“Visibililty unobscured.” “Visible to the naked eye.”  “I have it in sight!””

In this era of smart-alecky navigational devices with whining, nasal voices quick to remind you there’s a better way to go, nothing beats actually seeing your destination. Yourself.  As with your own two eyes (or, however many eyes you may possess).  Even with hundreds of thousands of dollars of avionics at his fingertips and trust in his machine, the captain of a jet descending through a dark gloom of clouds relaxes into his seat at visual confirmation of the runway. Even though the pilot knows exactly where he is in relation to the terrain, the RULES tell him his plane is permitted to go only so low without him seeing the runway environment. Seeing it. These are good rules. Seeing a runway is a small thing to ask of someone who can find his way home from anywhere in the dark.

Rules keep us safe.

Sometimes we use rules as vitamins when we should, instead, be eating our fruits and vegetables. We avoid the uncharted, seizing up the map the traveler before us drew, then kindly uploaded to the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with hiking the groomed path while taking frequent fixes to a GPS. And the marked road is often the most expeditious route from point A to point B, hopefully the pathway to riches, and generally the only survivable route to the scenic overlook.

 The danger comes in convincing ourselves there’s no alternate route. If the plane is on fire, do we really expect our pilot—who is now sweating bullets on his left cheek while exuding experience and situational awareness on his right— to circle until he sees runway lights? Or do we applaud his decision to creep below the minimum descent height this one time?  Most instrument pilots have busted minimums more than once (without being on fire) and lived to tell about it, just not to the FAA. That’s not what pilots train for, but rule-based training allows aviators the privilege of creatively breaking rules.

I’ve done both, and producing art is much safer than piloting. (Unless you eat your paints or sniff fixative or something, in which case your shriveled mind would not have carried you this far into my meandering writing.) The rules of the road apply to art, but under less threatening circumstances. An artist learns what colors come forward in a painting and which ones recede, creating distance—tricky artist magic. There are formulas. Tools for selecting a focal point. Rules that nudge us into creating orderly things other people understand enough to enjoy.

The focal point of a landscape painting is the artist’s runway, a well-lit environment a safe distance from distracting obstacles. Many of my early landscapes were lovely conversations about color and mass but lacking a focal point. The viewer could circle one of those paintings all day, wanting to land but never really seeing it.  (What is this painting about? What is she trying to tell me? I think I’ll watch Seinfeld reruns now. )

Through a lifetime in art, I’ve grown more skillful as a painter, but I’ve also grown smarter. How? I learned the rules. I shot approaches until I’d memorized the terrain. Using maps, I can find my way home in the dark now.  So one day, I composed a four foot square pastel with the focal point smack dab in the center of the canvas. (This is soooo against the rules, but I knew my terrain, and I was on fire.) Busting minimums, I threw the rules of composition out with that nagging, nasal-voiced GPS that kept telling me I’d stepped off the path.  Painting SHADOW CANYON was more fun than tossing pennies off the—(oops! I’d better not reveal that location here...) There was a more traditional way to compose this painting.

I’m not saying rules are made to be broken.  My point is don’t become trapped inside the map. I’ve hiked that Big Bend trail. The visibility is unobscured and the geological timeline is both colorful and visible to the naked eye.

I kept that deep, central, mysterious shadow in sight as I painted. Why? Because now, we’re busting minimums together as I pilot you deep within those canyon walls—off the groomed trail…off the map… into an uncharted place where following your imagination is the only rule.

                       
                                     SHADOW CANYON
                                    47" x 47" pastel copyright Lindy C Severns 2010
                                                            apprx. $12,500
                                             available at KIOWA GALLERY  Sept 2010
                                              contact  kiowagallery@sbcglobal.net

To see more of my paintings visit oldspanishtrailstudio.com