Wanderings of An Artist In Far West Texas

Riding the Red Dawn at Los Caballos, Marathon TX

2010-02-02T16:10:00Z

Last night, I closed the pages of one of the most remarkably satisfying reads I’ve enjoyed in my passionate relationship with fiction. If you love dogs, or race cars; if you’re young enough or old enough to contemplate the big questions life poses, rush out and buy your own copy of THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by Garth Stein. I won’t loan my copy out. It’s the sort of book I’ll savor, knowing I can return for one succinctly profound thought at a time.

What does this have to do with art? you ask. That’s why I enjoy blogging for you. You’re astutely aware of where your interests lie, and I assure you, this is going somewhere besides Watkins Glen or the kennels behind the library.

Without spoiling your read—should you take my advice and read the book—THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN keeps several philosophical themes weaving through its pages. As in the title: Anyone can race on a dry track—an artist embraces the rain, triumphing over the technicians skidding across a wet track. Rain is the unknown element, a thing that appears unbidden, heedless of all our planning and preparation. Rain. The wild card in life. That which cannot be controlled but which can, and often does, change everything. Forever.

I traveled to Marathon, Texas to paint a spectacular sunset. I like painting sunsets because I can select both the sunset vista and also, which afternoon I paint. Painting sunsets is a rather leisurely activity that can be savored. Sunrises, on the other hand, are just awful on artists, who must awaken in darkness, then blindly seek out transient light winking at an interesting terrain. If it’s cloudy or raining, or if you don’t know where to wait for sunup, most likely you’ve gotten out of bed early for naught. In my case, I drag my little family, husband, dog and parrot with me for such occasions. If I’m yawning and cold, I want everyone to share my discomfort. Art is a team sport in our family.

To say the weather that week didn’t cooperate would be like saying lechiguilla, with its rapier-tipped, toxin-coated spines, hurts when it breaks off in your knee. Painting on location went by the wayside with the first day’s ice storm. By midweek, we counted ourselves lucky to have one decent photograph of the dreary-skied desert. The next morning, I woke uncharacteristically early and roused the troops. Twenty-six degrees and windy. Nice driving toward sunrise weather, I announced. I screwed the lid on the Thermos as we staggered out the door and headed south.

South of Marathon, a rocky, isolated formation dramatic in a country steeped in drama gallops across the desert floor. “Los Caballos” the early Spaniards dubbed it, because the folded pattern of undulating white ridges reminded them of horsemen on their mounts. It hadn’t been much to see at sunset, but with time ticking the week away, I had nothing to lose but sleep. It was darkest-hour-before-the-dawn black when we reached the formation, or rather, the marker indicating it was out to the west, somewhere. We pulled off the road to wait.

Then, sunrise!

Sunrise drama is so fleeting, you can blink and miss the show. This frigid morning the sun rose, shone scarlet and gold across the eastern horizon, then instantly leapt into the clouds, leaving the mountains dark cutouts against a cheerless horizon. I took a picture anyway, a record of our travels. Jim poured coffee. We were there, so we sat in the truck, enjoying the silence of dawn. And there, we waited. For a lady with no patience, I wait a lot for what I want.

Pilots know all it takes is a hole in the sky. One hole. During our second cup of coffee in our Ford Super Duty F-250 holding pattern, the sun escaped to beam light onto one section of those ridges known as Los Caballos.

I leap from the truck, scramble up a boulder for a good shot. And giant, wind-driven raindrops splatter my cheeks. Now, I’m waving a digital camera around in the rain while precariously balanced on a slippery rock I didn’t actually need to climb and I still haven’t taken a picture and the sun is retreating into the clouds. Sheltering my hydrophobic camera with one hand, I focus on the galloping folds of rock ridges as late dawn dresses them in red velvet necklaced with diamonds.

Intellectually, I know—because I study guidebooks written by scholars of geology—that I’m not seeing diamonds. The sparkling white strata in this rollicking column of aged mountains poking up from the earth, unattached to their neighboring hills is novaculite. This stunning ripple of white chert-like rock is composed of microscopic quartz crystals. The crystals are wet now, and collectively, they dazzle. I get my shot, and another, and my camera battery goes dead. I have extra batteries in the truck, of course. I am not in the truck though. I am on a large slippery rock, and the rain is falling harder now. The photo shoot is over.

Another thing the guidebooks proclaim is that this formation is both ancient and displaced. Without getting lost in the fascinating geology of tectonic plates, let me summarize this place’s history as I understand it: Something cataclysmic happened to this spot very, very long ago, and these dawn-red mountains draped in jewels aren’t supposed to be here, and once they interjected themselves into this landscape to the sound of continents crashing apart, nothing was ever the same again. And on this morning, I am there to appreciate these old souls of mountains.

I love most of my paintings. The few I don’t love, you don’t see. But I love some paintings best, and this is one of those. I loved being out in the middle of nowhere, drinking coffee in a pickup truck with my husband and the animals we share our lives with. Loved standing on that rock in the icy rain and wondering if it would be me or my camera to crash first. Loved printing those two not-so-spectacular photos and knowing I’d remember, better than they, what splendor dawn light through rainclouds urged onto those ancient mountains. Loved boldly using the garish red pastels gathering dust in their little-used landscape tray. Loved painting in the studio as if sudden raindrops might wash my work away, as if my hair was afire and getting this one onto canvas was my last living act before that fire consumed me. As if continents were about to break up to drift apart beneath me and my easel.

Unanticipated, unknown elements fall into our lives every day. The trick is to live life as an artist, not a technician. Experience teaches more than the most detailed photograph. Diamonds excite us more than novaculite. Art, poetry, music, fine literature all zoom us past the guidebooks we depend so heavily on and into a place where wind whips our hair across damp cheeks and words are meaningless.

Today, may you take each moment for what it is. Rain is wet. Don’t fight it. You may even try racing in it.

RIDING THE RED DAWN Los Caballos near Marathon, TX
copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
22" x 33" pastel conservation framing by Midland Gallery $5800

for an enlarged image of this painting, visit http://lindycseverns.com

Lindy C Severns
PO Box 2167 Fort Davis, TX
Old Spanish Trail Studio
http://oldspanishtrailstudio.com

Gallery Representation:

MIDLAND GALLERY
432-694-8761
4610 N Garfield Ste A-2
Midland, TX 79705
http://midlandgallery.com

KIOWA GALLERY
432-837-3067
105 E Holland Ave
Alpine, TX 79830

Moonrise, Big Bend

2009-11-09T20:34:00Z

"Moonrise, Big Bend" 24" x 48" pastel copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
Kiowa Gallery, Alpine TX $7800 (for a more detailed image, go to my website)
Alpine's ArtWalk and Gallery Night 2009

Painting in the Big Bend entertains me. This is a land of surprises where being one with nature is the only given. I can go to the same location day after day and never see the same place twice. I can go to the same place twice and never see the scene I’d intended painting.

And that keeps painting this vast region fun for me.

Art should be fun for the artist. Too much work goes into creating art for it not to be fun. The behind-the scenes tasks of a professional artist can be daunting. Take deadlines.

Alpine’s annual Artwalk and Gallery Night happens the weekend before Thanksgiving. It’s sort of dress-up time for us artists, when we hang new work in time for the holidays. I’m a resident artist at Kiowa Gallery, so Artwalk is my deadline for framing and hanging my next year’s collection. I’m allotted x-amount of wall space. Gallery owner Keri Artzt and I confer as to what sizes, shapes and price ranges I'll fill that space with. This year, at the last minute, the gallery awarded me a significant chunk of extra wall turf. Keri wanted a four foot long pastel, and she wanted it to represent one of my favorite subjects, the Sierra del Carmens across the Rio Grande from Big Bend National Park. At sunset, she suggested, and I do not take my gallery owners’ suggestions lightly.

I recognized this as one of life’s mixed blessings, the sort that makes me clandestinely consume chocolate. If I had the market, I’d regularly paint large canvases, but in this case, there literally wasn’t time to travel, paint and frame. So, I said “yes”.

We moved the RV to Marathon, intent on taking a couple of day trips into the National Park. A wind storm swept through West Texas. We couldn’t sleep, the RV was rocking so. We rose before dawn and drove to Panther Junction, about 80 miles. Disappointed, we turned back after lunch. Paintings of dust storms and blowing cactus just don’t sell. The next day proved much the same. And the next.

The Border Patrol guys were getting to know us as the crazy folks who drove in and out of the Park with a parrot, a dog and a camera. (Painting on location wasn’t even an option.) I decided to try for a sunrise location, someplace nearby. We set the alarm for pre-dawn-thirty. Filled the Thermos. Drove twenty miles. Waited for the sun to rise and strike the Los Caballos formation. (This trip ultimately produced another large painting, but not until I got rained on. Snow and ice followed, keeping us parked in Marathon.) We ate buffalo burgers at the Gage Hotel another night. We’d been in Marathon a week and I still didn’t have a painting subject.

On Halloween, the last morning we could possibly stay gone and still have a life to go back to, we traveled once more into Big Bend. We finally got to hike, and we took lots of pictures, but nothing that said “Paint me Large”. We researched locations from which we could see the sunset color the del Carmens, then after much hiking and much discussion, we returned to our chosen spot.

We hiked up the rise about 4:30 pm. Sat in the burning sun on a fossil bed amid cholla and ocotillo and lechiguilla and studied the view I wanted to paint. It was clear and sunny, and the hill behind us promised to produce an interesting mass of shadow right at sunset. I sat, waiting. Watching.

Jim kicked up a melon-sized rock. He analyzed it, then brought it to me. It was a fossilized egg, the shell clearly delineated. The amber-colored head, neck, body and legs curled within. Striations on the outside of the “shell” seemed to indicate the beak’s attempts to break out. Before what? What happened to keep the prehistoric avian from hatching, walking this rise, flying over the del Carmens? We felt connected to the stony creature. Awed to experience such sacredness of nature. It is a huge region, with hundreds of views of the del Carmens. We’d debated on where to set up. What had made us choose this very difficult to reach spot?

Jim took the fossil back and carefully replaced just as he’d found it, gently sinking it back into the nest of dusty ground that for eons had been its grave and almost, its birthplace.

The shadows on the del Carmens deepened, but the sun was still high. We were hot and thirsty, but didn’t want to hike back down to the truck for water. Jim started politely whining about needing a beer and a buffalo burger. I was tempted. How foolish to spend hours sitting in one spot, waiting on a five-minute window that might or might not happen?

Having chosen this spot, I was reluctant to move at all now. I played with pebbles around my knees. When I looked up, the full moon was rising over Pico. A gift to an artist. Waiting became instantly easier.

Almost three hours after we’d hiked up the mountainside, the hill behind us dramatically blocked the sun and cast a giant shadow that melted the red volcanic rocks into purples and blues. The moon hesitated in its arc across the deepening blue sky, and the del Carmens vibrated with lights and darks.

It was almost two hours back to Marathon. The animals had been shut up in the RV all day. We were tired and hungry and hoping the bar at the Gage was still serving burgers. We passed less than an handful of cars all the way back. Five minutes out of Marathon, our headlights illuminated a deer lying in the opposite lane of traffic. Her head was up, alertly looking around, but her mangled legs were twisted awkwardly beneath her body. She calmly facing death. Wondering why, or maybe knowing why. She seemed so...aware.

We talked about stopping and shooting her.

We didn’t. And I thought about her all night.

For us, the things we didn’t do that busy day proved the most significant. We didn’t irreverently kick the fossilized chick aside. We marveled. We didn’t settle for merely spectacular scenery, and we didn't succumb to impatience so we didn’t miss moonrise. We didn’t try to “fix” nature by putting the doe down.

Sunset. Timelessness. Life. Death. Moonrise.

We got our burgers, shared a toast to the day, returned home to spend the next week of twelve hour days paintng in my studio before delivering the finished pastel for framing. I was tempted to keep this painting, but I have the memories that generated it.
I’m grateful for the gift of being able to celebrate and share Nature through my art. And that makes the deadlines a lot easier to handle.

for more paintings visit my website OLD SPANISH TRAIL STUDIO

Sleeping Lion Mountain Under a Sky So Broad and Deep

2009-09-21T18:19:00Z

Around Far West Texas, change comes slowly, and most of us locals appreciate that timetable. In tiny Fort Davis, Texas, history lingers like a guest sipping iced tea on a shady veranda. It's not that we don't appreciate things of the modern world. But we buy our balsamic vinegar, vine-ripened tomatoes and Blue Bell ice cream mere paces from one of the best-preserved and reconstructed frontier forts in the American West. Leaving the fort grounds, you can walk a stretch of the Overland/Butterfield Mail Route, the longest unpaved segment of that historic trail that remains. (Before that, this time-worn dirt road was known as the Old Spanish Trail. Think, conquistadors, caravans of wooden-wheeled wagons carrying goods from Chihuahua to Taos...)

Walking such ground as you go about life affects the way you look at time and space.

Numerous books and local organizations, such as the Friends of the Fort and the Historical Society regularly share arcane facts about our predecessors in Jeff Davis County. My favorite involves notorious mail carrier Henry Skillman. The first Butterfield/Overland Express carrier was taking his siesta in one of the towering palisades of igneous rock lining his route. He took off his boots and was mending his buckskin pants when some pesky Apaches interrupted his break. The dedicated mail carrier reported he dropped his drawers to sling his mail pouch over his shoulder. Bare of more than just his boots, he then tediously evaded the Apaches, who rudely confiscated his horse before scattering back into the mountains. After hours of playing hide and seek in the rocks, Skillman continued on to El Paso on foot. While neither rain nor snow nor Apaches could keep our Henry from his appointed rounds up the Old Spanish Trail from Fort Davis, I can only imagine the sunburn he must have suffered.

Sleeping Lion Mountain typifies those rugged, jumbled igneous rock formations that make this area so wildly spectacular. The mountain is the spinal cord of Fort Davis.  Along one side spread the original pre-Civil War fort, followed by the "new" army post, the one still standing today. Town sprouts under the mountain's southern and western shadows. The Davis Mountains State Park and McDonald Observatory have the mountain's back. More significantly, just past Sleeping Lion, there's still nothing but land and sky. And lots of both.

When I had to choose my subject for a recent in-studio pastel painting demonstration for a group of out-of-area artists, Sleeping Lion seemed a good introduction to Fort Davis landscape art. In an hour and a half, a relatively short time, as painting goes, I would paint a sky, because that's what I do--I paint skies.

But I wanted to convey a sense of place to these Texas hill country artists. I wanted to share this place in history, this place unchanged by big box stores and high rises and freeways. Although there wasn't time to spin the yarn about Henry Skillman, I wanted my fourteen visiting artists to intuit what a barefoot hike from Fort Davis might be like. I couldn't take them hiking, so I painted from photos I took while hiking the trail from the park to the fort with young city cousin/mountain goat Dylan Hernandez.

I enjoyed my visitors, the Lakeway Artists and their workshop instructor, professional artist Danny Jones of Mansfield, Texas. We painted, wined and dined. We laughed a lot. I hope they learned a lot.
I also hope they took something wild and agelessly empty home with them.
As I hope you do.

I introduce Sleeping Lion Mountain. Look down on it. Imagine climbing in and out of those long-cooled lava rocks, hiding from pursuers, taking shelter from the sun and storms.
Imagine you're alone. Walking across a mountain ridge. Standing on this mountain trail between the State Park and the old fort. The surrounding mountains hide all evidence of man's still sparse habitation in the area. Careful you don't bump into that needle-sharp dagger that clings to the rocky ground for dear life.
Look straight ahead. Will that distant rain shower make it all the way to Sleeping Lion Mountain?
I invite you to travel into a cloudy West Texas sky.  It's a long way to Infinity, but here in Far West Texas, we can still see that it's out there.

UNDER A SKY SO BROAD AND DEEP
Sleeping Lion Mountain, Fort Davis, TX
12" x 18" pastel on archival Kitty Wallis paper   copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
$1800 unframed
* for a larger image and more paintings of Big Bend country, visit my website http://oldspanishtrailstudio.com

TECHNIQUE TIP
Single Point Sky Perspective :

Years of flying made me acutely aware that clouds aren't puffy little cottonballs in cerulean sky. Clouds are substantial, sometimes scary entities that compete with each other, crowd each other, layer themselves over each other like rowdy litter of pups clamoring to get out of a box. Clouds are NOT symmetrical white shapes on a solid blue field, and they aren't all floating around on the same plane.

To paint layers of clouds, I employ perspective, just as when painting terrain, except mirror-imaged. The clouds at the top of the page are the closest. As such, they will appear larger, and they will overlap those beneath them. Successive layers of clouds get progressively smaller as they approach the horizon, and will be layered from the top of the page downward, with those on the horizon being the farthest back layer. In painting the ground, the exact opposite is true--items at the bottom of the page are closest and therefore, largest. This front layer overlaps successively smaller layers approaching the horizon.

Try this: Fold a piece of paper in two parts, but not necessarily in half. Your fold is the horizon. The top and bottom edges (farthest from the fold) will hold the largest shapes, say, clouds and rocks. Progressively layer increasingly smaller clouds (down) and behind and rocks (up) and behind until you reach the fold. That's where you place your smallest, farthest clouds and tiniest, most distant rocks.

See, you didn't even have to attend my workshop demo to learn that. Of course, you did miss drinks followed by that delicious, authentic Mexican food dinner on the veranda, but unfortunately, that can't be helped now. (The Internet does have its limitations.)

Light of a Distant Fire

2009-09-02T18:09:00Z

Art is a reflection of life, and wildfires are part of life in the arid west. Since my husband volunteer firefights now, I'm trying to understand our dramatic and fairly frequent blazes more than I fear them.

The suddeness of fire out here can be stunning. In spring, our super-dry season, sparks from passing cars, motorcycles, welders, even cigarettes can ignite white-dry grass that wouldn't have burned on a bet back when it was green and busy growing waist-high. We're careful with our machinery, we urge tourists to exercise extreme caution with campfires, we observe burn bans, but still, fire happens.

A lone lightning strike from a rogue thunderhead is often the culprit; a series of strikes from widespread storms isn't unheard of in our large county decorated with rugged mountains above far-ranging grasslands. We pray for rain, then hold our collective breath. One lightning strike is all it takes. (Years ago, close friends lost their house to a lightning strike and watched photos, recipes, family heirlooms burn before help could arrive. They remain scarred by that experience, but they're stoic about the fires that periodically sweep the ranch. It's just nature, they explain. Part of life.) An amazing group of volunteers with the same training as paid professionals regularly keep our county from going up in smoke. Once Jim joined their ranks, fire took on a new persona: like a bad inlaw, it became part of our family.

One moment, Jim and I are going about our lives, doing whatever it is we're doing that day; the next moment, Jim's pager is blaring a shrill message that all available hands are needed to gather at the firehouse some twenty miles away. Fire pages aren't so different than those phone calls that once came at all hours to summon us to go forth into the fickle skies to aviate. Those phone calls came often enough to produce regular paychecks, and we didn't enjoy the option of saying we were sick, or entertaining guests, or too busy to fly. (Although the parrot does a great fire truck siren, he hasn't yet imitated that awful page-out, and for that, we're grateful.)

It isn't being on call that concerns me during fire season. I'm used to dropping what I'm doing, to changing plans in a heartbeat. Volunteer firefighting is a cakewalk, compared to living on 24-hour call as a corporate pilot.  Jim (who started this post-retirement career after he went on Medicare, btw) sensibly doesn't respond to every fire. Although I'm always relieved when he steps through the door smelling of smoke and sweat, I don't spend undue energy worrying about the risks my man takes--things like tromping up and down mountainsides in the dark and setting backfires--those deeds are his venue now, and he's a big boy. I'm not adverse to risk-taking. I've gotten way too close to God at 41,000 feet and also, a few feet above ground level to deny anyone their chosen risks.

What I'm not used to is Jim rushing off without me to risk his life while seeking to control something I don't understand. Flying has its own set of terrors, but I understood those. So now, I'm learning about fire.
I don't want to fight it, but I do want to understand and appreciate fire for what it is.

Why demonize nature?

One morning a few months ago, I was somewhat simultaneously(1) shampooing the carpet while (2) cooking a meal to deliver to a recovering friend while (3) repotting houseplants, since I'd already hauled them all outside while I did my carpet cleaning. The fire page went off. We raced into action: I drove Jim out to the highway to meet the firetruck, already headed toward a wildfire near Valentine, about 25 miles west of us.

Back home and now, behind schedule, I apologetically stuffed the houseplants back into their original pots; I hauled the rented carpet cleaner out and heaved it into the truck bed, straining my back in the process. I finished cooking, then rushed the food I'd prepared into town, where I passed it to a mutual friend who was there, waiting on the steps of our little museum after her volunteer stint. (She lived near my convalescing friend, and this scheduled handoff saved me another hour's drive.) I rushed back home as rain and thunder and lightning crashed around the mountains without getting anything very wet. The sky was magnificent though.

Jim called to report that there were now over two dozen fires burning in Jeff Davis county. Almost more fires than people. Not good. Not to wait supper on him, for sure. They were moving to a new fire on the other side of the mountains. Could I see it?

Luckily, I could not. Home seemed safe enough to leave. I grabbed my camera, loaded up the dog and the parrot and set out driving west on highway 166 to see what I could see.

I sighed my relief: All the fires were distant ones. Just distant enough to paint the cumulonimbus clouds in every quadrant of the sky in rich, warm colors. Those clouds, I understood. (I was glad I was down on the ground looking up at them instead of up there, looking for a way down through them.) I started taking pictures of clouds. I snapped shot after shot, stopped a dozen times to study the colors of fire and sun and cloud. I drove ten or fifteen miles west, then happily backtracked. I drove almost to Fort Davis. I kept watching for new fires, watching the lightning, snapping pictures of the amazing skies, different skies in every direction now. Nature's fireworks.

Sunset. Storm. Fire.
Breathtakingly beautiful nature on a tear.
The sun burned through towering walls of clouds and painted the mountains in colors I cherish.
The storm was magnificent in its scope. I knew and respected the storm for what it was. I imagined banking through caverns in clouds, tiptoeing past sleeping monsters full of turbulence and hail.
I watched a beautiful glow dimming behind the mountains. Was that the fire my husband was fighting now?
I realized I was no more afraid of the fire than I feared the clouds.
I could paint that fire.
And so, I did.

"LIGHT OF A DISTANT FIRE"      copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
11" x 17" pastel on archival Wallis paper $1600 framed

*see or purchase this painting during September 2009 at the
KHAA juried art show    Old Fort Country Fort Davis, TX

visit OldSpanishTrailStudio.com to see more scenes of Far West Texas
                                              and support your local firefighters!

Storm Coming and Laundry on the Line, Finishing Touches to Blinded by Green

2009-07-18T21:27:00Z

Finishing touches are the strokes, or more often, the selective lack of strokes that make a painting sing.

I paint on location as well as in my studio. It seems easier to finish out a painting in the studio. There, I'm unhurried by changing weather, transportation, wandering art critics. Inside the studio lives continuity.

A studio painter can walk away from her easel. The next day, and the next, and so on-- long as necessary--a studio artist steps back up to that easel and finds it in the very same spot it stood in during the previous painting session.  (Or else, someone in the family is in big trouble!) The studio artist finds her paints still arranged in whatever orderly or chaotic system she finds useful. The light is the same, or else the artist flips a switch and makes it so. There's a rhythm to painting in a studio, a pattern. Pattern makes it easier to know what next.

  unfinished 9' x 12" pastel
Day One on location

                   Day 2

                      "STORM COMING AND LAUNDRY ON THE LINE"
                     9" x 12" pastel on archival Wallis copyright Lindy C Severns 2009
                    $550 (unframed)   shop.oldspanishtrailstudio.com

Plein air painting, otherwise known as "enduring the elements while attempting to produce a work of art" is fun. At leastit can be fun, for those of us who enjoy nature. But there are huge differences in studio painting and painting en plein air. Finishing, for me, anyway, is a giant difference. Study these two stages of the painting above. (I blogged about working on it in my last entry, "Blinded By Green". )

So, why is the top painting unfinished? (Ignore the fact that raindrops falling on my head made me call it a day.)

When I hurriedly packed up my Soltek easel and sealed my pastel in its foamcore carrying case for protection, I considered the sky finished.
The tree line in the middle ground was very green, with little variety in mass, color or value.
The foreground trees didn't stand out against the middle ground. The middle third of my painting seemed overworked. Boring. (Green.)
The foreground grass was still sketchy. (I basically work from top to bottom, and I hadn't gotten far on the bottom before rain made me stop.) I liked the broken color I'd swatched into it, altho the blue green resembled water.
The colors were vibrant, but they didn't flow together. The painting was TOO TOO much.
The killer: When I studied my painting, I wondered what I'd originally intended to say. (Had I intended to say anything, or had I just started painting?) Working on location, this lack of focus can prove fatal for a painting, but I like to think I can recussitate most anything.

Of course, with thunder and lightning overhead, I didn't have time to make any of these corrections, even if I'd recognized them after several hours of painting.

Next day, I broke out the ol' easel again. Set up my limited plein air pastel palette. Took the painting from its case. Looked at the new day's threatening sky. Realized a motorhome had parked between my locale and the cabin and clothesline in the painting's corner. Said a bad word about that. A quarter of my view was gone.

At that, I found my focus: The painting was ABOUT the inevitable afternoon shower and those bright clothes hanging on the line, now invisible to me. I didn't have to see them, though. (Surely the lady of the house had taken them off the line by then.) It was their color I needed!

The clothes had created tiny breaks in large masses of green, and that's what I needed to play on. (In these photos, you can barely make out that there's a cabin and a clothesline, but you can see the bits of color.) FOR A ZOOMED VIEW OF THE FINISHED PASTEL, GO TO THE PASTEL PORTFOLIO PAGE ON MY WEBSITE

I didn't need all those boring, defined trees in the mid-ground now. I took a stiff dry paintbrush (the kind that come in a child's watercolor tin works great on a small canvas) and vigorously brushed as much pigment off the green middleground as I could. Pastel doesn't brush off Wallis paper easily, so I knew some would remain as underpainting. Lightly, I brush-blended the grassy foreground. That killed those blue notes bothering me.

This left the sky and the small triangle of cabin and clothesline untouched. Untouched, both stood out. I reminded myself not to lose that triangle.

Although happy with the first day's sky, it needed adjusting to relate to my new focal triangle of cabin and clothesline. I introduced an apricot/gold chalk (in my plein air set up, I use tidbits of pastel sticks and have no idea what color brand or number they are. In the studio, I can tell you exactly what color I'm using and who makes it.) I accented a Z-shaped line of existing white highlights with this warm sunny color so it pointed at the focal triangle. I blended this into the white highlights, using my fingertip. That small change put the remaining clouds into too much contrast, so I floated pure white over the darker clouds and cerulean sky. More subtle.

Using purples, caput mortuum (love that color) and small switches of my darkest green, I next redefined the mass of trees in the middle ground. Light strokes, and not many of them were required. The brushed green underpainting was already there. Also, I now knew the painting wasn't about those trees!

Using very sharp pastel pencils, I redefined the laundry, giving the line more of a drooping curve as well. I used my darkest green soft pastel around the cabin to give it definition, my darkest mauve behind the clothes. (By using two darks of the same value but different color, the shadow mass behind my focal point holds interest.)

All that remained was to choose a light-valued green to re-emphasize the light that already ran behind the tree line and beneath the clothes. I used this lightest value sparsely, then stepped down to darker greens for all the other highlights in the trees and grass. A few lines of branches with ochre and rust pastel pencils, then a few highlights of greens gave life to the foremost trees, which now stood out-- mainly, because the trees in the background didn't. But even these fleshed-out trees no longer competed with the clothesline and cabin area.

I rolled a mid-value green pastel over the foreground, the direction my hand traveled following the rolling contours of the gopher-infested meadow I painted. This, I glazed with a raw sienna colored NuPastel stick. (Pastel glazing uses strokes so light, they are almost non-existant over what's already there. This subtly blends color without muddying it, and can give a lusciously rich transparency to a pastel painting.) I used the NuPastel glaze to further define the contours by stroking in the directions I imagined water would run, if poured on my subject landscape.

And then, I signed the thing. A new storm was billowing. And too, I'd run out of things I wanted to say.

TEN QUICK TIPS TO PLEIN AIR PASTEL PAINTING AND/OR LIFE AS A PASTELIST:

Don't quit on a painting (or a person) too soon.
Know what you want to say. Then find the quickest, most direct way to say it. (Not like my rambling blogs...)
Beware boring green masses that try, like creatures from a B-grade horror movie, to smother your vulnerable focal point.
There is no such thing as one little change that doesn't affect anything else. (If a butterfly flaps its wings in China and all that.)
Use any tool you need to get the effect you desire. Knocking pigment off your paper is a real de-stressor.
Purple and green are BFF's. Use them together so neither gets bored and listess.
Professional artists don't always know what color they're using, either.
You don't have to tell everything you know. And you certainly don't need to know every tree to paint a forest.
Make the stick of pastel you hold follow the contours of the land like you're Tiger Woods on the 18th green at the Masters. Learn to putt, if necessary. That tip about imagining which way water poured over the ground would flow came from a golf pro who must be so glad I pursued art and not golf...
Pastels are female pigments. Pastels never promise to be cheap, simple, or forgiving. Just when you think you have them figured out, a new layer of complexity makes you question whether blue and yellow make green or some mysterious new color like chartreuse. (If you can't handle this, choose oils. They are sooo solid and predicable, they must surely be male.)

Blinded by Green

2009-07-16T22:20:00Z

I'm all for blooming where planted. Making the best of a location--any location-- is easier than constantly grumbling and complaining about it. (I've tried this both ways.) Every location has its merits. Of course, some unfortunate places can tout only a single merit or two, and those hide behind vile weather or bleak landscapes...
Regardless, I do believe if you set your mind to it, you can bloom, wherever.

But living where you desire to live is very different than living somewhere because you've chosen to live there. What's the difference between desire and choice? The place where you locate Home Base is, unfortunately, almost always arrived at by choice. Probably because you work there. Maybe because you went to school there and somehow never left. Maybe you have family there. Responsibilities. A church you love. Ties of friendship. Maybe you've planted saplings that you want to see grow into mighty trees.
Maybe you simply never made the choice to leave. (Not choosing is always a choice.)
My husband and I have been there, done that, and for all the above reasons.

We weren't unhappy. Heavens, we sometimes even bloomed there. But we desired more.

So we walked away from that life, a life we'd chosen and nurtured for decades. Why? The easy answer: We were on the far side of middle-aged crazy, super-responsible, burned-out people. Dig deeper: One day we woke up and admitted our blossoms weren't as colorful nor as fragrant as we suspected they could be. Was there someplace we could blossom prolifically?
A Home Base we didn't have to make the best of?
We needed transplanting.

Uprooted, shed of responsibilities, ties, trees,we could've gone anywhere.
That is an amazing choice to possess. We followed our hearts, relocated somewhere we love, somewhere we desired to live.
Far West Texas certainly isn't for everyone, but living there is a privilege my husband and I don't take lightly.

Why then, do we ever leave?
This month, we've escaped our corner of the world for greener pastures, and I mean that literally. We're vacationing in south central New Mexico, camped under towering fir and pine on grass so lushly green it stains my bare feet and hurts my eyes if I stare at it too long. We've traded our rugged brown mountainside for this soft green one, gained a couple of thousand feet in altitude, driven six hours to get here. And for what? Green?

I don't enjoy painting this country as much as I enjoy painting west Texas. Never have. I miss the rainbow of color the high desert offers anyone who pays attention to its garish displays. I absolutely hate painting with those endless greens that fill most landscape palettes. We must frequently refer to our map when we hike here. Here, we're crowded in with other RV-ers, far closer than I'm comfortable being to unfamiliar humans, however nice and well-behaved, however expensive their motor homes. Our phone service is sketchy, roaming off-network, expensive. Real groceries are only available way off in Alamogordo. And having made my mark as a Big Bend landscape artist, I have a limited market for the subject matter found in these lovely Sacramento Mountains. It rains almost every afternoon, and my man, my dog and my parrot live in fear that a mountain shower will drown them during one of the hikes I insist we enjoy almost daily. Every mountainside looks the same. Green. Or, greener.

Even so, I paint what I see here. I'm blissfully happy when rain interrupts my day. Looking across pastures of too-green grass, trying to decide whether it's viridian or pthalo or olive or cinnabar relaxes me. I don't care whether what I paint here will sell back in Texas.
I'm blooming here in New Mexico this month.

We vacation to refill our senses. To unwind, to recharge. To put problems and stresses back in perspective. To renew our connections with each other. To take the time to watch the dog sniff unfamilar air, to listen to the parrot compose a new song. To explore new ground, to possibly get a little rain-soaked in our exploring. To make friends of strangers. To choose and use from that tray of unworn sticks of green pastel.

Even my husband, who authored the book No Place Like Home So Why the H%#! Leave It? and our dog, a shelter alumnus who worries that every trip away from Home Base might result in us losing our way and ending up back in the pound have recently admitted that yes, vacations are good things and they're glad they came. (I try not to say I told You so too often; I save my energy for prodding them into these little hiking adventures I plan for the team, and there is the possibilty they'll get wet, so I don't want to remind them I'm the one who demanded we take an extended trip somewhere, anywhere....)

It's good for us to sometimes follow other trails, to paint with seldom-used colors. To study maps, to hike farther than our legs feel comfortable carrying us. To sleep in, tired from yesterday's unexpectedly demanding hike. To fulfill inexplicable desires.

I remind myself that if I wasn't seeing green this month, I'd be painting from the same old familiar and beloved palette.
I know that, like Jim and the dog, I'll have a new appreciation of Home Base when I choose to return from painting this world through these wonderful green-tinted glasses.

Afternoon Showers and With Laundry on the Line
9" x 12" on archival Wallis paper
Unfinished plein air pastel copyright Lindy C Severns 2009

May you bloom today, wherever you are. And may you only get a little bit wet from those requisite afternoon showers. (Unless of course you live in Far West Texas, in which case I wish you a skin-soaker, so much rain it makes you shiver and run for the nearest rock shelter to await rescue by canoe...)

Follow Lindy Cook Severns on Facebook visit the website LindyCSeverns.com shop the studio store

Having Known Better Times (but is it really that bad?)

2009-06-26T19:41:00Z

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

Drawing from the Bed of A Pickup Truck and Other Stories of Aloneness

2009-06-17T22:32:00Z

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

The Road to Sundown and Visions Shared

2009-05-29T19:47:00Z

Much of my art and thus, all this writing about my art focuses on the Scenic Loop, a 76-mile circuit around the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Worthy of its descriptive name on area maps, this sightseer's delight starts in Fort Davis, then weaves southwest 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 families since the 1800's, volcanic palisades of rock, antelope, open range cattle and all brands of deer. As tourist children, my siblings and I would compete as to how many animals we could count during one of Daddy's sunset drives around the Loop, while my father concentrated on not making road kill out of any critters. Now, my husband and I drive it every time we leave home to go anywhere, a privilege we don't take lightly. Sometimes, we drive it just to be sightseers. Sometimes we chase the sunset, a splendid vision out in these parts.

I'm not the only artist seeing the far west of Texas up close and personal. I'm not even the only one living in the vicinity of the Davis Mountain Scenic Loop. Cowboy Artist of America Wayne Baize is my close neighbor. We see the same mountains when we wake up, mornings. We drive the same roads for groceries and mail, marvel at the same sunsets. We paint the same landscapes, because that's simply what see. What we know. Jim and I recently lunched with Wayne and Ellen, then attended their youngest son's high school graduation. Great people living a great life, and Wayne produces some great western art.

We also recently attended a memorial service for Fort Davis artist Bill Leftwich. (Bill and Mary Alice held down the town end of the Scenic Loop.) Bill, in his long and artistically prolific career, documented just about every aspect of life in Big Bend country, and he did it in about every way possible for an artist to capture a way of life. A native American himself, one of his last works was a bronze bust of an Indian. His skillfully-tooled leather chair seats in their home each display the portrait of a different Indian chief. A commemorative Christmas ornament Bill designed was chosen to hang on a recent White House tree. I could go on and on about what this humble World War II hero accomplished. His drawings have graced books; his alma mater Texas A& M proudly displays Bill's large bronze of dog mascot Reville. He painted Mexican dancers. Broken down cowboys. Colorful bandits. Like Bill, his oil paintings tell stories. Funny stories. Touching stories. Great stories, by a great man who traveled dusty roads around a great land. I wish we'd known him longer.

Another place, another time, another artist: For one brief but intense week, I studied under talented New York city artist Ted Seth Jacobs. Jacobs, who was also a fellow martial artist, shared his manuscript of what later became the best book on drawing I've yet to read, DRAWING WITH AN OPEN MIND. In it, Jacobs defines drawing as "the relic of movement". The trail a bird leaves in the sky. The path of the wind. The step of a dancer... the hand of a painter.

The life of a man.

The relic of motion. Energy as vision.

Landscapes, portraits, figures and animals. Baize, Leftwich and Lindy. Ted Seth Jacobs, who lived in a world about as alien to ours as it gets. Unnamed artists, working in media I don't use, in places I'll never go. Artists share a common vision. Perhaps because no matter how we do it or how it comes out, we seek to capture the relic of movement, to freeze energy and then, to share it.

Energy translated. Visions shared.
Daddy driving us city kids around the Scenic Loop to count animals. The Baizes ceremoniously sealing their son's childhood and sending him toward manhood with well-placed learning to back him up. Our town telling Bill Leftwich goodbye, saying "thank you" for sharing a life well-lived. A teacher I never saw again sharing his thoughts on drawing in a way I'll never forget.
Vision. Energy.

Volcanic activity making mountains for artists to one day paint. The sun painting color across a broad sky.
From where I stand now, the road to sundown takes me to Sawtooth Mountain. I chase the sunset and try to freeze the relic of its movement so I can share it.
I share that vision as a tribute to Bill Leftwich, who leaves a long trail of life across the western sky.

THE ROAD TO SUNDOWN (Sawtooth Mt)
30" x 22" pastel on archival Wallis paper
by Lindy C Severns 2009
available at Midland Gallery June 2009 $5000 plus framing

for purchase information, email mike@midlandgallery.com

For more visions of Big Bend Country visit my website OldSpanishTrailStudio.comor if you can't remember that, just go to LindyCSeverns.com

The Colors of Silence

2009-05-12T21:15:00Z

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

With Leftovers From Creation

2009-04-05T20:43:00Z

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...

Gallery Representation Meets Oral Surgery, or Painting on Milkshakes and Speaking In Tongues

2009-03-20T13:11:00Z

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

Fine Art Donations, Otherwise Known As Sales Minus the Money

2009-02-14T18:01:00Z

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.

Wind Rain and Fire and the Mysteries of Regeneration Around A Stock Tank

2009-02-07T20:39:00Z

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.

Mountains above the Clouds: A drive to church yields a 2009 Trappings of Texas Piece

2009-01-27T22:00:00Z

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

Miles and Miles of (Far West) Texas

2009-01-14T19:04:24Z

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.

Viva Terlingua and a Happy New Year

2008-12-31T21:44:00Z

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

Alpine's ArtWalk/Gallery Nite 2008 at Kiowa Gallery

2008-11-23T23:05:00Z

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