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