

One afternoon, the wind calmed. I squared my shoulders, strapped my easel to my back and started hiking before the wind picked up, as forecast. I didn't have long to paint so I didn't hike far and didn't get too picky about a subject: I chose a scraggly tree. The tree was only just so interesting, and the wind was gathering steam, so I taped a 4" x 6' piece of paper to my easel. Not much time, not much interest, not much paper.
 
I whipped out a likeness, didn't like it, brushed it off and did another. And another. An hour later, I had nothing to show for my efforts but a stiff back, a smudgy scrap of paper and dirty fingers.

And I felt seriously wonderful, the way you feel when you spend quality time in fresh air and crunchy leaves with a wasp or two circling your head. I didn't even mind the gusty wind in my face.

I wriggled the easel, safe in its backpack now, onto my sore shoulders. Then, I trudged downhill, empty-handed and exhausted from my efforts. As I scanned for snakes along the gametrail I followed, a plate-sized crescent of white caught my attention. I bent to examine the sun-bleached mandible of a javelina, one of those hog-like creatures who snort through our world on a fairly regular basis. Tusks and teeth intact, the complete jawbone was a museum specimen. I wondered how the beast had died. Old age? Predator? Disease? Carefully, I carried the mandible home with me. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like that's what I should do with it.

It was a hugely successful painting day. The next day was very windy. I started a studio painting. As I worked on that complex landscape from photo references in the comfort of my studio, my fingers remembered painting that nondescript tree. That day's studio landscape ultimately turned out so nice, I entered it in a national competition. You can't convince me the teensy tree sketches that don't even exist anymore and the javelina mandible propped outside my door aren't integral to that exhibit-worthy studio pastel.

The thing about painting, any kind of painting, is this: Creating is a process, not a goal. It's about the journey, not the destination. That's easier to intuit when you're standing on a mountainside (watching for snakes). And if you happen across a javelina jaw as you stagger home under the weight of your easel?
Words just can't describe that kind of trip.
 

Check out some Lindy Severns paintings done on location. Visit Old Spanish Trail Studio.com now!

        

For years, I had neither the time nor the inclination to plan my day (any day) around lunching with other ladies. Mainly, I had no time. Nor did my friends. We had, unwittingly sped straight from our starry-eyed, uncomplicated young lives to raising families; starting second or third careers; caring for aging parents; volunteering to do anything even remotely associated with garnering stars for our heavenly crowns. We, who as twenty-somethings enjoyed mornings of golf followed by white wine luncheons eventually found ourselves over-committed, over-worked and underpaid, slowly gaining weight while too frazzled by life to meet over salads at an appointed time and place. Taking an hour out of my day to socialize over lunch wasn't an option I considered sane.
 
Back then, I was flying all over the country, dining in five star restaurants—or, more often, scarfing down peanut butter crackers chased with lukewarm coffee and hoping that wasn't my meal for the day.  A good, if rare day during those years involved being home at noon to open a can of soup then eat it on the sunporch with cats underfoot rubbing against my legs. Slowing down to a simpler life was inevitable, but old habits are hard broken. It's taken me half a decade to realize as long as I'm taking in the people and the places around me as I draw each breath, I'm hardly squandering my time.

My friend Roxa called (seems like it was about this time a year ago) one day to ask if I'd accompany her to lunch with one of her old girlfriends the next day. At her ranch "down the road". I'm always honored to be included in get-togethers among old friends willing to pull another chair up to the table. I'd met this friend, liked and admired her.
I accepted before Roxa listed her caveats: be ready to leave at 7 am (for lunch!? I'm normally still too sleepy to sip coffee at 7 am!); wear sturdy hiking shoes; bring a couple of warm jackets; I'd need a flashlight and at least a gallon of water. Oh, and a camera. And some food, too. In case. Just cheese and crackers, maybe a peanut butter sandwich. Nuts. Fruit. In case.

I mentally added a gun. And extra ammo. In case. My nimble mind had already leapt to the realization that if we needed survival gear, we wouldn't have cell phone service the whole way.

We left at 7. I took a thermos of coffee along. And toilet paper. In case.

Roxa explained that she didn't anticipate problems, but....

We headed south. We stopped, often, to take pictures. Roxa does a line of notecards with Big Bend cactus, flowers, landscapes which she markets through our online store at Old Spanish Trail Studio. I keep my Canon Digital Elph and my Canon SLR close and ready to capture the landscape of my next painting, and for photo references of specific plants, skies, rocks.  We passed a lot of plants, skies, rocks. A lot. By 10:30, we'd stopped more times than a Greyhound bus taking the scenic route across the nation.
We hit the blooming ocotillo flats. I mean that literally. If you've ever come upon a sweep of tall, spindly ocotillo sprouting red blossoms ten feet above the white alkali desert, you'll understand what I'm saying. Every blessed ocotillo demanded its own photo from each of the three cameras on board. Past the ocotillo came the orangy-green creosote flats spotted with bravely blooming cactus and Indian paintbrush.
 
We arrived, late for lunch.

A leisurely tour of the ranch house and its surroundings, a luncheon of shrimp salad and homemade rolls, lingering long after over iced tea and conversation consumed a couple of enjoyable hours. Then, it was time to head back.

By now, it was mid-afternoon. We were tired, and there wasn't as much chatter in the truck, but the silence was companionable and introspective at the same time. Roxa pointed out the dry riverbed as we crossed it. That unassuming draw and its companion down the way, filled with runoff from a rain, would've stranded us until the water subsided. Maybe a day. Maybe less. It didn't rain. We didn't have a flat. Lunch was satisfying and the tea, cool. We didn't have to dip into our rations. We passed only one other vehicle the whole time we were off the main road and only a couple of trucks while on the main road. Those we passed, we knew. It wasn't necessary to shoot anybody. I didn't have to hike, but the shoes came in handy as I scrambled up and down rocks taking pictures. Roxa dropped me off at home at suppertime. It was a hard day, but a hard day to end, too.

The friendships I sustained during those busy years of work were and are valuable ones, no less so than the new ones I'm making during these days I call "my own". The difference is in the scenery, and in the silence, and in the sense of place that overrides the urgencies of time. Lunching at the newest, trendiest restaurant dictates conversation. Busy-ness. Hurry. Lunching at a ranch three hours from anywhere, being prepared to survive in transit, devoting a whole day to the adventure is different. You must like not only the conversation of friends—you must like yourself enough to appreciate the silence of an unhurried walk through a cresote forest.


SILENT WALK THRU A CREOSOTE FOREST       14" x 18" pastel by Lindy C Severns
about $1800, once framed    available at Kiowa Gallery, Alpine TX April 2008

        

Not all southwestern architecture is adobe. Still, buildings made mud and straw brick define the southwest. You find old adobes in the most picturesque of settings. And the clay-like qualities of adobe brick allow the builder artistic license to create softly shaped meandering walls, rooms that defy a carpenter's square to constrain them into boring cubes. You don't see "perfect" adobes. That's one of the things that makes them so interesting. Adobe is a living, breathing thing, an elemental part of its surroundings, a landscape in itself.

I love to paint old adobes. For one, they generally occur in locales I love. You find old adobes in quiet places set back from the bustle of city life; you see them on protected hillsides or in remote corners, intuitively comfortable spots where someone once sculpted a retreat from long days likely spiced with hard work and no small dose of danger. Another aspect of adobe's appeal is that it's forever changing, trying its best to return to the earth from which it came. Cared for, adobe mellows gracefully. But it needs constant attention, loving, hands-on upkeep. These days, we're mostly too busy for that. Too modern. We like our corners square and our walls, permanent and invincible. Many strong, well-maintained adobes I passed as a child have since reduced themselves to crumbling walls surrounding tumbled roofs. Picturesque? Maybe. But also, sad.

The luckiest adobes have assumed second and third and fourth lives. Generations of family occupy many old adobes; laughing children run tiny hands along smooth, cool walls laboriously plastered by the hands of their great-grandmothers. Newcomers with time and energy and (mainly) money treasure the old adobes they purchase and repair.
And weary animals find shade in abandoned rooms that artists stop to paint.


GETTING OLD   a 9" x 12" pastel by Lindy C Severns
                            available at Kiowa Gallery Alpine Tx  March 15 2008    about $825 framed

I guess falling apart as we age can open new doors. Or windows. (Or an entire roof one day!)

        

Living in a tourist destination means we frequently get company, friends and relations who count on us to show them the sights. The trick, of course, is to intuit which sights they want to see. We recently hosted two sort-of-adult nephews in a month. Separately. (I cooked more than is my custom.) We wanted to show them around, but these six-footer-plus brothers are not so alike that the same Far West Texas tour would serve to satisfy both.

For wannabe writer Daniel, the elder of the two young men, hiking and the nature tour followed by lots of hearty food sufficed. Dan, a recent graduate of Texas A & M University was en route to Terlingua to report for temporary employment as a guide for river raft trips on the Rio Grande. (BBRT: Big Bend Raft Trips, pronounced "Be-Bert". Ask for Daniel Nammour, and please, tip him generously. Hurry, though. before he bails in search of new material to write about.)

We hadn't been around younger nephew Steven as much. What could we find to do with him? What would we even talk about? Steven (sometime actor, sometime scholar, still searching for his niche but rather convinced it he won't find it on the river or living in a tent outside Terlingua, TX like his brother) required structure.  We hadn't been up to MacDonald Observatory in awhile. We did the day tour. No star party, but hey, we didn't expect to see stars at noon. They do a great sunspot and solar flare show, though, and the drive up Mount Locke is worth the time and diesel spent getting there.

That still left the evening to fill. We bundled man and beast into the truck, then drove the Scenic Loop into the sunset. Somewhere around the old Rockpile, it was getting dark so we U-turned back, then took 505 to Marfa. (Actors love Marfa.) Which inevitably led to, "Let's go see the Marfa Lights."

I've seen these unexplained "ghost lights" several times. When I was a girl, we'd all bundle up (the high desert gets pretty darn chilly after all those solar flares retire for the night) then drive the lonely highway between Marfa and Alpine to see if the lights felt like greeting us. Daddy always knew where to pull off the two-lane road. He'd park, then my sister and I would crane for a view out the car window. "There!" someone would say. And sure enough, colored lights would be dancing and floating across the dark mountains. They'd disappear. Or they'd split. Sometimes, lights approached as if to chase us. Ooooo.

Seeing the Marfa Lights wasn't a given. Sometimes, the night remained dark. On those instances, Daddy would finally, reluctantly turn the key in the ignition. But usually, there were lights. I don't know why they appear. I just know they do. So do many other people who've driven that road.

Native Americans reported the ghost lights of the Marfa plains long before highways and airplanes came into play as explanations. Today, it's important to remember there's nothing man-made out there. Lights appear, and just as mysteriously, disappear. And that stretches even a child's imagination: neither Mommy nor Daddy can explain away those lights. Nor can they summon them. We often saw the lights. We didn't know why they appeared or why they refused to. Where they came from. Where they went.
 
Scientists haven't been able to explain the Marfa Lights. But as a girl, I saw them more than a few times.  I wasn't sure what I was seeing, but even as a kid, I never once thought the lights came from ghostly fires. (Why would ghosts need campfires? Do people think they toast s'mores out there, or what?) And I don't blame the mystery lights for never showing their colors on nights my favorite skeptic, Jim is along. (I think he's actually beginning to hope for a sighting now, but so far, no joy. He's never seen Big Foot, either.)

Since I've reached adulthood (a state of being which spans slightly more than one decade) The State of Texas, in all its wisdom, has alloted bags of money to build The Marfa Lights Viewing Station. It's lovely. There's this big wide pull-off, a motorhome mecca. And a building. Brick walls, a viewing scope, restrooms. The real kicker is the sign. It states (I kid you not) that the lights are better seen after dark.
 
Oh, my. What if they hadn't erected that sign? Picture multitudes of tourists crowding into the designated area (sticking to the brick walls, hovering near the rest rooms, dodging rattlesnakes), all shielding their sun-glassed eyes from those pesky solar flares. All hoping for a magnificent high noon light show.
 
Thank goodness for that sign. Heavens, that stretch of highway is 22 miles long. Without that sign, how would we know where to park to view something that doesn't always appear, a sometimes subtle phenomenon no one can explain?

Perhaps I'm being too hard on eager tourists and the helpful highway department. But we West Texans grow up assuming that lights can best be seen in the dark. And my Daddy, who wasn't even known for his navigational finesse, never needed a sign to find the best location to park and view the Marfa Lights. He didn't Google it.  He spent a fair amount of time talking to other people and a few evenings, searching.

Perhaps, in our continuing, insatiable quest for definable truth and concrete knowledge, we are losing something valuable. We are wandering less on our own, seeking more adventures under bright lights and surrounded by crowds of strangers who read the same informative signs we do.

Are we losing our respect for mystery?

Far West Texas was originally mapped by Spanish explorers as "El Desplobado", the unexplored. This was the Texas map-maker's version of those charts of the deep Atlantic that noted "Here be Monsters". No one suggested the bravest of sailors shouldn't go there, just that they should keep their eyes open and accept that they might spy a sea monster or two. No one back then supposed that photographing or analyzing a sample of sea monster DNA was the determinate factor for confirming a monster sighting. You saw monsters, or you didn't. Who's to say why the monsters were or weren't swimming that day. It was a mystery. It remained a mystery.

Our highly educated friend and pastor Matt Miles (Fort Davis Presbyterian Church) frequently answers some of the intellectual puzzles we Presbyterians ponder by saying God is bigger and smarter than us (okay, Matt says it better but that's the gist of it). He sometimes assures us we don't have to know such and such. Or, possibly, aren't meant to know. Even, Can't know. (Ouch!) I find that freedom not to know both comforting and challenging. Take, for instance, the Marfa Lights. I know they exist. I vaguely want to know why. (What if there really are a bunch of ghosts out there toasting marshmallows over campfires?) But I also savor the mystery of not knowing, and of not caring why I don't know.
 
I don't need a sign to tell me there are lights out there anymore than I need someone to tell me there is a God.

Glimpsing mysterious lights, the mossy fins of sea monsters, the grace of God in daily life is what differentiates Life from all the tourist attractions we've constructed. Half the fun comes in learning just where to pull over and park. And then, the trick is to be very still and to watch for what happens next. Even if you don't see what you're looking for, you'll inevitably see something you didn't expect to see. Something that isn't on any sign.

We didn't see any lights that night. But we laughed a lot, and we got to know our nephew Steven a little better.



CATHEDRAL OF THE WEST   a 12" x 18" pastel by Lindy C Severns   $1900 SOLD at auction
                    donated to Museum of the Big Bend's Trappings of Texas Auction 2008

Another day: We pulled off the road at the Marfa Lights Viewing Station to take pictures.
It was daylight.
No lights appear in this painting, no matter how long you look at it. But I know they exist. There may also be fossilized sea monsters embedded in those cliffs, but I can't vouch for that. Maybe you should check it out for yourself? And bring marshmallows. Just in case.

        

Our good friend and neighbor Boogie lives and ranches miles from the nearest paved road to anywhere. At eighty-something, she's still going strong, although she would dispute that statement, protesting that her eyesight isn't what it once was and that she can't lift bags of feed into her pickup anymore. She drinks beer on occasion, smokes every chance she gets, eats like one of those colorful, flitty little finches she reminds me of.

And she's taught me a lot.

Boog pulls no punches. She likes you, or she doesn't. She doesn't squander a great deal of the time that remains her on folks she doesn't like. If she doesn't want to do something, she tells you, straight out. No pussy-footing around your feelings, no glib excuses. "Yes" is an answer. "No" is another answer. There's a choice. She uses it. Wisely. Therein lies a lesson for those of us who tiptoe around the feelings of others, often to our own detriment.

This tough-as-Longhorn-jerky rancher-lady with sun-freckled skin lives in a nice house with a nice dog whose hobby is biting men who strike her as suspicious or downright shady. She loves children, but has none of her own so she offers support, love and encouragement to those of others. Petite, straight-spined, her hair styled in a cut that a twenty-something would covet, she wears campy hats, eyelet blouses, scuffed boots. She dresses "just darling", as my grandmother liked to say. I feel confident that since Boog doesn't indulge in the Internet, that statement about being darling won't get back to her. But she really is. Darling. With a mind that rivals the computer she doesn't use. I wish I shared some of her genes.

The cut-through to Marfa closed several years back. Now she drives forty minutes, one way, to get her mail. Most days, she spends alone. No one who knows her would consider her a hermit, a recluse, or the least bit "odd". She's simply Boogie, a woman who has made a success of her life and who continues to enrich the lives of all the folks she bothers with, not limited to but including even the few shady characters her dog doesn't bite.

Once, when we were planning a trip to Lubbock, Jim called to ask her if she needed anything from "The Land of Stores" (as cities are both affectionately and disdainfully referred to around here, according to how badly you need something from them).  Boogie thought a minute. "You know," she said, "I can't think of a thing I can't get around here. And if I've done without it for three days, why would I need it?"

Talk about a lesson in consumerism.

When Boogie drives out to the highway on her dirt ranch road, her pickup disappears in a cloud of dust.

I hope the lifestyle she represents so elegantly never does.


LEAVING HOME    a 14" x 18" pastel on archival Wallis pastel paper by Lindy C Severns
$1800 available at the Museum of the Big Bend's
TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS 2008 Invitational Cowboy Gear and Fine Western Art Show and Sale 
opening February 28- April 2008   Alpine, TX

I thought a lot about Boogie as I painted this from several photos my husband Jim shot after visiting her.
                 Reaching the pavement isn't always what we should shoot for. 

        

En plein air: My easel set up at Point of Rocks on Texas Hwy 166 outside Fort Davis

Sometimes, the landscapes most familiar to an artist are neglected in favor of more exotic locales.
It's the artist's version of that ancient saw known to every cow. The one about the grass being significantly greener in the neighbor's field...the greater the distance away from the home pasture, the greener that grass.

When I lived in Lubbock, I had an excuse for painting only scenes from our travels. Here in the wild Davis Mountains of Far West Texas, there's no excuse for wandering too far afield just to find a worthy painting subject. (The real problem here is narrowing down the landscape, condensing it into a finite number of paintings! It's a great problem to have.) So when I received my invitation to The Museum of the Big Bend's annual Trappings of Texas show, I decided to specialize in the familiar.  This year, all three of my entries will feature landscapes within range of a rifle shot of a formation known around here as "Point of Rocks".  And Point of Rocks is what I see from my living room window every sunrise.

Point of Rocks has quite a history. Indians built sheltered fires there. A landmark on the Old Spanish Trail (the geography-based name of my studio and website) later known as the Overland-Butterfield trail, Point of Rocks was one of the official stagecoach rest stops scattered along Texas Highway 166, now known as the Davis Mountain Scenic Loop. My family used to picnic there — I'm fifteen years older than my brother, and Point of Rocks picnics are one of the few family vacation memories we share in common.  Recognizable for its wall of towering, tumbling boulders, it's visible from a great distance.

The roadside park there makes it a convenient plein air painting site.  (No hiking required, level ground, a stone wall to hold my pastel boxes, public access, shade.) We drove up in the truck, but it didn't stretch my imagination much to envision stepping out of a stagecoach or hobbling a Comanche pony there.

For about a week last November, I eyed the site for its potential as a pastel. (This was the first of my Trappings paintings, done between my husband's two hip replacement surgeries. I needed to get outside and paint something, anything! Jim needed fresh air and the dog needed to prowl new territory.) I pass Point of Rocks several times a week. There are lots of paintings to be found there. But what grabbed me that time was a solitary yellow sumac shouting color at the base of the rocks. (West Texas isn't exactly known for our fall color.) On closer inspection, I spied pockets of red oak lining dark boulders like sprinkles on cupcakes. It wasn't until I was unloading my easel and pastels that I saw the dried white stalks of sotol blooms marking the rock base just beyond the golden sumac. And I had my composition.

Because I'm at my core a risk-taker, I pick subjects rather intuitively, then hope for the best. So I make a lot of composition mistakes that I must later correct. (Better to paint and perish than never to paint at all.) In this case, the two areas that interested me vied for honors as my focal point. On one side of the squarish 12" x 16" paper I had with me were the white stalks, on the other, the brilliant sumac. I started my painting not knowing where I'd go with that. Also, the rocks ran straight up between the two foliage subjects, straight into a lone pinon that was solid in its greeness. Drawing the viewer's eye straight up the middle of the painting isn't as interesting as weaving it from one of the quadrants. Big blocks of anything solid aren't very interesting. And I had only two hours until the sun would go away, leaving me inspired but in the dark. I ignored all these left-brained concerns and got to painting, fast as my fingers would move.


Alcohol on Nupastel wash sketch on Kitty Wallis museum grade pastel paper

The fastest way I've found to get something workable on paper outdoors is to do a loose line sketch of the major shapes using Nupastel sticks. (Extremely hard pastels which don't fill the tooth of the surface.)  I use the local color for each object, not that the color will show when I'm done but because it gives me a sort of color map that I use to keep my place in a complex landscape. I see a line of green and know its a tree shape; I see blue and know its a distant mountain. And so on.) We're talking minutes.
 
I then take a cheap brush dipped in rubbing alcohol and paint over the Nupastel, which turns the powdered pigment into paint which won't blend into subsequent layers of pastel and get lost. (It's my map, remember.) In this case, I also bleed alcohol-color into broad areas to indicate shadows I don't want to forget, and the yellow tree form. Alcohol dries almost immediately, so there's no waiting time before I switch to my usual soft pastels. It's only a map. But its someplace to start, and should a sudden storm blow in and send me packing, I have something on paper (canvas) that, adding a reference photo, I can work from, remembering the feel of the locale.

In the above stage, I follow my line sketch with a filled pastel sketch: the darkest darks and lightest lights are indicated as well as the object forms. My color palette emerges. I have a landscape I feel I could walk through.
(I finished the sky before I did the rest, then stuck with what I had there— otherwise, the approaching sunset will change my palette again and again. The sky defines the ground for me.)

Because of the jumbled rocks in this painting, there was more drawing early on than I usually do. I smdged in the sky, danced sky colors through the rocks as shadow areas. Using Sennilier dark browns and violets, I indicate my darkest areas. I paint very heavily into my surface, so I don't like to use ultra-soft Sennilier pastels except as accents, as they fill my surface too quickly. But the darks are creamy and deep, and there is a place for that in rocky crevasses like these.


A detail of the block-in stage of my pastel. (Note the sotol stalks— I don't want to forget those.)

I paint with bold, loose strokes. I can refine the painting later.


This is as far as I got before darkness drove me to pack it up and go home.

The main things I wanted to say in this painting are here: the sumac sings color, the rocks brood with shapes and shadows, the white stalks seem to mark the trail for the next guy to pass this way. There's unexpected color in this old place. I could stop here. I think about stopping here. But the painting is still a mish-mash that doesn't invite the viewer in, and the two sides still vie for the position as focal point. It's several objects on paper. Not a painting.

I finish this in my studio, blurring the background rocks, defining the foreground. The sotol wins out. I love the original color of the sumac, but for composition's sake, it mute it slightly, giving the sotol stalks center stage. Another day, I might've done the opposite. That's why art is called "creating".
Out of a perverse sense of place, I rebel at artistic composition and don't move the pine tree, even though it is almost dead center. It's a very old tree, and I want to image a Comanche would recognize this very spot on this ancient trail. Color marked the trail for me that day. I'll never see it quite the same again.


"AUTUMN MARKS THE OVERLAND TRAIL" a 12" x 16" pastel by Lindy C Severns 
                                                        copyright 2007
              A plein air painting on Kitty Wallis museum-grade pastel paper
 Framed: $1500  On display and available for purchase at Trappings of Texas 2008
           February 29 - April 30 2008  Museum of the Big Bend   Alpine, Texas

        

My husband and I don't work real jobs anymore. We live on a ranch three hours from the nearest WalMart. (Unless you count that tiny token "big box" in Pecos, which, no one does—if you need to shop, you'd might as well drive the three hours north to Midland/Odessa or west to El Paso, because even Pecos is ninety minutes away, and when you get there, well, you're in Pecos.)

Out here, there's no fast food in sight (unless you're talking about crossing paths with a swift mule deer).  A DSL line isn't even an option where we live— Alltel assures us we're lucky to have phone service. So Jim and I pass a plodding data card back and forth between our laptops and dream of the day it will give us high speed Internet access right here in the comfort of our remote home.

We define a "neighbor" as any friendly soul we can reach by truck in less than the twenty-five minutes it takes us to get to town. (Actually, we can make it to town quicker than we can drive the unpaved ranch roads to some of our close "neighbors".) Neither of us operate on a fixed schedule. Our time is our own. Sort of.

So one of the first things gainfully employed city friends and relations ask us these days is What (on earth!) do you do with your time?  Or, more diplomatically phrased, What (the hell!) is there to do way out there? 

I accept these as valid questions, as they keep coming from intelligent beings, some of whom care deeply about Jim and me. I suspect the non-locals still regular in our acquaintance secretly anticipate the pain of watching us either lapsing into hermithood, declining into alcoholism, or becoming obese and addicted to TV reality shows. (We do have two TV's, a satellite dish, DVR and a subscription to Netflix. Neither of us watch much television. The parrot, however, is a sucker for PBS preschool programming; Jim knows the words to all the Sesame Street songs and can quote Mr. Rogers as accurately as he quotes the daily stock market averages.)

Several years ago, in preparation for our then-imminent retirement, I bought one of those mystery book/jigsaw puzzles by Nelson DeMille, a favorite author. (My husband and I are avid readers.) I think I'd enjoy keeping a puzzle on the table; Jim has never worked a jigsaw puzzle in his life, and has no plans to start that activity, but Jim has a long history of doing things I think he should enjoy. We also purchased a telescope, because forty years ago, when Jim was in the Air Force, he learned to use a sextant, and when I was a child in Houston, I liked to lie in our driveway and watch satellites arc overhead.

Several years into "retirement" the puzzle is still in the box and the telescope is in storage. The interest is there: We simply don't have time.

So what do we do?

A bunch of us (all five people—including instructor Maggie McCollum—who fit comfortably inside our local yoga studio) had this very conversation before class one morning. It's a question almost impossible to answer. Describing daily life in small town, rural Far West Texas to someone from Lubbock or Dallas or Houston is like trying to translate the nuances of being a fish into the foriegn language of a country without water — the words don't exist. As a fish, the best thing you can do is to take the land-locked swimming. Which frightens them.

Even Mother, who really tries to understand and hopefully isn't concerned that I'll become an alcoholic, asks me what my normal daily routine is. The short answer: It isn't routine. But, it's mine.

Every morning, Jim and I wake to a new world. Living on land without man-made distractions, we're much more finely attuned to the weather, to the phases of the moon, to the exact moment of sunset than when we flew a jet all over the continent. Sometimes, the morning calls us to hike while the air is still crisp and the mountains swimming in fog. Sometimes we wake to deer camped in our yard; one of us will pour coffee while the other hurries outside to scatter a cupful of corn to keep them around a few minutes longer, and we'll drink the whole pot as we identify our favorites— Notch Ear, Limpy, Rocky-Neck, Old George. We point to birds. We vow to look each of them up to identify. (One day.) I paint. I think about painting, then paint some more. Some days, Jim saws wood, or notches ears, or pumps water. Often, I go along for the ride, or just to be with him. We kick up interesting rocks.



Like city-dwellers, we check email, watch GMA, put away the last nights' dishes. We meet friends for lunch, go to dinner at houses an hour away from here. Once a week, I'll put in a load of laundry then head to the studio; I'll paint while it washes, change out a load, paint while the dryer runs, paint until I forget I'm also doing laundry, which means I must continue this routine the next day, too. Or I may bake bread, a luxury I couldn't enjoy when we were flying and always "on call". Some mornings, I hurry into town for yoga while Jim hits Baeza's with a grocery list. Monthly, there's the Wednesday Matinee Good Times Reader's book club; my cherished women's evening circle, session meetings at the church. Commitments I never would've found time for in the city. Every few days, we drive to Alpine to run errands or to deliver a painting to the gallery. We always go to the Drug Store for gossip and breakfast before the Presbyterians gather for Sunday School.
 
Regardless of where we're going, whenever the truck is in motion, we're tourists admiring the view of our own world. We take hundreds of photos, mentally mark locations to return to with my easel and paints. We exclaim over light hitting the mountains in unfamiliar ways, at clouds patterning the ground with shadow. We stop to smell wet pinon, fuschia cholla blossoms, musky javelina. (If we weren't so tired by bedtime each night, we'd learn to use that telescope.)

We live as many moments in awe as we do in activity. And that makes unopened puzzles last a lot longer.