Wanderings of An Artist In Far West Texas

Wildfire in Jeff Davis County

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:53:02 GMT

June has been a month for homilies. Three have haunted and comforted me.

My friend Stessa has a plaque over her kitchen sink: "WE PLAN: GOD LAUGHS".

My friend Roxa, recently involved in the painful task of sorting through her mother's belongings found a scrap of paper dated 1930 or so, on which her mother had penned a quote from an author I haven't yet traced:
     "LIFE IS MOSTLY FROTH AND BAUBLE.
       TWO THINGS STAND AS STONE:
        KINDNESS IN ANOTHER'S TROUBLE,
        COURAGE IN YOUR OWN."

Tolkein, in one LORD OF THE RINGS book, eloquently explains it isn't our job to control the weather -- it's our job to tend the fields we're given, in the climate in which we find ourselves living. (Tolkein said this much better than my pedestrian paraphrase, but hopefully, you get the point.)

On June 6, while I searched the basement of the historic Presbyterian Church here in Fort Davis for a fan ( to prevent heat stroke from wiping out half the membership of the Wednesday Matinee Good Time Readers, who were upstairs, sweltering over FOR THE TIME BEING by Annie Dilliard) I got a call from my husband Jim. No need to worry, he explained, BUT the Fort Davis volunteer firefighters were being summoned to a grass fire near the Marfa highway, 10 miles or so from home. (Seems the Union Pacific Railroad had been cutting rails on a friend's ranch on a day posted as extreme fire danger. But that's another story. I detest negligence.)
The BUT part meant that my husband, the same man who received two new hips for Christmas, was seriously contemplating donning his newly issued brush gear and riding a fire truck to the scene of the conflagration.

Jim and I respect each other's passions in life, even when we don't share them. I wouldn't have signed a guy with two brand new, still sparkling titanium hip joints up as a firefighter, but then I'm the gal who once took up martial arts as therapy for the broken back I sustained while crashing an airplane. You gotta do what you gotta do. I think my mistake was in not believing there would ever be a fire. Not here at home.

We Readers got through Annie Dilliard before Jim called again. I'd started cleaning out the church basement with Linda Allen, who'd driven in from near Prude Ranch. We'd PLANNED this cleanup session for days. The fire was growing, Jim reported, reminding me his gear was in the truck I drove. He might need to report for duty, if it spread. (We're so far from town, by the time he makes it to the station, most fires are out. So he specializes in fires near home, where he can join up with the firetrucks on the highway.) Just let me know, I said. No hurry, he said. BUT.

Next call, he could see smoke. He calmly suggested that I might be more comfortable at home, with the animals, and said he needed to go firefight. So I left Linda in the basement, breathing the dust of ancient hymnals.

By the time I passed Blue Mountain, smoke blanketed half the sky. I could barely breathe for smoke. I sped the rest of the way home. Sped fast. We loaded up the dog and parrot. I drove Jim and his bag of brush gear out to highway 166, the scenic loop around the Davis Mountains. He cautioned me not to stay way back in our canyon, not to get caught there. He jumped on the first firetruck to pass by, and the man I'd nursed only months before vanished up a smoke-obscured ranch road.

There are lots of stories from that point. How the animals and I parked upwind of the smoke, then saw chorus lines of flame leap across familar ridgelines; how I realized that one of those lines of flame was dancing straight toward neighboring artist Wayne Baize's lovely ranch home and studio; how I saw Tom and Bill Max bulldozing a firebreak around Eda's house. How I calmly (?) raced back to the studio for my pastel cases and the stack of unframed originals I've spent the last few months creating...
How I packed up our RV in half-a-dozen five-minute shifts, which I alternated with trips back out to the highway to check the status of the fire.
How I tried to console the animals. How I wondered if I could hook up our large RV, tow it out of the mountains, alone...
How Jim called next. "We just saved Wayne Baize's house. We petted his dog...the one that jumped out of the truck....Fire's heading for Boogie's now. Have you talked to her? Susan and Dick's place is burning up...Meet me on the highway and we'll get the RV out."
How Jim hitchhiked from crew to crew to get back out to the highway where I waited; how his fellow firefighters lining the highway shot him "thumbs up" as he towed us out of the smoke-filled canyon, past the fire line to safety in town.
Boogie still didn't answer her phone, but we saw her truck parked at the entrance to her ranch road. She was safe, somewhere. The landscape I painted in "LEAVING HOME" was burning. The fire, driven by forty to fifty mile an hour winds, ravaged the county now.

The ridgeline at Warbonnet, across the highway from Crows Nest.

We're pretty self-sufficient. That didn't mean we didn't weep tears of gratitude every time a friend called or e-mailed their concern or an offer of a place to stay. I didn't know there were so many spare bedrooms in the county. Larry and Beth offered their tranquil garden to just sit in. The manager of the RV park we evacuated to wouldn't take Jim's money. "Thank you," she said. "For all of us." My phone burned hot from calls.

We unhooked, immediately raced Jim the twenty miles back to the fireline, where it appeared our neighbors across the highway in Warbonnet, the Poindexters and the Fields in particular, were certainly about to lose their houses. Jim, separated now from his crew, drove food and water up to the fireline on the mountain. We drove the highway to spot and confirm new fires. We watched the flames spread. Our animals, still in the truck with us, watched in what must have been silent horror. I took comfort that we were all together again.

It was a long night. And the next day our neighborhood fire raged on, threatened historic Bloys campground with its hundreds of cabins and cook sheds and the wonderful old Skillman oak grove, named after the first colorful mail carrier out here. For a painfully long few hours, the fire raced straight toward town, sprinting before high winds blowing in exactly the wrong direction. Jim and Matt (also known as minister of our Presbyterian church and husband to Stessa of "God Laughs" fame) fought flames and set backfires around the vast perimeter of Bloys campground until the Forest Service relieved them at midnight. Hip surgery is no picnic. Jim has had two in the last six months. Jim. The rookie volunteer firefighter. My man. Out until midnight again, fighting fires in the mountains.

On Friday morning, the sky in town was clear. The weather we had to sow our fields in that day was, well, just better. The Forest Service tankers were dumping water from Balmorhea springs and from ranch tanks on the still vast backcountry fires sweeping Besa and Roy's land, Barrel Springs, the Hughes ranch, others. We remembered to eat breakfast. We drove to see what remained of home. We'd lost nothing.

Exhausted volunteer firefighters recovered while professional crews moped up. The Santa Fe Hotshots and Zuni Hotshots can pretty much write their own tickets with the citizens of Fort Davis--they came to the rescue, hiking back in the mountains to put out hotspots after everyone else was ready to drop.

Almost sixty thousand acres of some of the most spectacularly beautiful land in Texas burned to a crisp, a state of burned that makes charcoal in the bottom of a grill look medium rare. Thanks mainly to a handful of well-trained volunteers with a lot of guts and a devotion to their neighbors, no structures were lost. No lives were lost. There were no serious injuries. Ranchers opened fences for each other, and there may be some mixed breed calves next spring, but there were no livestock losses, or none reported as of this writing.

Cowboy Artist of America Wayne Baize still has his studio filled with wonderful western art. And his five dogs. And the house full of memories where he and Ellen raised their four kids. Boogie sat on her porch a few nights after the fire and reported to Jim "it's kinda nice outside tonight". She didn't mention the scorched view where once was beauty. I just spread my pastel cases in the studio, so I'm ready to start a new painting in the morning. I'll find something here in these parched mountains to paint. Much survives out here. In fact, Bob and Rae Field have invited us to a gathering of "The Survivors of the Fire of 2008"; they promise food and wine will be provided. (Bring Your Own Tall Fire Tale.") The church basement has miraculously been cleansed of dusty hymnals, through no effort of mine, but I suspect Linda is still coughing up moldy paper. Jim is ready for the next fire, and I suppose I am, too. And the land? Some things are lost forever. But in the big scheme of life, fire is good for the land. We'll will green up, first rain. And I can't even imagine the wildflowers we'll enjoy after the next wet spring. Already the cholla are blooming.

Jeff Davis is a big, beautiful, wild county with very few people in it. But they are good people. Strong people.
People here are a lot like the landscape. We'll all recover, and we'll recover sooner than anyone could've imagined back on June 6. Like the land, though, we won't be the same.
Too much kindess and courage has been passed around for that.
As for the weather?
It's my job to paint the fields I am given. The weather? The weather must take care of itself.

Change: Ocotillo and Oil Paint

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:11:41 GMT

Dramatic blossoms fill the Chihuahuan desert. Our regal agaves, better known as Century plants stretch stalks laden with dozens of ochre bouquets fifteen feet skyward. Spanish daggers lavish the foothills with spikes of orchid-like white blooms. Prickly pear and other cactus flower the mountains and the alkaline lowlands with an unapologetic riot of pinks, reds and yellows. We see prickly poppy waving its large and elegant white flower; tall penstemons whispering delicate pastel hues; wild verbena weaving a carpet of purple; Indian paintbrush painting splashes of red-orange along roadways. Though loathed by ranchers, even the legume locoweed produces splendidly colorful lavendar blossoms that resemble faded bluebonnets. (Oh, do we have bluebonnets.) And the multi-armed cholla sends forth such a mass of fushia blossoms that the underlying mountains seem to be auditioning for a slot in the Rose Bowl Parade. There's diversity out here to rival any greenhouse garden, and then some.

Trouble is, unless we get more than our allotted dollop of rain, we don't get to enjoy all of these flowers each spring. It's like they hold an annual drawing to decide which of them will be the season's star bloomer. Maybe the desert can support splendor from only one plant at a time. Maybe they simply enjoy not sharing the spotlight.
Whatever the reason, it seems like each spring, one desert species explodes into blooming supernovae while less fortunate flowers struggle into being. Last year we marveled over the Spanish daggers and all their yucca kin. The year before, we admired the magnificence of mile after mile of Century plants in lush bloom.

This year belongs to the ocotillo.

An ocotillo is a spiny, twisted jumble of unbranching stalks, each rarely more than an inch or so in diameter.  Except for being a gangly ten or twelve feet tall, an ocotillo plant resembles one of those dessicated, starkly bare-root rose bushes sheathed in plastic. (You know--those cheap, half-dead bushes you periodically buy to prove your optimism.) Ocotillos spend most of their lives brown and leafless. Most people probably dismiss standing ocotillos as pathetic remnants of dead something-or-others doomed to life in an unfortunate location. Even when the plant greens up and fingernail-sized leaves finally break out up and down its collection of stalks, an ocotillo seems more dead than alive. I often add an ocotillo or two to Big Bend landscapes in compositional need of a vertical element. (Except for mountains, there isn't much else out here that breaks the horizon.)

But the blossoms! Oh, my. A blooming ocotillo looks like God swept through the desert and stuck scarlet bottle brushes to the end of each dry stalk while no one was looking. Magnificent in its spareness, embarrassing in its color, an ocotillo in bloom is one of those twists of nature that makes a walk in the desert overflow the senses.

I've spent much of my lifetime sneaking up on ocotillos in bloom. Seeing one in full bloom feels sort of like finding a hundred dollar bill in the forest. The more you think about it, the more you know you deserve to enjoy it.

I spend most of my creative life doing pastels. That's by choice. I like the feel of pigment on my fingers, like the challenge of layering color over color, like the planning that must precede each stroke. I loved the Century plants that year, and I painted them in pastel. I loved the Dagger blossoms last year. I painted them in pastel. The plants relate, the paintings relate. I loved the year of the chollo blossom, and I painted them in pastel. Green spears with thorns and bright, rose-like blossoms. Same joy.
I loved this spring's unusually magnificent outpouring of red ocotillo brushes.
They relate to nothing. Brown stalks with incongruously vibrant brushy-feathered odd-shaped things stuck to the tips like something a first-grader would draw.
They relate to everything.

Seeing ocotillo in bloom is a spirit-gift.
I painted them in oils, not because oils are more serious than pastels--if anything, the opposite is true. I painted them in oils because I usually do pastels.
Nothing in nature says you must do things the same way every time. It's like at the Annual Meeting of the Desert Plants: Choose one, and all will be lovely; change to a different one sometimes, and all will be special.

OCOTILLO AT SAN JACINTO PEAK    by Lindy C Severns
                                                  9" x 12" oil on archival Russian linen
available at Kiowa Gallery Alpine, TX    June 2008 ~ about $750 framed

Jawing with Javelinas: Complaining about the Weather and Painting on Location

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:02:51 GMT

Whether I'm painting or not, I'm passionate about nature, time spent outdoors. Two hundred years ago, I would've enjoyed being a mountain man, except I wouldn't have been able to support myself because I wouldn't have had it in my heart to trap furry critters for hat material. Certainly, I could've followed Lewis and Clark across the country. My (very distant) Native American ancestors would be proud of tbe soft steps I take across leaves, of the instinctive prayers I whisper over dead things, of the reverence I feel when I stand atop a mountain.

I'd paint on location all the time but for one thing: I don't like being uncomfortable. Call me a woose, but I don't do temperature extremes, full sun, rain, snow, or (especially) wind. I admire more hardy plein air painters, those so dedicated to their art that they ignore gale force winds sandblasting dirt into their oil paints, pastelists with frostbitten fingers, watercolorists who cheerfully work raindrops into their washes. But I think if God had meant for me to be miserable when I paint, He would've staked me out in Houston or Dallas instead of steering me to the arid mountains of West Texas, where we scarcely even run our air conditioner. (Nothing against Houston, or even Dallas. If green is what turns you on, somewhere humid is the place for you-- our natural color out here is brown. I think brown is beautiful, but brown isn't becoming on everybody.) So I have a warm, dry studio, and I use it year-round. But whatever the season, I try not to let perfect painting days slip past without going out on location. Painting weather calls to me like a Siren to a sailor.

I keep a Soltek easel (I love this easel for plein air painting, and highly recommend it) packed with pastels and pads of Wallis pastel paper. All I have to do is grab it and go. Once I'm in the locale I want to paint, I search for shade, and for snakes. Once shaded in a snake-free zone, I seek a level spot. Shade is the most critical, though. I've set up on slopes so steep, I had to hang onto my easel as I painted, but at least I didn't have to fight the sun while dodging serpents. I'm not a total woose. Any other comfort, such as a rock to spread my paints on is gravy. I even handle biting insects pretty well, once I'm working. Once I'm working, I toughen up.

I hate the wind, though. And we've had wind constantly this spring. The old-timers say this is the windiest spring they've seen in twenty years, and that usually, a windy spring means a rainy summer. A rainy summer would be good, so I hate to complain too much about the wind. But it has seriously limited my plein air painting, and I've gotten a little claustrophobic in the studio.

Painting on location is an exercise in discipline. It challenges an artist to be extremely selective and very decisive. Like any discipline, it must be honed and practiced. The less I paint outdoors, the harder it is the next time. I hate the wind.

One afternoon, the wind calmed. I squared my shoulders, strapped my easel to my back and started hiking before the wind picked up, as forecast. I didn't have long to paint so I didn't hike far and didn't get too picky about a subject: I chose a scraggly tree. The tree was only just so interesting, and the wind was gathering steam, so I taped a 4" x 6' piece of paper to my easel. Not much time, not much interest, not much paper.

I whipped out a likeness, didn't like it, brushed it off and did another. And another. An hour later, I had nothing to show for my efforts but a stiff back, a smudgy scrap of paper and dirty fingers.

And I felt seriously wonderful, the way you feel when you spend quality time in fresh air and crunchy leaves with a wasp or two circling your head. I didn't even mind the gusty wind in my face.

I wriggled the easel, safe in its backpack now, onto my sore shoulders. Then, I trudged downhill, empty-handed and exhausted from my efforts. As I scanned for snakes along the gametrail I followed, a plate-sized crescent of white caught my attention. I bent to examine the sun-bleached mandible of a javelina, one of those hog-like creatures who snort through our world on a fairly regular basis. Tusks and teeth intact, the complete jawbone was a museum specimen. I wondered how the beast had died. Old age? Predator? Disease? Carefully, I carried the mandible home with me. I'm not sure why, but it seemed like that's what I should do with it.

It was a hugely successful painting day. The next day was very windy. I started a studio painting. As I worked on that complex landscape from photo references in the comfort of my studio, my fingers remembered painting that nondescript tree. That day's studio landscape ultimately turned out so nice, I entered it in a national competition. You can't convince me the teensy tree sketches that don't even exist anymore and the javelina mandible propped outside my door aren't integral to that exhibit-worthy studio pastel.

The thing about painting, any kind of painting, is this: Creating is a process, not a goal. It's about the journey, not the destination. That's easier to intuit when you're standing on a mountainside (watching for snakes). And if you happen across a javelina jaw as you stagger home under the weight of your easel?
Words just can't describe that kind of trip.

Check out some Lindy Severns paintings done on location. Visit Old Spanish Trail Studio.com now!

Through the Creosote Forest to a Ladies Luncheon (Big Bend Style)

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:16:20 GMT

For years, I had neither the time nor the inclination to plan my day (any day) around lunching with other ladies. Mainly, I had no time. Nor did my friends. We had, unwittingly sped straight from our starry-eyed, uncomplicated young lives to raising families; starting second or third careers; caring for aging parents; volunteering to do anything even remotely associated with garnering stars for our heavenly crowns. We, who as twenty-somethings enjoyed mornings of golf followed by white wine luncheons eventually found ourselves over-committed, over-worked and underpaid, slowly gaining weight while too frazzled by life to meet over salads at an appointed time and place. Taking an hour out of my day to socialize over lunch wasn't an option I considered sane.

Back then, I was flying all over the country, dining in five star restaurants--or, more often, scarfing down peanut butter crackers chased with lukewarm coffee and hoping that wasn't my meal for the day. A good, if rare day during those years involved being home at noon to open a can of soup then eat it on the sunporch with cats underfoot rubbing against my legs. Slowing down to a simpler life was inevitable, but old habits are hard broken. It's taken me half a decade to realize as long as I'm taking in the people and the places around me as I draw each breath, I'm hardly squandering my time.

My friend Roxa called (seems like it was about this time a year ago) one day to ask if I'd accompany her to lunch with one of her old girlfriends the next day. At her ranch "down the road". I'm always honored to be included in get-togethers among old friends willing to pull another chair up to the table. I'd met this friend, liked and admired her.
I accepted before Roxa listed her caveats: be ready to leave at 7 am (for lunch!? I'm normally still too sleepy to sip coffee at 7 am!); wear sturdy hiking shoes; bring a couple of warm jackets; I'd need a flashlight and at least a gallon of water. Oh, and a camera. And some food, too. In case. Just cheese and crackers, maybe a peanut butter sandwich. Nuts. Fruit. In case.

I mentally added a gun. And extra ammo. In case. My nimble mind had already leapt to the realization that if we needed survival gear, we wouldn't have cell phone service the whole way.

We left at 7. I took a thermos of coffee along. And toilet paper. In case.

Roxa explained that she didn't anticipate problems, but....

We headed south. We stopped, often, to take pictures. Roxa does a line of notecards with Big Bend cactus, flowers, landscapes which she markets through our online store at Old Spanish Trail Studio. I keep my Canon Digital Elph and my Canon SLR close and ready to capture the landscape of my next painting, and for photo references of specific plants, skies, rocks. We passed a lot of plants, skies, rocks. A lot. By 10:30, we'd stopped more times than a Greyhound bus taking the scenic route across the nation.
We hit the blooming ocotillo flats. I mean that literally. If you've ever come upon a sweep of tall, spindly ocotillo sprouting red blossoms ten feet above the white alkali desert, you'll understand what I'm saying. Every blessed ocotillo demanded its own photo from each of the three cameras on board. Past the ocotillo came the orangy-green creosote flats spotted with bravely blooming cactus and Indian paintbrush.

We arrived, late for lunch.

A leisurely tour of the ranch house and its surroundings, a luncheon of shrimp salad and homemade rolls, lingering long after over iced tea and conversation consumed a couple of enjoyable hours. Then, it was time to head back.

By now, it was mid-afternoon. We were tired, and there wasn't as much chatter in the truck, but the silence was companionable and introspective at the same time. Roxa pointed out the dry riverbed as we crossed it. That unassuming draw and its companion down the way, filled with runoff from a rain, would've stranded us until the water subsided. Maybe a day. Maybe less. It didn't rain. We didn't have a flat. Lunch was satisfying and the tea, cool. We didn't have to dip into our rations. We passed only one other vehicle the whole time we were off the main road and only a couple of trucks while on the main road. Those we passed, we knew. It wasn't necessary to shoot anybody. I didn't have to hike, but the shoes came in handy as I scrambled up and down rocks taking pictures. Roxa dropped me off at home at suppertime. It was a hard day, but a hard day to end, too.

The friendships I sustained during those busy years of work were and are valuable ones, no less so than the new ones I'm making during these days I call "my own". The difference is in the scenery, and in the silence, and in the sense of place that overrides the urgencies of time. Lunching at the newest, trendiest restaurant dictates conversation. Busy-ness. Hurry. Lunching at a ranch three hours from anywhere, being prepared to survive in transit, devoting a whole day to the adventure is different. You must like not only the conversation of friends--you must like yourself enough to appreciate the silence of an unhurried walk through a cresote forest.

SILENT WALK THRU A CREOSOTE FOREST 14" x 18" pastel by Lindy C Severns
about $1800, once framed available at Kiowa Gallery, Alpine TX April 2008

GETTING OLD: Crumbling Adobe and A Contented Horse

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:20:36 GMT

Not all southwestern architecture is adobe. Still, buildings made mud and straw brick define the southwest. You find old adobes in the most picturesque of settings. And the clay-like qualities of adobe brick allow the builder artistic license to create softly shaped meandering walls, rooms that defy a carpenter's square to constrain them into boring cubes. You don't see "perfect" adobes. That's one of the things that makes them so interesting. Adobe is a living, breathing thing, an elemental part of its surroundings, a landscape in itself.

I love to paint old adobes. For one, they generally occur in locales I love. You find old adobes in quiet places set back from the bustle of city life; you see them on protected hillsides or in remote corners, intuitively comfortable spots where someone once sculpted a retreat from long days likely spiced with hard work and no small dose of danger. Another aspect of adobe's appeal is that it's forever changing, trying its best to return to the earth from which it came. Cared for, adobe mellows gracefully. But it needs constant attention, loving, hands-on upkeep. These days, we're mostly too busy for that. Too modern. We like our corners square and our walls, permanent and invincible. Many strong, well-maintained adobes I passed as a child have since reduced themselves to crumbling walls surrounding tumbled roofs. Picturesque? Maybe. But also, sad.

The luckiest adobes have assumed second and third and fourth lives. Generations of family occupy many old adobes; laughing children run tiny hands along smooth, cool walls laboriously plastered by the hands of their great-grandmothers. Newcomers with time and energy and (mainly) money treasure the old adobes they purchase and repair.
And weary animals find shade in abandoned rooms that artists stop to paint.

GETTING OLD a 9" x 12" pastel by Lindy C Severns
available at Kiowa Gallery Alpine Tx March 15 2008 about $825 framed

I guess falling apart as we age can open new doors. Or windows. (Or an entire roof one day!)

Here Be Mystery (the Marfa Lights and Things Unknown)

Lindy C Severns — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:19:05 GMT

Living in a tourist destination means we frequently get company, friends and relations who count on us to show them the sights. The trick, of course, is to intuit which sights they want to see. We recently hosted two sort-of-adult nephews in a month. Separately. (I cooked more than is my custom.) We wanted to show them around, but these six-footer-plus brothers are not so alike that the same Far West Texas tour would serve to satisfy both.

For wannabe writer Daniel, the elder of the two young men, hiking and the nature tour followed by lots of hearty food sufficed. Dan, a recent graduate of Texas A & M University was en route to Terlingua to report for temporary employment as a guide for river raft trips on the Rio Grande. (BBRT: Big Bend Raft Trips, pronounced "Be-Bert". Ask for Daniel Nammour, and please, tip him generously. Hurry, though. before he bails in search of new material to write about.)

We hadn't been around younger nephew Steven as much. What could we find to do with him? What would we even talk about? Steven (sometime actor, sometime scholar, still searching for his niche but rather convinced it he won't find it on the river or living in a tent outside Terlingua, TX like his brother) required structure. We hadn't been up to MacDonald Observatory in awhile. We did the day tour. No star party, but hey, we didn't expect to see stars at noon. They do a great sunspot and solar flare show, though, and the drive up Mount Locke is worth the time and diesel spent getting there.

That still left the evening to fill. We bundled man and beast into the truck, then drove the Scenic Loop into the sunset. Somewhere around the old Rockpile, it was getting dark so we U-turned back, then took 505 to Marfa. (Actors love Marfa.) Which inevitably led to, "Let's go see the Marfa Lights."

I've seen these unexplained "ghost lights" several times. When I was a girl, we'd all bundle up (the high desert gets pretty darn chilly after all those solar flares retire for the night) then drive the lonely highway between Marfa and Alpine to see if the lights felt like greeting us. Daddy always knew where to pull off the two-lane road. He'd park, then my sister and I would crane for a view out the car window. "There!" someone would say. And sure enough, colored lights would be dancing and floating across the dark mountains. They'd disappear. Or they'd split. Sometimes, lights approached as if to chase us. Ooooo.

Seeing the Marfa Lights wasn't a given. Sometimes, the night remained dark. On those instances, Daddy would finally, reluctantly turn the key in the ignition. But usually, there were lights. I don't know why they appear. I just know they do. So do many other people who've driven that road.

Native Americans reported the ghost lights of the Marfa plains long before highways and airplanes came into play as explanations. Today, it's important to remember there's nothing man-made out there. Lights appear, and just as mysteriously, disappear. And that stretches even a child's imagination: neither Mommy nor Daddy can explain away those lights. Nor can they summon them. We often saw the lights. We didn't know why they appeared or why they refused to. Where they came from. Where they went.

Scientists haven't been able to explain the Marfa Lights. But as a girl, I saw them more than a few times. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, but even as a kid, I never once thought the lights came from ghostly fires. (Why would ghosts need campfires? Do people think they toast s'mores out there, or what?) And I don't blame the mystery lights for never showing their colors on nights my favorite skeptic, Jim is along. (I think he's actually beginning to hope for a sighting now, but so far, no joy. He's never seen Big Foot, either.)

Since I've reached adulthood (a state of being which spans slightly more than one decade) The State of Texas, in all its wisdom, has alloted bags of money to build The Marfa Lights Viewing Station. It's lovely. There's this big wide pull-off, a motorhome mecca. And a building. Brick walls, a viewing scope, restrooms. The real kicker is the sign. It states (I kid you not) that the lights are better seen after dark.

Oh, my. What if they hadn't erected that sign? Picture multitudes of tourists crowding into the designated area (sticking to the brick walls, hovering near the rest rooms, dodging rattlesnakes), all shielding their sun-glassed eyes from those pesky solar flares. All hoping for a magnificent high noon light show.

Thank goodness for that sign. Heavens, that stretch of highway is 22 miles long. Without that sign, how would we know where to park to view something that doesn't always appear, a sometimes subtle phenomenon no one can explain?

Perhaps I'm being too hard on eager tourists and the helpful highway department. But we West Texans grow up assuming that lights can best be seen in the dark. And my Daddy, who wasn't even known for his navigational finesse, never needed a sign to find the best location to park and view the Marfa Lights. He didn't Google it. He spent a fair amount of time talking to other people and a few evenings, searching.

Perhaps, in our continuing, insatiable quest for definable truth and concrete knowledge, we are losing something valuable. We are wandering less on our own, seeking more adventures under bright lights and surrounded by crowds of strangers who read the same informative signs we do.

Are we losing our respect for mystery?

Far West Texas was originally mapped by Spanish explorers as "El Desplobado", the unexplored. This was the Texas map-maker's version of those charts of the deep Atlantic that noted "Here be Monsters". No one suggested the bravest of sailors shouldn't go there, just that they should keep their eyes open and accept that they might spy a sea monster or two. No one back then supposed that photographing or analyzing a sample of sea monster DNA was the determinate factor for confirming a monster sighting. You saw monsters, or you didn't. Who's to say why the monsters were or weren't swimming that day. It was a mystery. It remained a mystery.

Our highly educated friend and pastor Matt Miles (Fort Davis Presbyterian Church) frequently answers some of the intellectual puzzles we Presbyterians ponder by saying God is bigger and smarter than us (okay, Matt says it better but that's the gist of it). He sometimes assures us we don't have to know such and such. Or, possibly, aren't meant to know. Even, Can't know. (Ouch!) I find that freedom not to know both comforting and challenging. Take, for instance, the Marfa Lights. I know they exist. I vaguely want to know why. (What if there really are a bunch of ghosts out there toasting marshmallows over campfires?) But I also savor the mystery of not knowing, and of not caring why I don't know.

I don't need a sign to tell me there are lights out there anymore than I need someone to tell me there is a God.

Glimpsing mysterious lights, the mossy fins of sea monsters, the grace of God in daily life is what differentiates Life from all the tourist attractions we've constructed. Half the fun comes in learning just where to pull over and park. And then, the trick is to be very still and to watch for what happens next. Even if you don't see what you're looking for, you'll inevitably see something you didn't expect to see. Something that isn't on any sign.

We didn't see any lights that night. But we laughed a lot, and we got to know our nephew Steven a little better.

CATHEDRAL OF THE WEST a 12" x 18" pastel by Lindy C Severns $1900 SOLD at auction
donated to Museum of the Big Bend's Trappings of Texas Auction 2008

Another day: We pulled off the road at the Marfa Lights Viewing Station to take pictures.
It was daylight.
No lights appear in this painting, no matter how long you look at it. But I know they exist. There may also be fossilized sea monsters embedded in those cliffs, but I can't vouch for that. Maybe you should check it out for yourself? And bring marshmallows. Just in case.

Leaving Home

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:14:23 GMT

Our good friend and neighbor Boogie lives and ranches miles from the nearest paved road to anywhere. At eighty-something, she's still going strong, although she would dispute that statement, protesting that her eyesight isn't what it once was and that she can't lift bags of feed into her pickup anymore. She drinks beer on occasion, smokes every chance she gets, eats like one of those colorful, flitty little finches she reminds me of.

And she's taught me a lot.

Boog pulls no punches. She likes you, or she doesn't. She doesn't squander a great deal of the time that remains her on folks she doesn't like. If she doesn't want to do something, she tells you, straight out. No pussy-footing around your feelings, no glib excuses. "Yes" is an answer. "No" is another answer. There's a choice. She uses it. Wisely. Therein lies a lesson for those of us who tiptoe around the feelings of others, often to our own detriment.

This tough-as-Longhorn-jerky rancher-lady with sun-freckled skin lives in a nice house with a nice dog whose hobby is biting men who strike her as suspicious or downright shady. She loves children, but has none of her own so she offers support, love and encouragement to those of others. Petite, straight-spined, her hair styled in a cut that a twenty-something would covet, she wears campy hats, eyelet blouses, scuffed boots. She dresses "just darling", as my grandmother liked to say. I feel confident that since Boog doesn't indulge in the Internet, that statement about being darling won't get back to her. But she really is. Darling. With a mind that rivals the computer she doesn't use. I wish I shared some of her genes.

The cut-through to Marfa closed several years back. Now she drives forty minutes, one way, to get her mail. Most days, she spends alone. No one who knows her would consider her a hermit, a recluse, or the least bit "odd". She's simply Boogie, a woman who has made a success of her life and who continues to enrich the lives of all the folks she bothers with, not limited to but including even the few shady characters her dog doesn't bite.

Once, when we were planning a trip to Lubbock, Jim called to ask her if she needed anything from "The Land of Stores" (as cities are both affectionately and disdainfully referred to around here, according to how badly you need something from them). Boogie thought a minute. "You know," she said, "I can't think of a thing I can't get around here. And if I've done without it for three days, why would I need it?"

Talk about a lesson in consumerism.

When Boogie drives out to the highway on her dirt ranch road, her pickup disappears in a cloud of dust.

I hope the lifestyle she represents so elegantly never does.

LEAVING HOME    a 14" x 18" pastel on archival Wallis pastel paper by Lindy C Severns
$1800 available at the Museum of the Big Bend's
TRAPPINGS OF TEXAS 2008 Invitational Cowboy Gear and Fine Western Art Show and Sale
opening February 28- April 2008   Alpine, TX

I thought a lot about Boogie as I painted this from several photos my husband Jim shot after visiting her.
                 Reaching the pavement isn't always what we should shoot for.

Painting at Point of Rocks: Autumn Marks the Overland Trail

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:11:55 GMT

En plein air: My easel set up at Point of Rocks on Texas Hwy 166 outside Fort Davis

Sometimes, the landscapes most familiar to an artist are neglected in favor of more exotic locales.
It's the artist's version of that ancient saw known to every cow. The one about the grass being significantly greener in the neighbor's field...the greater the distance away from the home pasture, the greener that grass.

When I lived in Lubbock, I had an excuse for painting only scenes from our travels. Here in the wild Davis Mountains of Far West Texas, there's no excuse for wandering too far afield just to find a worthy painting subject. (The real problem here is narrowing down the landscape, condensing it into a finite number of paintings! It's a great problem to have.) So when I received my invitation to The Museum of the Big Bend's annual Trappings of Texas show, I decided to specialize in the familiar. This year, all three of my entries will feature landscapes within range of a rifle shot of a formation known around here as "Point of Rocks". And Point of Rocks is what I see from my living room window every sunrise.

Point of Rocks has quite a history. Indians built sheltered fires there. A landmark on the Old Spanish Trail (the geography-based name of my studio and website) later known as the Overland-Butterfield trail, Point of Rocks was one of the official stagecoach rest stops scattered along Texas Highway 166, now known as the Davis Mountain Scenic Loop. My family used to picnic there -- I'm fifteen years older than my brother, and Point of Rocks picnics are one of the few family vacation memories we share in common. Recognizable for its wall of towering, tumbling boulders, it's visible from a great distance.

The roadside park there makes it a convenient plein air painting site. (No hiking required, level ground, a stone wall to hold my pastel boxes, public access, shade.) We drove up in the truck, but it didn't stretch my imagination much to envision stepping out of a stagecoach or hobbling a Comanche pony there.

For about a week last November, I eyed the site for its potential as a pastel. (This was the first of my Trappings paintings, done between my husband's two hip replacement surgeries. I needed to get outside and paint something, anything! Jim needed fresh air and the dog needed to prowl new territory.) I pass Point of Rocks several times a week. There are lots of paintings to be found there. But what grabbed me that time was a solitary yellow sumac shouting color at the base of the rocks. (West Texas isn't exactly known for our fall color.) On closer inspection, I spied pockets of red oak lining dark boulders like sprinkles on cupcakes. It wasn't until I was unloading my easel and pastels that I saw the dried white stalks of sotol blooms marking the rock base just beyond the golden sumac. And I had my composition.

Because I'm at my core a risk-taker, I pick subjects rather intuitively, then hope for the best. So I make a lot of composition mistakes that I must later correct. (Better to paint and perish than never to paint at all.) In this case, the two areas that interested me vied for honors as my focal point. On one side of the squarish 12" x 16" paper I had with me were the white stalks, on the other, the brilliant sumac. I started my painting not knowing where I'd go with that. Also, the rocks ran straight up between the two foliage subjects, straight into a lone pinon that was solid in its greeness. Drawing the viewer's eye straight up the middle of the painting isn't as interesting as weaving it from one of the quadrants. Big blocks of anything solid aren't very interesting. And I had only two hours until the sun would go away, leaving me inspired but in the dark. I ignored all these left-brained concerns and got to painting, fast as my fingers would move.

Alcohol on Nupastel wash sketch on Kitty Wallis museum grade pastel paper

The fastest way I've found to get something workable on paper outdoors is to do a loose line sketch of the major shapes using Nupastel sticks. (Extremely hard pastels which don't fill the tooth of the surface.) I use the local color for each object, not that the color will show when I'm done but because it gives me a sort of color map that I use to keep my place in a complex landscape. I see a line of green and know its a tree shape; I see blue and know its a distant mountain. And so on.) We're talking minutes.

I then take a cheap brush dipped in rubbing alcohol and paint over the Nupastel, which turns the powdered pigment into paint which won't blend into subsequent layers of pastel and get lost. (It's my map, remember.) In this case, I also bleed alcohol-color into broad areas to indicate shadows I don't want to forget, and the yellow tree form. Alcohol dries almost immediately, so there's no waiting time before I switch to my usual soft pastels. It's only a map. But its someplace to start, and should a sudden storm blow in and send me packing, I have something on paper (canvas) that, adding a reference photo, I can work from, remembering the feel of the locale.

In the above stage, I follow my line sketch with a filled pastel sketch: the darkest darks and lightest lights are indicated as well as the object forms. My color palette emerges. I have a landscape I feel I could walk through.
(I finished the sky before I did the rest, then stuck with what I had there-- otherwise, the approaching sunset will change my palette again and again. The sky defines the ground for me.)

Because of the jumbled rocks in this painting, there was more drawing early on than I usually do. I smdged in the sky, danced sky colors through the rocks as shadow areas. Using Sennilier dark browns and violets, I indicate my darkest areas. I paint very heavily into my surface, so I don't like to use ultra-soft Sennilier pastels except as accents, as they fill my surface too quickly. But the darks are creamy and deep, and there is a place for that in rocky crevasses like these.

A detail of the block-in stage of my pastel. (Note the sotol stalks-- I don't want to forget those.)

I paint with bold, loose strokes. I can refine the painting later.

This is as far as I got before darkness drove me to pack it up and go home.

The main things I wanted to say in this painting are here: the sumac sings color, the rocks brood with shapes and shadows, the white stalks seem to mark the trail for the next guy to pass this way. There's unexpected color in this old place. I could stop here. I think about stopping here. But the painting is still a mish-mash that doesn't invite the viewer in, and the two sides still vie for the position as focal point. It's several objects on paper. Not a painting.

I finish this in my studio, blurring the background rocks, defining the foreground. The sotol wins out. I love the original color of the sumac, but for composition's sake, it mute it slightly, giving the sotol stalks center stage. Another day, I might've done the opposite. That's why art is called "creating".
Out of a perverse sense of place, I rebel at artistic composition and don't move the pine tree, even though it is almost dead center. It's a very old tree, and I want to image a Comanche would recognize this very spot on this ancient trail. Color marked the trail for me that day. I'll never see it quite the same again.

"AUTUMN MARKS THE OVERLAND TRAIL" a 12" x 16" pastel by Lindy C Severns
                                                        copyright 2007
              A plein air painting on Kitty Wallis museum-grade pastel paper
Framed: $1500  On display and available for purchase at Trappings of Texas 2008
           February 29 - April 30 2008 Museum of the Big Bend   Alpine, Texas

What You Do With Your Time When There's Never Enough

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:12:28 GMT

My husband and I don't work real jobs anymore. We live on a ranch three hours from the nearest WalMart. (Unless you count that tiny token "big box" in Pecos, which, no one does--if you need to shop, you'd might as well drive the three hours north to Midland/Odessa or west to El Paso, because even Pecos is ninety minutes away, and when you get there, well, you're in Pecos.)

Out here, there's no fast food in sight (unless you're talking about crossing paths with a swift mule deer). A DSL line isn't even an option where we live-- Alltel assures us we're lucky to have phone service. So Jim and I pass a plodding data card back and forth between our laptops and dream of the day it will give us high speed Internet access right here in the comfort of our remote home.

We define a "neighbor" as any friendly soul we can reach by truck in less than the twenty-five minutes it takes us to get to town. (Actually, we can make it to town quicker than we can drive the unpaved ranch roads to some of our close "neighbors".) Neither of us operate on a fixed schedule. Our time is our own. Sort of.

So one of the first things gainfully employed city friends and relations ask us these days is What (on earth!) do you do with your time? Or, more diplomatically phrased, What (the hell!) is there to do way out there?

I accept these as valid questions, as they keep coming from intelligent beings, some of whom care deeply about Jim and me. I suspect the non-locals still regular in our acquaintance secretly anticipate the pain of watching us either lapsing into hermithood, declining into alcoholism, or becoming obese and addicted to TV reality shows. (We do have two TV's, a satellite dish, DVR and a subscription to Netflix. Neither of us watch much television. The parrot, however, is a sucker for PBS preschool programming; Jim knows the words to all the Sesame Street songs and can quote Mr. Rogers as accurately as he quotes the daily stock market averages.)

Several years ago, in preparation for our then-imminent retirement, I bought one of those mystery book/jigsaw puzzles by Nelson DeMille, a favorite author. (My husband and I are avid readers.) I think I'd enjoy keeping a puzzle on the table; Jim has never worked a jigsaw puzzle in his life, and has no plans to start that activity, but Jim has a long history of doing things I think he should enjoy. We also purchased a telescope, because forty years ago, when Jim was in the Air Force, he learned to use a sextant, and when I was a child in Houston, I liked to lie in our driveway and watch satellites arc overhead.

Several years into "retirement" the puzzle is still in the box and the telescope is in storage. The interest is there: We simply don't have time.

So what do we do?

A bunch of us (all five people--including instructor Maggie McCollum--who fit comfortably inside our local yoga studio) had this very conversation before class one morning. It's a question almost impossible to answer. Describing daily life in small town, rural Far West Texas to someone from Lubbock or Dallas or Houston is like trying to translate the nuances of being a fish into the foriegn language of a country without water -- the words don't exist. As a fish, the best thing you can do is to take the land-locked swimming. Which frightens them.

Even Mother, who really tries to understand and hopefully isn't concerned that I'll become an alcoholic, asks me what my normal daily routine is. The short answer: It isn't routine. But, it's mine.

Every morning, Jim and I wake to a new world. Living on land without man-made distractions, we're much more finely attuned to the weather, to the phases of the moon, to the exact moment of sunset than when we flew a jet all over the continent. Sometimes, the morning calls us to hike while the air is still crisp and the mountains swimming in fog. Sometimes we wake to deer camped in our yard; one of us will pour coffee while the other hurries outside to scatter a cupful of corn to keep them around a few minutes longer, and we'll drink the whole pot as we identify our favorites-- Notch Ear, Limpy, Rocky-Neck, Old George. We point to birds. We vow to look each of them up to identify. (One day.) I paint. I think about painting, then paint some more. Some days, Jim saws wood, or notches ears, or pumps water. Often, I go along for the ride, or just to be with him. We kick up interesting rocks.

Like city-dwellers, we check email, watch GMA, put away the last nights' dishes. We meet friends for lunch, go to dinner at houses an hour away from here. Once a week, I'll put in a load of laundry then head to the studio; I'll paint while it washes, change out a load, paint while the dryer runs, paint until I forget I'm also doing laundry, which means I must continue this routine the next day, too. Or I may bake bread, a luxury I couldn't enjoy when we were flying and always "on call". Some mornings, I hurry into town for yoga while Jim hits Baeza's with a grocery list. Monthly, there's the Wednesday Matinee Good Times Reader's book club; my cherished women's evening circle, session meetings at the church. Commitments I never would've found time for in the city. Every few days, we drive to Alpine to run errands or to deliver a painting to the gallery. We always go to the Drug Store for gossip and breakfast before the Presbyterians gather for Sunday School.

Regardless of where we're going, whenever the truck is in motion, we're tourists admiring the view of our own world. We take hundreds of photos, mentally mark locations to return to with my easel and paints. We exclaim over light hitting the mountains in unfamiliar ways, at clouds patterning the ground with shadow. We stop to smell wet pinon, fuschia cholla blossoms, musky javelina. (If we weren't so tired by bedtime each night, we'd learn to use that telescope.)

We live as many moments in awe as we do in activity. And that makes unopened puzzles last a lot longer.

From Whence Comes Inspiration

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:13:08 GMT

Many artists, including my mother, insist they can't paint until their lives are in order and they feel inspired. But order and inspiration of that sort is a luxury a professional artist can't afford. As it is, I must regularly claim time for creating -- time that could otherwise be spent hiking with my husband, lunching with friends, cleaning house, grooming the dog, learning Turkish. (Okay. So I don't obsess over a dusty house nor do I really plan to tour Turkey. But painting takes time that could, conceiveably, be spent on those tasks!) Having already stolen time from a full day, I'm not inclined to waste it seeking moments of grand inspiration. So, I follow a five-minutes to inspiration rule.

That doesn't mean I never feel inspired.

When I'm painting plein air, a certain amount of choice and planning has already occurred. Whether on foot or by truck, I travel to a preselected locale; I find a spot that will accommodate me and my Soltek easel; I then turn 360 degrees to familiarize myself with my surroundings. That done, I take five minutes to select a subject then distill a composition from that landscape. (If the landscape hadn't somehow summoned me back, I wouldn't be there.) I'm not picky. I believe art is a process, I enjoy being outdoors surrounded by nature, and I derive the same satisfaction from painting a lichen-covered rock as I do from painting a glacial lake beneath snow-capped Rockies. Sometimes, the inspiring moment is a quiet one. If I'm lucky, a potential focal point jumps out and grabs me. Regardless, I'm there, so I find something to paint. In five minutes or less.

If I'm starting a new painting in the studio, I've usually already lost a little sleep mulling over an idea, an image that whispers my name. Maybe I want to document a recent day trip to a familiar but yet-unpainted landmark. Sometimes, I see familiar territory from a different angle or under a different sky. I carry my Canon digital Elph everywhere I go -- getting groceries, walking the dog -- so when I see something that intrigues me, I photograph it. Because photo references can get out of hand, I try to immediately download all angles of that small inspiration into a location-specific, dated folder in my laptop. Months later, when I see a thunderstorm building in the distance and it triggers an artistic memory of Spanish daggers lining Highway 505 after a late afternoon storm, I can delve into my files, then print out half a dozen of those dagger shots. Photos in hand, I attack the studio with a plan, if not a composition. Five minutes in the studio, and I'm painting.

I keep a few "paint-me" photos printed out and filed in the studio for those inevitable days when the world sucks and nothing inspirational festers in the back of my mind, where nothing is waiting to be painted. On such days, I walk into the studio, pull a random photo from the Sucky Day folder and go to work. I don't let myself think too much. The five minute rule still applies. And fifteen minutes into painting, the world never seems so bad.

Once in a great while, I stumble upon a grand moment of inspiration. You can't plan it. It's a magnificence, a breath of life which fills the lungs and drives the artist to paint, regardless. Never mind comfort. Forget companionship. Who cares whether life is orderly or not, whether another painting is in progress or not. True inspiration demands immediate action.

I acted upon such inspiration two weeks ago. All afternoon (while Jim watched football playoffs) I'd been in the studio, unpacking a new set of Terry Ludwig dark pastels, plus, replenishing my favorite Rembrandt, Schmincke and Sennilier sticks. Getting all orderly for the new year. Thinking of the new year, I felt suddenly fat. I had the truck: Other than having partaken of too much holiday eating, I don't know what made me start walking, walking up a mountain I rarely hike, and in a direction I rarely go.

Here in the mountains, our sun vanishes early, bringing a dramatic drop in temperature. Heading eastward, I walked fast to ward off the chill, and in the fading light, my breath made clouds that I struggled to catch. I kicked up a chipped arrowhead, studied the ground for the missing piece. A hawk, giving chase to unseen prey cried out as he swooped overhead. As pilots encountering flying objects are prone to do, I looked up to follow the hawk's flight. What I saw stole my breath.
The familiar eastern sky was on fire with reflected light. The sky's fire melted down Blue Mountain, coated Point of Rocks, tickled toward the mountains near the Bloys encampment. That's all I could think: the sky is on fire, and the blue mountains are swimming in it.
I snapped a few shots, hiked a few steps higher to snap a few more. But already, the fire was dissolving into familiar pastel shades of sunset.

Oil painting, I thought, having not done an oil in almost a year, but knowing, intuitively, that oil this one should be. I raced back to the studio. Before darkness claimed the peaks to the east, I'd unwrapped a linen canvas that I'd been saving for who knows what, clamped it to my easel and whipped out my wooden box of oil paints so they'd be ready for my entrance the next morning. I drove home, called a time-out from TV football to announce I needed to start an oil painting. Because, I explained, still breathless, I'd serendipitously taken a spontaneous hike in the time when the sky catches fire.

I delivered the painting to Kiowa Gallery for framing last week. I then called museum curator Mary Bones to beg a change in my Trappings of Texas entries. Everyone agreed, this oil was right for that show. This piece is inspired.

Like a whispered breath, the spirit of creation is fragile, fleeting. Alive. I believe we artists are gifted with inspiration, but all people are gifted with the breath of life. Magnificent inspiration is a gift we shouldn't take lightly.

One day, the sky over the mountains I love best held fire for one fleeting moment. In that time, I was there. A hawk flew. And so, I looked up. Sharing that moment, that joy is both my gift and my duty. Hope you enjoy it.

IN THE TIME WHEN THE SKY CATCHES FIRE copyright Lindy C Severns 2008
24"x36" oil on archival Russian linen $3900 framed

The original will debut as an entry in the invitational Trappings of Texas 2008
at the Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas
-on display and available for purchase February 29 thru April 30 2008-

New Year 's Eve in the Wild Wild West

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:04:44 GMT

A way out here in west Texas, we welcomed in the new year with more bass than bang, more fiddling than fireworks, a dash of drink and a dribble of dancing.  Realize, please, that in doing so, Jim and I broke with recent tradition. Last year, we stayed home, using a six-inch snowfall as our excuse for being fuddy-duds; the year before, we went to bed at ten without even weather to excuse us. This year, we decided to go for broke and to celebrate at Sutler's Club, a small room upstairs in the historic Limpia Hotel in downtown Fort Davis where our good friend Jim Hall was scheduled to play his bass guitar with Todd Jagger and J.R. (whose surname I still don't know), a credible trio known far and wide as "the Border Blasters".  A loyal bunch of Jim Hall groupies from the Presbyterian Church planned to attend; we coaxed our fellow fuddy-duds and cohorts in adventure, Nelda and Jerry Miles to accompany us on this one.

We honestly had no idea what to expect. For two weeks, I tried to discover the dinner menu (was there a buffet? a choice? a fixed selection? If so, would it be fancy and weird?). I inquired as to the cost, the time the band started playing. Stuff partygoers sometimes feel the need to know prior to the big event. No one could give me a glimmer of a hint. Likely this was partially due to the absence of the owners, Joe and Lanna Duncan (more friends, also members of Jim Hall's dedicated Presbyterian following) who, with son Malcolm, spent their holidays skiing in New England. But part of the charm of small town life is spontaneity. Had this been my first taste of local event scheduling, I might've panicked and cancelled our reservations. But here, things just have a way of working out without the constrictions of overplanning. I put my trust in history, then convinced Jim and the Miles that we'd have a good time, regardless of the details and any (unanticipated) large sum of money involved.

Lest you assume that we've never kicked up our heels on New Year's Eve before, let me be clear: This was not our first rodeo. We'll always smile, remembering dancing the night away with the Brands and the Bushes at that hundred-year-old, one-room schoolhouse somewhere near Richland Springs, deep in the heart of Texas. But that simple celebration was the exception. In over three decades of marriage, my husband and I have, on more than one occasion, royally celebrated the eve of the new year in Las Vegas, NV, first at the old Caesar's Palace, years later at the Bellagio, every time enjoying VIP guest status (through no merit of our own). We've celebrated at the tree-lit Polo Lounge while staying in a bungalow at the very pink Beverly Hills Hotel. (From this extravagant experience, I learned that I am not cut out to live in southern California, nor do I especially enjoy shopping on Rodeo Drive.) I can't remember if we were ever in Fort Lauderdale or in Manhattan for New Year's Eve. I block things like that out. Most years, we spent in Aspen, which is not a bad place to be except when everyone else and the Kennedys are in residence there.

Feeling envious? Don't! Being there, wherever there was, was how we earned our keep for a lot of years. Jim flew corporate jets for thirty-four years; for seventeen of those, I copiloted for him. We've seen our share of grand rooms strewn with drunken strangers swinging from chandeliers. The last New Year's eve we spent in Aspen, we cancelled our coveted dinner reservations at the last minute in favor of ordering pizza delivered to our hotel room--we didn't think we could stomach dining out again with the rude mob, however elegantly attired. So this year, with trepidation, we decided to risk officially celebrating New Year's Eve with friends and in our chosen location. No matter the menu, no matter the cost. (We knew the music and the company would be terrific!)

Jim wore jeans, but did change shirts. He kept his scuffed suede nerd shoes on because his hip was only four weeks our of surgery, and he was afraid if he wore boots, then asked me to remove them, I might pull his leg off. I wore velvet, not because there was a dress code but because there wasn't. Jerry came straight from work. Nelda had flown across Texas all day; she looked Texas-chic in a stunningly simple white blouse and turqoise choker. Our fellow partygoers wore sequined silk; casual sweaters; denim. Whatever they wanted to wear, worked. In Big Bend country, you are who you are. Clothes can't change that. (Just ask the elk in the picture below how much difference that festoon of confetti really makes in one's life.)

Nelda and Party Elk. (Her husband Jerry in the foreground.)

Dinner was both very reasonably priced ($30 per person) and also, delicious. There was a choice after all, and I chose herbed salmon. We had to buy a club membership to order drinks. That's standard in this area. We had to buy one because we so rarely go into town at night, unless it's to hike by starlight. No one at our table drank excessively... no one in the room drank excessively, although the rather senior citizen who spent so much time draping the much-younger gal over his body on the dance floor surely wished for some strong spirits on awakening the next morning. The Border Blasters played their brand of "Texas Music" at a volume conducive to both toe-tapping and the conversation that kept us all awake long after our usual bedtimes. We joked with Jan Hall (Jim Hall's long-legged blonde and chief groupie) while Jim's music played on.

Smokin' Jim Hall of the Border Blasters.

The small frame room held perhaps a dozen tables, plus the groupies' couch and the short bar on which the younger set (who haven't yet enjoyed hip replacements) leaned. There was room to spontaneously stand and two-step when the music called to you, and at the stroke of midnight, Jim and I pressed a little flesh and did a little slow-dancing, sans cane.


My man Jim, ex-jet pilot wears his party favor.   Bookfeller Jerry wears his party favor.

                   I didn't say no one drank. I said no one drank excessively.


Fellow Musician & Hall groupie Margie Ferguson
          Nelda Miles crowned with official hat by her honey Jerry.

New Year's Eve 2008 at Sutler's Bar in the Limpia Hotel was a far cry from the martini bar at the Bellagio, or from the cigar bar at the Hotel Jerome, my favorite Aspen hangout except that I can't take the smoke. (Sutlers was smoke-free.) I even ignored my aversion to bodily contact with strangers to let that AARP-aged dance floor contortonist give me a midnight hug. We all wished each other well and went home into the sub-freezing night illuminated by a Dipper so big and bright, it will surely pour good things all year.



Chief Groupie Jan Hall toasting with her music man Jim.

Having temporarily lost possession of the camera, I wish everyone a happy 2008.

We wouldn't have stayed in and ordered pizza for all the world.

Portrait of a Ranch Christmas

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:17:27 GMT

We had such a wonderful Christmas, I'd like to share parts of it with you!

Mother and Child at our doorstep Christmas 2007

Watching the fire, solving the problems of the world. It takes all afternoon to prepare the fire in the authentic horno (oven) Roxa and her son Bill Max Robison made. The fire burns down, and the horno is ready when Bill Max can hold his hand in it for five seconds. The baking happens fast after that!

The pizza assembly line at Crows Nest Ranch, directed by Besa Martin (in the apron).

Painted gourd ornaments on the tree in front of "Sunset on a Way of Life" an unfinished 8' x20' mural by Lindy Severns and Roxa Robison on a wall in the ranch kitchen. The figures in the mural are portraits of Roxa Medley Robison's relatives and ancestors from old family snapshots. That chuckwagon served many meals for the Medley cowboys, and we enjoyed inviting them to step on out for Christmas dinner with us.

Putting the pizza in the oven by light of the full moon. Mars is too faint to show in this photo, but it was there!

Lindy on our family Christmas eve hike near Brown Mountain-- Jim's first uphill run since surgery last month!

The calm before Christmas dinner

Now we're all full. Jim Severns (with his new hiking pole) and Danielle Matthews

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from inside First Presbyterian Church, Fort Davis, Texas

Negative Space: Zen and the Art of Christmas

Lindy C Severns — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 17:00:11 GMT

If you regularly follow this blog, you will have noticed the scarcity of entries lately. With Jim's two hip replacement surgeries only six weeks apart, the related rehab, plus travel to and from Lubbock, I've had to (gladly, mind you!) temporarily pick up slack for him. Whining all the way, I keep getting bogged down in tasks Jim regularly accomplishes with more competence and less effort than I.
We've spent a lot of sleepless nights as he tries to get comfortable on two tender, freshly sliced buns. Even the dog has lost sleep. Added to my nursing duties, I had to get through Gallery Night, Alpine's annual show.
But now Jim's rehabing, gradually weaning off his cane and hiking the mountains; I made it thru Gallery Night without a meltdown. Life is returning to normal, and life is normally good.

Now I advocate painting regularly, not just when you're inspired or "in the mood". But in the past month, I haven't painted at all; I've scarcely had time to plan the four pastels I'm doing for Trappings of Texas. (Trappings is the Museum of the Big Bend's annual invitational custom western gear and art show and sale, opening in Alpine February 29, 2008. More on that in a future blog entry.) I'm behind on everything I'm doing, can only spell my last name on a good day and then only after three cups of expresso. I'm constantly praying I haven't forgotten to pay anybody who expects money from us in a timely manner.
And wouldn't you know it? Along comes Christmas. I wasn't prepared for Christmas season. It came, anyway.

We spent the first (crazy) part of the holiday season in noisy, bright and bustling Lubbock. Mom lives at Ransom Canyon, a small community so artistically lit every Christmas, you can barely get to her house after dark because of bumper-to-bumper sight-seers idling through the neighborhood. My dad loved stringing Christmas lights across the eaves, the windows, the trees. His sense of holiday well-being depended on displaying zillions of lights, which he religiously lit at the stroke of dusk each night. Daddy criticized any neighbor who refrained from doubling his December electric bill...one year, when the guy next-door installed more lights than Daddy, we adult kids seriously discussed giving Daddy an extra, dedicated circuit for outdoor lighting. Falling not far from the tree, my landscape architect brother Kelly Cook delights in constructing extravagant light displays in his Midland yard. His crowning achievement to date is an impressive string of life-sized flying reindeer tautly secured by rebar. Usually tautly secured. There's yet another untold story...apparently there's no brain damage, but ask Kelly about that scar on his nose. Happily, no reindeer were injured.

And any city Christmas season worth its salt includes a plethora of street corner Santas jingling annoying little bells designed to instill guilt at we who hurry past them, our arms laden with an abundance of essential groceries including freshly made macaroons, smoked salmon and brie. Tamales. Shrimp. Asparagus for the infamous, much-corrupted traditional family casserole, an artery-clogging dish taken from a recipe my 97-year-old great-aunt got from the lady who ran the boarding house my great-uncle lived in before they married. Stores hawk tree-sized poinsettias, fake trees, frosted trees, fresh trees and already-failing trees painted green to attract those who don't know the difference. Everywhere, holiday music blares, squeezing conscious thought from the far recesses of the stressed-out brain. Women parade around in gaudy Christmas sweaters a gal wouldn't be caught dead in any other month of the year. Lots of wine and liquor, candy, pie and cake is gifted and regifted. (I confess: I've never re-gifted wine or liquor. Or, fudge.) Annually, I religiously refuse to visit a mall after November 15, so I can't report on the shopping frenzy that must surely have been in progress while we were there.

Mid-December, we returned home to Fort Davis. I felt like I'd stepped from sparkling, shining, singing chaos into the Void. (Stay with me here, okay? I'm lapsing a little metaphysical now, but I'll get back to holiday basics, honest.)

In martial arts, an ultimate (rarely attainable) experience comes of entering a mindless state known as "the Void". Empty Mind. Sounds bad. Is good. Empty the mind, and the spirit emerges, each breath one with the universe. You simply are. Spar an opponent while flirting even on the outskirts of the Void and you'll win, regardless of the match's physical outcome. I didn't go there often, or stay there long, but I've felt it. The Void draws from and defines the fullness that surrounds it, and thus, the Void is the ultimate fullness.

Similarly, in fine art, the area surrounding an image is known as "negative space". I know this sounds bad. Empty. Negative. But negative space is essential. Without negative space, a drawing is nothing but a clutter of line, an indefinable shapelessness. Think about that famous black and white image of faces or vases. You see two black profiles facing each other. Or, you see a single white vase in the center. Which is it meant to be? Because the one defines the other. Similarly, you can look at a cast shadow and immediately know the shape of the unseen object casting that shadow.

I'm not musical, but I'm told it's the pauses--the negative space, the void--between the notes that makes for magic.

So here we are, Jim and I, alone on our thirty-third Christmas together. We're deep in the remote mountains of Far West Texas with one string of tiny white lights on a tabletop Norfolk pine and a dinner plate-sized poinsettia that can only be described as "cute". Our families are away, celebrating in their own special ways. We did precious little shopping this year. Instead of the expensive gifts we usually give each other, we will hike the mountain, as far as Jim's new hips agree to go. I haven't even hunted up our Christmas CD's, so we listen, contentedly, to the cacophany of silence in this semi-wilderness we call home.

Last night, we joined friends for pizza baked in the ranch's horno oven, and as we shivered around the warm adobe oven, Roxa Robison marveled at how Mars looked like a necklace hung around the moon. This morning, the non-English-speaking housekeeper for the ranch brought us a gift from Chihuahua, an act of unexected generosity that brought tears to my eyes and a self-conscious "Feliz Navidad" to Jim's non-Spanish-speaking lips. Tonight we'll attend candlelight communion service at the historic Fort Davis Presbyterian Church; I will read verse while Jim lights the Christ candle. Tomorrow we'll dine with close friends, and we'll call our distant and near families and tell them thanks for the generous gifts they sent. The week continues with a host of wine and cheese socials, lunches with friends, more ranch dinners. We're busy, but we're not harried. There is time to be still.

We are celebrating in the Void this year, feasting in negative space. It is warm space. Uncluttered space. Daddy isn't around to string lights, but his garish displays illuminate our hearts under these dark Davis Mountain skies as surely as when he'd march outside at dusk to plug in his nightly show. I doubt we'll drink eggnog because I forgot to buy extra eggs. But my great-grandmother's recipe is sweet on my tongue, the bourbon burning as it goes down my throat. Mother didn't send one of those fruitcakes baked with so much love, I ate them anyway, but I imagine her now, up to her elbows in brightly colored candied fruit. Which makes me think of those pickup truck, motorhome, limosine tours of Christmas lights, all of us, nieces, nephews, a dog and a parrot jammed into one vehicle, all joining my father in exclaiming ohh and ah at appropriate times. I do wish I still had one of the long Victorian dresses I sewed for my sister and I to prance around in on Christmas eve, or the old stocking Mother sewed with sequins when they probably didn't have money for felt. But at the time, some of those joyous and not so joyous Christmases had so many lines, such a tangle of shapes, so much noise, such confusion that the focal point went unnoticed.

We are alone this year, thankfully taking stock of our lives in a void far removed from the hustle and bustle, the glitter and bows. We are alone, yet all those who have loved us and whom we have loved are here with us, casting giant shadows that define who we are. And that is one great gift.
All the fear and frustrations, the hurt and the healing of the past year, all the remembrances of Christmases past compose the negative space shaping this ultimate fullness that Jim and I feel today.
Today, we give thanks. Today, we have Time. Love. Reverence. Hope.
For one brief moment, we pause between the notes of our lives to breathe at one with God.

(And now, I must make an asparagus casserole to take to Christmas dinner tomorrow. Likely I'm missing some ingredient, so I'll have to alter the sacred boardinghouse recipe one more time. Merry Christmas!)

These Rocks Weren't As Steep Forty Years Ago (Touring Mitre Peak with a Pro)

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:19:04 GMT

Gallery Night weekend has successfully come and gone. The largest pastel I've ever done, "Broken Sky Over Blue Mountain" found a new home. So I'm now happily interviewing landscapes for my next mega-painting. But for me, the highlight of that weekend was spending a few precious days with my little sis, Kathy Nammour.

Kathy Cook Nammour with her furry niece and feathered nephew 2007

The grownup version of my baby sister now resides in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. During our Midland years, however,she spent every childhood summer at Camp Mitre Peak. (Back then, my idea of immersing myself in the Great Outdoors involved sunning around the pool, bicycling around the Tall City with girlfriends, or on really adventurous days, driving golf carts into water traps at the ol' country club.) Kat, who has traveled and lived all over the world, vows Far West Texas remains one of the places most dear to her heart. So it's ironic that I'm the one who now traipses around rocky mountainscapes with an easel on my back, that I'm the one who calls Big Bend Country "home". So it was special to finally share this place we love in common, a land she knew as a child and that I only truly learned as an adult.

In Alpine, we spent the requisite time shopping (we are, first and foremost, female). Jim graciously wined and dined us. We drank a lot of coffee, marveled that once again, we'd unwittingly had our hair cut alike.

And one morning, we spent hiking around Mitre Peak, revisiting Kathy's former haunts.

MITRE PEAK SKY 9" x 12" pastel by Lindy Cook Severns c 2006 private collection

In Big Bend country, you don't trespass. It isn't polite and it isn't prudent. Folks who live thirty miles from nowhere take responsibility for their own safety and they (we) don't like surprise visits from strangers. Also, in cattle country, fences and gates have a purpose. You never know what's going on on the other side. We always ask permission or don't tread private property. (I haven't actually heard about any recent shootings, but way out West, you never know. Last year's bodies might all be buried.) Anyway, my law-abiding husband felt reassured when Kathy knocked on the caretaker's door, introduced herself, then asked if she could show me around. Jim was facing his second hip surgery (he had it the Monday after Thanksgiving and is already doing half a mile a day on a cane) so he couldn't accompany us. The loyal dog stayed in the truck with him.

The parrot, a dedicated hiker, set out with Kathy and me.
Past rock landmarks like Frankenstein and the monkey's head. (I apparently have less imagination than generations of young scouts.) Past a roadrunner staking out a bush. Across oak leaves so thick, a rattler hidden beneath that leafy carpet wouldn't have felt us walking on him, or so I told myself.

Kat pointed out the mess hall, cabins she once occupied, the place she killed her first rattlesnake, the place one camper's foolish mother had teased one of the resident serpents until it had struck her. (Kathy knew of only two bite incidents in all those years. Both involved childish parents playing with snakes.) The infirmary. The pool. I'd been to Mitre several times, either to leave my sister or to pick her up, but this time, the place looked different. This was my VIP tour, and with a poignancy so strong it stung, I suddenly imagined my sister there, summer after summer, first as a camper, later, a counselor. Mitre Peak had been her special world. The sister I know so well had experienced things those Mitre summers that I can never share. I felt jealousy for Ginger and Lisa, her childhood scouting friends who called each other by silly nicknames that have stuck into middle age; I wished I had been there to hike the ten miles into Alpine with them. I realized I've seldom walked in my sister's footprints. Arrogantly, we presume to know the worlds of those we are closest to, when the terrain that shaped them is, by definition, beyond our knowing.

As I mused on the different paths our lives have taken and marveled at the scenery, Kathy led me up a boulder path between oaks and madrone. We hadn't planned to hike so far. I wore ballet flats, Kathy, street shoes. As we scrambled over an especially treacherous rock, Kat observed that she used to be much taller and the rocks, less steep. We laughed, discussed turning back, continued on.
"This is a baby hike," she confided. "Where we'd take the campers their first year." Abruptly, we came to a narrow cleft in towering rock. "Daphie's Cave," she announced smugly. She explained the story: A young ranch girl (Daphie, I presume) would retreat to this cave to draw, to write, to dream. Later, hundreds of tender scouts explored her secret world in turn. And now, my sister was sharing it with me, a baby to that hidden place.

Charged with the enthusiasm that comes with discovery, we continued upward, around more boulders, happily planting our scuffed street slippers through a squeeze of rock that separates the not-skinny-but-thin-enough from the unthin while praying we wouldn't get stuck.
"Do you hear it?" she whispered.
I did. Water. Tricking, gurgling, running water teasing through the arid mountains. I smiled.
She said, "This is the first pool." She might have been opening a safety deposit box and pointing to a string of nine diamonds. The parrot cooed. We lingered, took pictures. Enjoyed. Shared the moment in that place where my sister had skinny-dipped on hot August afternoons past.

Going back down, the boulders weren't as steep.

Whenever our parrot does something surprising, I'm humbled, reminded that the world of humans isn't the only amazing world out there. There is much in nature we cannot know, muchless understand. Likewise, hiking Camp Mitre Peak with my little sis, I felt humility. Kathrine D'Cook Nammour is her own person; a part, but only a part of her is the known world I call "sister'. We are who we are, and no one, not even those closest to us can presume to know all our caves and pools. That's why it's such a treasure when someone we already love shares the route to one of theirs with us.

I don't know if a scene from that morning will ever become a painting or not. But I fit through that rock squeeze; like countless Brownies, I've seen Daphie's cave; I know how to find the first pool in my sister's soul.

As for me skinny-dipping? I refer you back to the passage about trespassing in Big Bend country. It isn't from lack of will that I shall refrain.

Falling Trees, Gallery Art, and Paint-Smudged Palms

Lindy C Severns — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:37:40 GMT

If an artist paints, then if no one ever sees that painting, is it still art? This Question of the Weekend relates to the old "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it" dilemma.


This is Alpine Artwalk's Gallery Night. So we're here, in little Alpine, Texas. Big times. Food, drink, music, art, friends. Family. (My sister Kathy flew down from Calgary to share the weekend with us.) This small West Texas town decks the halls; businesses open their doors for the 14th annual event. Artists seek display space like bulls charging into a rodeo arena, Alpine being a cornerstone of the growing Big Bend art market. This isn't Manhattan or Santa Fe, but some of the art here is just as good. Some is better. And there's no traffic.

              Sisters Lindy Cook Severns & Kathy Cook Nammour looking twinsy for Gallery Night
                                                                               (I'm the short, round-faced one.)

For a nominal fee, any local business can participate and display the work of an area artist, jeweler, photographer, potter, or other artisan this weekend. (Making space for more than one artist is, of course, even better.) Folks who come to Artwalk then follow the signs to the next location as they walk the intimate downtown area while listening to corner musicians, visiting, nibbling and perhaps imbibing along the way. I dearly love people who drink bubbly while shopping for art.

Paintings by aspiring amateurs and polished professionals line the walls of Front Street Books, Bread and Breakfast, the Holland Hotel, Quetzal Gifts. Trans-Pecos Bank (one of my collectors of both oil and pastel) and West Texas National Bank (which really should buy a piece of my work so as to keep up with their discriminating neighbor) provide not only wall space but big donor funds. Alpine's full time galleries--my favorite jewelers, Susanna and David at Mi Tesoro; the new Catch Light Gallery, an artists' coop; big guy on the block and exclusive home to my framed creations, Kiowa Gallery all urge their resident artists to unfold new art at the event. (In my case, only two of the fifteen 2006 paintings I took to Kiowa for last fall's Gallery Night remain unsold. Unfolding new pieces wasn't the issue-- I had to produce a whole new collection for this year's event! A good problem to have, but, whew!!!) Collectors, designers, art lovers fly in to browse new regional art. Holiday shopping commences, and sales of unique gift items are brisk.


                                                        Jim & Lindy Severns and MONSOON SEASON (30" x 40" oil)
                                                                collection of Trans Pecos Banks, Alpine, TX

Some fine art walks out during Gallery Night weekend. But the event's thrust is acquainting people with the work and faces of area artists and introducing visitors to our charming and friendly area businesses. Gallery Night puts faces behind paintings, promotes art, and brings folks back to Alpine again, and again.

In the days leading to the official event, energy and excitement float through Alpine's streets like colorful leaves on a mountain breeze. Serious repeat collectors and savvy shoppers arrive to preview the offerings. There is the smell of money in the air. (Three of my pieces have already sold. And for that, I'm thankful, but I wish my sister could've seen them, first! ) I'm a professional artist, so I don't pretend the money isn't an issue. When I sell a painting, I shout whoopdeedoo.
But having ten or fifteen thousand strangers plus a few friends viewing the paintings I've been doing since last spring is heady. I can't be humble about that. I paint, and I absolutely love people admiring what I paint. The viewer is as much a part of the creative process as a stick of pastel.
So, do I paint to have my work admired?
If no one but me would ever see a painting, would I still pour my soul into creating it?
You bet I would.

Without an audience, would that unseen painting still be art?

                      Only for the birds.....
My audience while painting BROKEN SKY OVER BLUE MOUNTAIN would've just as soon made confetti of it

If a tree falls in a deserted forest, the earth surely feels the thunder from that living thing it has long and lovingly nourished. Who cares if anybody hears the tree fall. The earth was involved with that tree from the get-go. The earth remembers the sapling's roots sucking water from the soil, its trunk flowing with life, branching, leafing. The sound the tree makes when it falls may be mighty, but to the earth it came from, sound is the least part of its quiet creation.

I'm thrilled when a painting sells. I delight in having my work prominently displayed in a prestigious gallery. I want my husband, my sister, my friends to admire what I spend my time on. But ultimately, I paint for myself. Once I dirty my hands, creating, that painting becomes forever part of me. After reproducing a physical landscape on canvas, I never see that terrain the same again. It edges into my soul to claim a niche. Whether anyone ever sees my creation changes nothing. I paint because I paint.
And all the rest is gravy.
(This weekend, I think I'll enjoy a fine Merlot with all that gravy!)

BROKEN SKY OVER BLUE MOUNTAIN, a 20" x 50" pastel , the centerpiece of my Gallery Night 2007 collection