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Sleeping Lion Mountain Under a Sky So Broad and Deep.. Light of a Distant Fire.. Storm Coming and Laundry on the Line, Finishing Touches to Blinded by Green.. Blinded by Green..
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Sleeping Lion Mountain Under a Sky So Broad and Deep
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
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
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
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.
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