In a state notorious for stretching tall tales into blatantly outrageous sagas, Texans, especially we die-hard Far West Texans shouldn’t be faulted for boasting about our  wide, dramatic skies.  Whether severe-clear blue or sagging with towering gray thunder-boomers, the big Texas sky refuses to take a rear seat to any landscape.

Sometimes, the sky is such a force, it becomes the landscape. It’s a little scary for an artist to accept this reversal of the accepted order of things, to let the sky drive a painting. Making sky your subject feels a little like walking on the ceiling. For one, terrain makes a nice model. Mountains stand very still while you paint them. Trees may twitch a little, sometimes even undress for the artist; rivers wiggle and splash, but accommodate the artist by politely staying within their banks while being rendered.  Skies, however, rumble and roll all over the place. And about the time you get a feel for one, it abruptly relinquishes its place to a whole new-and-unfamiliar sky. An artist painting a big Texas sky on location had better be quick and decisive about it.

The temptation for those of us who paint this country is to paint our big skies on big canvases. I do that, usually in the slow comfort of my studio. But I also paint skies en plein air—as in, while standing directly under clouds as they do their goofy weather things. (More than once, my adoring husband has had to rescue me and my easel from one of Mother Nature's tantrums.)

I also enjoy distilling the biggest, most dramatic sky into a few square inches of canvas. It’s sort of like building a ship in a bottle while riding a bike pursued by a charging rhino. You have to know where you’re going because you don’t have time to think about anything but the details of getting there.
 
Painting on location, painting in miniature mean traveling through one of those places in life where everything you do counts.

Where everything you do counts…

We fill our days with busy-ness, but how many things in our lives really count? Loving someone definitely counts. Words spoken in anger; a random act of kindness; raindrops on parched cactus count. Things that really matter set off chain reactions, create new things that also count for something.

On a postcard-sized canvas, one speck of color, a single dab of pigment can change everything. One shifting cloud can profoundly alter the lighting of an entire sky. So it's important to know what I want to say in a painting, especially when I'm restricted by time or size. Everything I put in, everything I omit counts.
 
I want my paintings, whatever their size, to count as little bursts of joy, tiny instances of splendor— like rowdy clouds rollicking around the sky, jockeying for the finest places in a Texas sunset.



BLUE MOUNTAIN MEMORIES   4" x 6" pastel   private collection
copyright Lindy C Severns 2010

I rarely get to visit with people who buy my art.
One day last spring a tourist couple from Sugarland were directed to my studio .
They'd once owned property nearby, and they wanted something special by which to remember
their time in West Texas. After carefully studying everything
hanging and stacked in the studio, they spied this one, propped on my easel, still untitled.
It was their tiny burst of joy, and after hearing their story, I titled it for them.
It all just clicked.  The previous night, this storm had painted the sky over Blue Mountain, a
Davis Mt landmark in my" backyard".  I'd painted the storm—the mountain here counts,
but it's the sky that defines this tiny pastel. Small things. They count.
Lindy