Wanderings of An Artist In Far West Texas

Sunrise Wakes the Ruins

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2011-10-31T20:04:30Z

Listening to Dawn Rouse Terlingua Ghost Town

I possess a keen understanding of foreign language: I live with a terrier, a parrot and a man. My days are rich with nuance, with profound understanding and often as not, with gentle misunderstandings. Each morning, we wake inside our respective lives with stories to share, while sometimes lacking sounds common to species and gender.

And so it is with ruins. “If walls could speak!” I was seven, high on a mountainside and exploring cliff dwellings when I first heard that. My grandad’s words halted my random scrambling. I pressed my tiny body into the shadows of that mysterious mountainside aerie, and I listened, hard: Soft footsteps of children in woven sandals pattered across smoke-stained stone; ghostly laughter from a game of chase gifted the maze of rooms with life; a baby, one just the age of my sister cried, shushed by her mother’s crooning song.

At seven, you hear things others cannot.

Those ancient whisperings began a lifelong enchantment with old places. I love historic hotels, creaking-floored houses, but especially, I love ruins. Ruins are characters who’ve been around the block a time or two and lived to tell about it. (If people take on the characteristics of places they live, why can’t places retain the hearts of the people who once occupied them?) Admittedly, I no longer enjoy a child’s ears for language--as in conversing with my husband, my dog, my parrot, when listening to crumbling adobe, much is lost in translation—but painting is my Rosetta Stone. Through the eyes of an artist, I still hear ruins telling their stories. Like border country locals, Terlingua Ghost Town waxes rich with yarns.

Terlingua, once a remote mercury-mining community, is now just remote, a jump-off to even more remote Big Bend National Park. Terlingua is a colorful place where tourists spend a few days, at most, navigating an alien landscape populated with colorful people who have, for various reasons, chosen to live simpler lives than those known to corporate America. (We spend much of each winter in Terlingua and adjoining Study Butte, Texas, so that tells you something about my little family.) One of the most colorful places in Terlingua is Ghost Town, with its cemetery (eerie even at high noon) and scattering of mining era ruins, each once a home, a shelter in the desert.

Many are accessible. Some are occupied, coveted lodging for seasonal river rat guides and others content with any place to unroll a sleeping bag. On that dark winter morning as we drove up to the Starlight Theatre to await sunrise on the Chisos, the dog and I trod the ruin-happy arroyos near the cemetery with respect for private property. Feeling the call of nature, the terrier had wisely used body language to interrupt our drive. Shivering, still more concerned by the prospect of walking up on a sleeping human or stepping on a rattlesnake in the dark than taking pictures, I cautiously followed my four-footed family member down one of the deep cuts in the desert floor. My patience with our female terrier is seriously limited when it is dark and cold outside, however.

A coyote howled nearby. Jim and the parrot sipped coffee in the truck. The warm truck. Cooks-the-Ranch-Dog, as she is known to her friends, forgot her prior urinary emergency in order to meticulously sniff fresh rabbit scat. I shivered, and snagged my down vest on catclaw as Cooks struck out down the arroyo at a dead run. With visions of a sleepy, naked, scraggly-bearded human emerging from a hidden desert shack with a shotgun, I quietly struck out after Cooks, who, I realized, had twisted cross-species communication to her benefit and apparently savored frolicking across the desert way worse than she needed to relieve herself.

Cooks skidded to a stop at the edged of a drop-off approximating the Grand Canyon. I caught up in time to see the rabbit disappear below. Dog eyes looked up at me and clearly explained she could’ve caught the dangerous desert bunny, but did I really want to skin and clean it for her this early? I nodded my gratitude as I plucked thorns from my inadequantly insulated vest.

As the did a token pee, I reconnoitered: It was a long way back to the truck, and our chase had likely woken all the snakes ‘twixt here and there. I glanced around. The sun rose through layers of cloud, broke through, and as if in a fairy tale, woke the ruins sleeping all around us. I forgave our dog and forgot the cold. To date, I’ve done four paintings from photos of ruins I took in the next five minutes of dawn.

What story did the ruins speak that morning? I originally titled this large oil painting “Sunrise Sings Through the Ruins” but that, my husband explained in the language of males, was a bit of poetic overkill, even for an artist. But brimming with life, overflowing with stories, the ruins woke with the sun, yawned, stretched, filled their crumbling walls with the light of another day. Step into this landscape, feel the nuances of the desert on a cold winter morning. Walls can speak. The trick is in the listening.

SUNRISE WAKES THE RUINS 24" x 36" oil on archival Ampersandbord
copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2011
To see more Big Bend landscapes, please visit my website BigBendArtist.com

LANDMARKS and LONGINGS and SERENITY in the DESERT

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2011-06-21T12:30:00Z

How many Big Bend travelers, over how many centuries have spotted aptly-named Mule Ears Peaks and felt their hearts smiling between beats?

I count myself in that timeless demographic.

My husband and I enjoy revisiting places that enchant us, and Big Bend National Park stays high on that list. There is, of course, much, much more of Big Bend to see than places we’ve explored, but it isn’t the unexplored path that summons us.

We return first to the landmarks, the picture postcard scenes first sighted before the Texas sun turned youthful skin to cancer-prone leather, before hip replacements and blown knees made our hiking the Texas desert a determined exercise in pain tolerance and perseverance. (In these, our golden years of hiking, Jim has been known to whisper, "Here comes somebody-- smile, and don't look dead. We don't want them to think we need rescued!")

We've been there, done that, so why return to a place so demanding one careless misstep, one bad judgment call can mean death, or, worse, to losing oneself in the Chihuahuan desert for a spell before becoming a statistic?

It’s worth the journey because I am a landscape artist, and Big Bend is a beautiful place.

And because there’s something about familiarity of place that simultaneously comforts, excites, and stills the spirit. Landmarks assure us, however lost we once were, that now, sheltered in the shadow of a familiar place, we’re found. (Road signs accomplish the same purpose except without the romance a weathered landmark offers. Jim and I have had many more heated disagreements following and not following road signs in major cities than we’ve had seeking out landmarks in the wilderness of the American West.)

Finally, a landmark, especially a harshly remote one like Mule Ears, connects us to those who have come before and to those who will follow our steps.

Mule Ears is the Ellis Island of the Big Bend, a visual starting place around which strangers define movement. I’ve never set foot on those long-eared peaks—although I’d enjoy hiking them, because bad knees and all, I enjoy ascending mountains—but I almost know where I am in relation to where those pointed mountains rise from the desert. Look out from Terlingua Ghost Town; meander along Ross Maxwell drive; purchase a cold drink at the old Castellon store; twist, turn wherever long enough, go far enough; sooner or later, somewhere on the horizon you’ll find old Mule Ears offering to give you your bearings.

These scraggly-eared peaks rise from the same place they did thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five hundred years ago. Native Americans found them just as Jim and I first found them; travel to Big Bend and they’ll be there, waiting for you, whoever you may be. Landmarks are not fickle friends. Landmarks serenely mark the land for all. Remarkable.

In a chaotic modern world torn by grumblings, strife and division, I find serenity in the desert.

May you often long for your own landmark, whatever and wherever it may be: It is the imagining, not the footprint that marks a place and makes it real. Art, at its finest, is simply a vehicle of our collective imaginations. At this moment, we are sharing a landmark. Breathe deeply: the air is clean. A lizard rustles out of the prickly pear to disappear into the earth's powdery wrinkles, disappears without a trace. What is left? Silence so profound, it seems almost visible. Late afternoon shadows feather down onto Mule Ears. The shadows become heavier, then sink, settling into canyons of mystery. Wispy clouds, mare's tails flick the broad, unpolluted sky into gentle, ever-changing currents of air.

The land marked here is more than real: it is a collective vision now, a timeless, spiritual compass pointing to serenity.

SERENITY IN THE DESERT 24” x 36” pastel copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2011

To see more of my Big Bend paintings and others, visit my online fine art gallery at LindyCSeverns.com

SEIZING SUNRISE

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2011-05-12T18:01:00Z

SEIZING SUNRISE

A Fort Davis, Texas Wildfire Lies Behind a Chisos Mountain Sunrise in Big Bend

Wildfire of Biblical proportions recently ravaged the serenity of our Texas mountains. Wildlife, livestock and human residents greeted that first day’s sunrise as they had greeted so many. By sunset, many were homeless; many more were displaced, wondering their home’s fate. Some Fort Davis residents endured a series of evacuations, moving from one presumably safe haven to another as the traveling inferno raced through the dark of night, creating its own terrible and erratic weather. Those of us living a handful of miles outside the boundaries of the (ultimately three hundred thousand-plus acre) Rockhouse Fire spent that first anxiety-filled night taking an emotional mental roll call of those we care about (which, surprisingly, even included the village idiots, town bores and thorns in our sides). We tried not to imagine the screams of animals trapped by fences yet to burn, the terror of calves and fawns too young and weak to outrun the flames. We slept little, flames illuminating the sky.

The Davis Mountain region breathed and panted in an information vacuum, without electricity, phone service, water. In the best of times, cell phones in Far West Texas enjoy erratic service and vast dead zones; that night, texting ultimately proved the only technology that worked, with terse, increasingly frightening texts from my brother in Midland our only updates on the fire’s path.

We live in a blind canyon; unable to contact anyone and without radio or television, we periodically drove the couple of miles out to the road to see where the fire was. We made these frequent fire checks until conserving fuel for evacuation became a concern. The road to the east, the Scenic Loop to Fort Davis had closed mid-afternoon, right after we left town—right before the fire ripped open our historic town. (Our only available evacuation route lay west, to distant Van Horn.) At four a.m., the fire outside the bedroom window grew brighter. Coughing, we piled sleepy animals into the truck. We needed to know what was coming. And, what was gone.

The smoke proved so dense, we U-turned before reaching town. We parked at historic Point of Rocks, the first Butterfield Overland Express stagecoach stop between old Fort Davis and El Paso. Still not knowing the fate of town, friends, community, we watched a moving column of flame, flame that stretched the twenty-three miles from Fort Davis to Marfa advance toward Alpine. The sun rose, finally. It was a beautiful sunrise. The sun is brighter than fire.

The fire burned for over three weeks.

Much has been written about the largest wildfire ever recorded in Texas. We survived, our picturesque tourist town is still there, no human lives were lost and the mountains will be greener for having burned. But it touched our lives profoundly. Long before the smoke cleared, a universal need “to help” swept Jeff Davis County and neighboring Brewster County. Offering manual labor, performing small favors, rendering financial assistance … even tiny things, filling bird feeders or saying “thank you” have assumed new meaning. The fire didn’t touch us out here. Like so many others, we’ve helped where we can. And yet, many nights during the fire’s reign, I put my head to my pillow feeling inadequate.

We are part of the same communal organism. What one suffers affects all. Like blood cells and nerves and muscles and neurons, we each have our specialty, a function in keeping the organism that is Community healthy. Or, in healing it.

I finally made my peace with the fire by painting. It wasn’t an easy peace. I cried a lot, and my hundreds of pastel sticks remain packed, temporarily. Should we need to flee suddenly, I wouldn’t have had time to pack so many delicate sticks. (I keep a much smaller set with me for painting on location, but my meticulously arranged studio set has been acquired over a lifetime and takes up a banquet table in the studio; I’d abandon framed paintings before I abandoned my pastel sticks.)

Since the fire began, I’ve painted only in oils, my first painting medium.

During the fire, I painted sunrises.

I’m small, not terribly young nor strong and not awfully rich. I wheeze at the first whiff of smoke. I’m not handy with a hammer; we don’t have a pasture to loan to homeless cattle nor a bedroom to house a homeless neighbor.

But I can paint a sunrise to make someone’s heart leap. I know sunrise is brighter than fire. I understand how to seize joy and I understand how to translate it for sharing.

As I see it, that’s my function in the organism.

SEIZING THE SUNRISE 24" x 36" oil copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2011

Sunrise on the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend in Far West Texas

For more images of West Texas and the West, visit my website LindyCSeverns.com
or the online studio gallery store at OldSpanishTrailStudio.com

Breaking Dawn in the High Country (where cattle go when they stray)

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2011-02-10T13:04:00Z

Florid, pockmarked rocks, weathered remnants of the volcanic activity that mothered the Davis Mountains rise above our high country West Texas homesite. Our mountains maintain my interest, not just because mountains, by nature, are splendid things—these craggy red mountains, tumbled and stacked with no regard to order or symmetry, seem to have lanterns inside them. Spotty varnishes of kiwi-colored lichen make me dig past my comfortable earth-colored pastel sticks and into my little-used box of exotic greens. Sunrise to sunset, deep shadows appear to move through them, as well as across the jumbles of rock rising irregularly above the high desert. This is a good place for an artist.

Cedar and pinon tuck snaking roots into thimbles of soil. Stunted oak twist skyward at odd angles. Prickly pear, lechiguilla and cholla hide their thorns under brambles of catclaw. These mountains hum with life and whisper survive. Lions, golden cougars rule the high country; coyotes, foxes, bobcats compete for jackrabbits and whatever scrawny meal. Mule deer scramble up and down steep slopes; bands of javelina unearth rock-covered delicacies, scorpions and centipedes; Mojave rattlers alternately stretch their length beneath the high Texas sun, or hide from it. Solitary tarantulas march stoically across rugged ground where prehistoric Native Americans tended hearth fires and flaked points from this mountain’s snow white chert, then left behind thin, rosy beads and burned rock middens. This mountain was apparently a good camp for hunter-gatherers. They, too, must have admired the morning sun striking these volcanic rocks with such splendid drama.

Ranchers put cattle on this mountain over a hundred years ago, and cattle have grazed it ever since. But this volcanic castle in the high country is a blessing to artists but a curse to cattlemen—I almost titled this painting “Where Cattle Go When They Stray.” There’s a water trough high on the mountain’s backside, constant water in what passes for meadow in this country. You’d think the cattle would hang out on the grassy, level ground near that water. You’d think. But I’ll glance up at the cliffs and see big, slow-moving shapes. Shapes that shouldn’t be there: Cattle, on a slope so steep, a cow’s head can rise six feet higher than its rump. Cattle, grazing slopes where rocks pre-empt grass. There are better pastures for cattle. Easier places to live.

Of course, life isn’t as simple as just surviving.

Maybe, like me, they just enjoy the view.

BREAKING DAWN IN THE HIGH COUNTRY 9" x 18" pastel copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2010

Exhibited at Trappings of Texas Invitational Western Art and Cowboy Gear Show 2011
Museum of the Big Bend, Alpine, TX

See an enlarged image of this painting at BigBendArtist.com

A Breath of Wind, A Creak of Blades

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2011-02-03T21:48:00Z

Old windmills aren't much to look at, at least not by some standards. Drab constructs of weather-worn lumber, windmills aren’t quaint. Unlike lighthouses, you can’t live inside a windmill, can’t turn one into a studio, can’t sell tour tickets for inspection by inquisitive visitors. Most West Texas windmills are so battered, it’s hard to tell whether these much-repaired towers of bailing wire and scrap lumber are relics or actual working models, laboriously pumping precious water into rusty tanks flanked by skinny cattle.

As a preschooler, one of my favorite travel pastimes was spying windmills on the sweeping Texas prairie between towns scattered few and far between. I’d scan the horizon for anything taller than mesquite and prickly pear, and when I spotted a circle of blades mounted on weathered lumber, I’d exclaim, “That windmill’s turning!” to which Daddy always responded, “That windmill’s NOT turning!”. This argument could go on for a couple of miles. The delight of this game was that mostly, we drove across Texas, where the wind is the sun’s every breath. Which meant I was invariably right about those windmill blades spinning in the wind: My windmills were always turning.

Fascinated with the concept of the ever-present west Texas wind spinning rickety blades whose motion ultimately coaxed water into surface tanks, the child that was me also chased the shadow of every crop duster and waved my arms in comradeship with every jet plane that soared overhead. Airfoils have always intrigued me. In a land of endless sand storms interspersed with frequent tornados, I observed delicate rings of petal-like blades regularly harnessing the wind. Circles of blades brought water up from the earth and moved aircraft across the sky.

I no longer fly, but the whine of a fan jet will never really leave my ears. And seeing age-scarred windmill blades spin silver across a lonely landscape will forever play my father’s playful voice: “That windmill’s NOT turning.” Remembering makes me smile, but Daddy's teasing challenge did more than entertain me on long road trips. Spying windmills taught me a valuable lesson: airfoils aren’t designed for stillness. With that lesson now as intrinsic to me as the blue of the sky at 41,000 feet, my goal isn’t to paint the vast, empty landscapes of my home turf. My goal is to paint motion, whisperings and creakings and glimmers of light shimmering across mundane expanses of silence. Good landscapes may be still, but they are never stagnant.

If you are in windswept west Texas, that windmill you see IS turning, its aging gears creaking and groaning as its blades harness the sun’s every breath. And if you aren’t? Spy whatever is in motion. Listen for the distinctive sounds of everyday life. We aren’t constructed to sit idle in the wind, and as with old windmills, weather scarring just make us more interesting.
©Lindy Cook Severns2010

A BREATH OF WIND, A CREAK OF BLADES 18” x 18” pastel copyright Lindy Cook Severns 2010 (for an enlarged view, visit my website.)

Ehibited at TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS 2011 Invitational Western Art and Gear Show Museum of the Big Bend,
Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas

We pass this windmill all the time, and ten months out of the year it is camouflaged against the brown landscape. No matter how much water it pumps for the cattle, the grasses languish around it, dry and brittle gray. But then, finally, it rains. This brilliant lushness hardly looks real, and it doesn’t last, but I thought this old timer deserved to be painted surrounded by its rare carpet of emerald green. Most of all, I liked the way the light hit the blades as they barely moved, whispering in anticipation of the approaching storm. Turning...

FIRST RAIN on Blue Mountain and Hope, Acceptance, and Gratitude

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2010-10-27T17:32:00Z

Water rules these desert highlands. Its scarcity in the Chihuahuan desert decrees that only those specie most efficient at conserving moisture will survive the summer.

This desert demands survival not of the fittest, but of the least thirsty.

We hardened Texas desert dwellers don’t complain too loudly about brown grass waving at an endless chain of arid days—if Far West Texas was eternally green and lush, we’d be overrun with city folks. We’d need traffic lights in every town bigger than Valentine, and Lupitas couldn’t serve enough burritos to fill so many bellies. We don’t fight the lack of water out here.

That doesn’t mean we don’t suffer when we see skinny calves following their skinny mamas across pastures stripped bare of grass, or piñons fruited with hollow nuts. It means we pour any leftover iced tea onto the scraggly rosemary plant out front. Our loyal herb never grows any taller, but it also refuses to die. Perseverance is the way of the desert, where Water is a benevolent despot, bestowing life and color onto the land. Just not very often.

If Water is King, Rain is the high desert’s court jester, a charitable prankster with a fickle sense of humor. Rains fall repeatedly on the same pasture, leaving neighbors begging for even a sprinkle; rain falls on the mountain, but away from the watershed to the main tank; rain floods the unpaved back streets of Fort Davis, morphing ankle-deep dust into quagmires of mud; rain raises the trickle that was Limpia Creek so high, so fast, residents of Limpia Crossing can’t drive through the crossing to get home from work. Rain sends tourists scampering for shelter, interrupting the festive 4^th of July parade. We get about 8”-12” of precipitation annually, and you ought to be here the day we get it.

So, out here, we pray a lot. We pray, for months on end, for rain. We know this dry land for what it is; we accept that desert is where we are planted, and yet, in churches across the Trans-Pecos, we stoic desert folk pray for rain like child in a Brooklyn tenement prays for a pony to ride to school. Just enough rain to fatten the little calves, perhaps a few drops to blossom out the prickly pear on the south slope. Selective rain. Rain on demand, please You God.

It is easy to beseech God for rain, natural to hope that rain comes on our timetable, to hope that ranchers don't have to sell off cattle and fawns fatten up enough to survive the winter. But dreary days of gloomy skies aren't an issue in our lives out here in Big Bend country, so I hope we offer enough thanks for those days rain doesn't fall. And when it finally comes? The first rain makes the desert smile and colors the sky with laughter.

   FIRST RAIN on Blue Mountain
                                                                                     36" x 24" pastel   copyright Lindy C Severns 2010
It isn't rainy season as I write this, but it was back in June, when I painted this. (And our skies really do look like this--no artistic license involved!) This painting is one of 3 new LCS paintings featured at Kiowa Gallery, Alpine TX during the 2010 Artwalk Alpine held the weekend before Thanksgiving.

For purchase information, contact Keri at Kiowa Gallery . And to see more images of the Davis Mountains and Big Bend country in the Far West of Texas, visit my website,  BigBendArtist.com

Texas Sage and Chisos Dawn

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2010-10-09T17:04:00Z

We choose to live in a quietly lovely place. Our closest neighbors are deer, javelina and hawks. So the first thing I notice about a city is the noise. (I believe there must be an unwritten law stating that RV parks must be placed in close proximity to (1) an airport (2) a train or (3) a high school with a marching band.) The constant drone of idling engines is interrupted only by horns and sirens. Returning to the city, I catch my breath and will myself to readjust to the visual clutter, the ragtag inevitability of many humans living and working in close proximity to groceries, schools and one another. It isn’t the city that is out-of-step: It is I who have, by choice, moved away.

This recurring transition, rural to urban, empty to overflowing, sparse to abundant does more than reconnect me with family, friends and the world outside Far West Texas. Returning to “civilization” makes me even more attuned to the solitude of the high desert and life in its rugged brown mountains. Traveling reminds me that finding magnificence in the mundane is what I do best.

I recently spoke at Heritage Auction Gallery to a Dallas group--Texans, collectors and fellow artists--about my art and the harshly beautiful land I paint. I didn’t exaggerate. The land’s drama speaks for itself. A recent book on the Big Bend relates true tales of death and distress befalling those who underestimate its power. For city-dwellers constantly surrounded by mown grass, nursery-bred trees and rioting petunias, a rambling maze of desiccated prickly pear can offer little in the way of eye candy. A waist-high forest of creosote, a sickly green shrub so competitive that its survival mechanism virtually poisons off all surrounding vegetation simply doesn’t have the universal appeal of pruned azaleas.

Lots of first time visitors to Big Bend leave with a sense of unease, if not relief. Initially, visiting the Chihuahuan Desert is like attending a formal dinner then being presented with your first untrimmed artichoke —you suspect there is something uniquely special inside, but getting to its tender heart may require more effort than you are comfortable with, especially while wearing silk and pearls. To appreciate Far West Texas, you must spend enough time inside to find its heart. You must find the Christmas cactus blooming beneath that rock you just fell from, or be around for a sunrise just when a patch of Texas sage is in full bloom.

        TEXAS SAGE AND CHISOS DAWN
                18" x 38" pastel copyright Lindy C Severns 2010
                   A featured painting at Kiowa Gallery for Artwalk Alpine 2010  for purchase information contact Kiowa Gallery, Alpine, TX kiowagallery@sbcglobal.net
            See this painting and other Big Bend scenes on my website .

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In West Texas, beholders must move past time-honored concepts of citified beauty, and with this transition comes awe.

BLUE MT MEMORIES, Texas Skies and Big Things in Small Packages

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2010-09-07T21:57:00Z

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

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

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

I also enjoy distilling the biggest, most dramatic sky into a few square inches of canvas. It’s sort of like building a ship in a bottle while riding a bike pursued by a charging rhino. You have to know where you’re going because you don’t have time to think about anything but the details of getting there.

Painting on location, painting in miniature mean traveling through one of those places in life where everything you do counts.

Where everything you do counts…

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

On a postcard-sized canvas, one speck of color, a single dab of pigment can change everything. One shifting cloud can profoundly alter the lighting of an entire sky. So it's important to know what I want to say in a painting, especially when I'm restricted by time or size. Everything I put in, everything I omit counts.

I want my paintings, whatever their size, to count as little bursts of joy, tiny instances of splendor-- like rowdy clouds rollicking around the sky, jockeying for the finest places in a Texas sunset.

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

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

SHADOW CANYON, Big Bend Insights on Busting Minimums and Breaking the Rules

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2010-08-27T22:55:00Z

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

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

Rules keep us safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To see more of my paintings visit oldspanishtrailstudio.com

The Blog is Baaaack

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 2010-08-27T22:46:00Z

Many of you have complained that this blog, once going strong, faded abruptly into some wormhole on the web. My apologies to those of you who follow it faithfully. Besides an intense schedule of travel and painting the last several months, my (Vista) laptop spent that time self-destructing, and I only did the absolute necessary tasks on the wretched machine. Once I finally had time, I replaced it with a delightful new (Windows 7!) computer. I spent a month systematically loading it with programs, photos of paintings...only to realize the hard drive on that one was schizophrenic and plotting to.... well, it was ugly, and you don't want to know.
Thanks to a great set of Geeks their supervisor at Best Buy in Midland, TX, I have a new new computer, a sweet and considerate laptop that promises we can blog weekly again.

Riding the Red Dawn at Los Caballos, Marathon TX

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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?)

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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

lindycseverns@aol.com (Lindy C Severns) — 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