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