Planning #3 of the Palestine Series

First vision. June 11, 2022

Palestine Blues. 1st of series

Nearing completion of 2nd in the series

“It is very well to copy what one sees. It’s much better to draw what one has retained in one’s memory. It is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. One reproduces only that which is striking, that is to say, the necessary. This one’s recollections and invention are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.”

Edgar Degas

“It’s hard to define how they come about,” Hopper said of his pictures, “but it’s a long process of gestation in the mind and a rising emotion.”

Brian O’Doherty, “Edward Hopper’s Voice” in American Masters: The Voice and the Myth

The three-week hiatus has been restful for me. As we approached the second anniversary of owning The Gallery at Redlands, Sandi & I decided we needed to take a couple of weekends off before the annual Dogwood Art & Music Festival gets underway. In three weeks we’ve enjoyed our fireplace during the Texas freeze, traveled Oklahoma, Missouri & Arkansas, and rested here at home.

Above all, I’ve bathed in the warm, soothing waters of imagination through sketching, reading, journaling and composting ideas for new art work. Edward Hopper has been my guiding spirit lately as I’ve pondered ways to continue my Palestine blues series of watercolors.

This series began on June 11, 2022 while walking across town one morning as I’m accustomed to doing during our weekend stays there. Looking across Spring Street (actually Highway 287 through Palestine), I was arrested at the beauty of the contrasting warm sun and cool shadows around what once was the Pearlstone Grocery.

On August 22, after a lengthy gestation, I finally began my first attempt at painting this, adding the ghost of Lightnin’ Hopkins walking along the tracks. This bluesman used to perform thirty minutes away at a juke joint in the town of Crockett.

I began my second painting on January 2, adding a harp player to Lightnin’. The harp player is actually a guy I watched play one Sunday morning in Dallas at the Sons of Hermann Hall some years back. We were beginning the final day of our Randy Brodnax Christmas Art Show. I took pictures of him with my phone and used them for this composition.

On January 18, something happened that gave me fresh inspiration for the 3rd of this series. I began work on it yesterday, though I’m still finishing the second one. The quotes above I posted because of the severe editing of this third in the series; there are a host of items removed from the scene as well as new objects added and others repositioned. I’ve already changed my mind a dozen times and chuckle at the thought of my characters and sign posts getting up, walking about and repositioning themselves somewhere else in the scene. I keep saying “Stop that!” but they won’t listen.

More later. . .

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Musings over Winter Work

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent. They love to emerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

Rollo May, The Courage to Create

The beautiful winter day has been spent at the drafting table, dividing my time between scrutinizing the details of this Fort Worth railyard setting and looking up at the marvelous white abyss blanketing our neighborhood. My only appointment for the day was canceled awhile ago, so I am more than happy to stay indoors, stay warm, and avoid getting into a vehicle to go sledding across town.

I’ve also had the privilege of communicating with several members of The Twelve (artists who will open The Gallery at Redlands March 20). Enthusiasm is already reaching fever pitch. One of them sent me this link to a video I had forgotten since it was created a few years ago, and I am posting it now for any readers interested in viewing a stunning media presentation of Palestine. If you blink, you will miss seeing me seated at the desk in The Gallery at Redlands.

The day is perfect for painting, my watercolor should be dry enough to continue, so I’ll close this and get back to work.

Thanks for reading.

I make art in order to discover.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself I am not alone.

Retirement Odyssey

My first Retirement Retreat off the Grid

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

1:21 a.m., Thursday morning (barely)
June 15, 2017

Sitting in this dark country kitchen tonight, I feel that I am drifting in the current of a moonless midnight river without oars, and without compass. With the banks on both sides concealed in the night gloom, and unable to discern what lies immediately before me, I find retirement very scintillating and intriguing. The senses feel sharp, and the anticipation positive. In midweek, I decided to make the two-and-a-half-hour road trip to Palestine, Texas, and resettle The Gallery at Redlands for a few days. This new gallery opened in March with my one-man-show, and the relationship I have enjoyed with the proprietors since that day has been deeply satisfying to my soul. When I retired last week from twenty-eight years of teaching school, I was happy to know that a new chapter was waiting to be written.

After yesterday’s road trip following a mostly sleepless night, I found myself extremely exhausted by five in the afternoon. I had already put in six hours at the gallery and another hour at a Rotary Club meeting where I made a number of new acquaintances. I managed to frame a couple of my recent watercolors, began work on a new painting and resumed work on a painting abandoned last year. Ten more works were added to the display I already had in place, and the interior of the gallery felt like home once again to me. I could feel myself smiling internally.

After closing shop, I made the fifty-minute drive out into the country to tuck myself in to my favorite hideaway—an old store that friends allow me to make my home-away-from home, off the grid beside a gravel road. Settling on the porch with a fresh cup of coffee, the cool winds concealed the reality of a 95-degree late Texas afternoon, and I gazed across acres of sun-washed pastureland, letting my thoughts drift. Finally at 7:30, I could no longer keep my eyes open, so I retired to bed, knowing that was probably a mistake. Sure enough, at 11:50 I awakened, and have been unable to sleep since. My mind is too awake, too interested, too consumed with possibilities of the new Thursday that has yet to dawn. I sit now at the large kitchen table of this old store, composing this “blind blog” (no Wi-Fi in this remote location), waiting for drowsiness to lead me back to bed.

Palestine is a city of trains, and the Texas Railroad Authority has granted me access to some of their historic locomotives, including old #610. This behemoth pulled the Texas Freedom Train all over the state during our nation’s bicentennial in 1976. Following that year, the locomotive served time in Atlanta, Georgia until it completely tired out, and was returned to Texas. For nearly three months, I have waited for the opportunity to paint this enormous machine, poring over a number of photos taken from a recent visit to the shed where it’s been parked. I have a number of experimental ideas in mind as I try for the first time to render this loco’s portrait in watercolor and pencil.

While I’m working in the gallery over the next few days, I also hope to complete a larger watercolor of a passenger rail car I found in Eureka Springs, Arkansas during a visit last year. I’ve always been dissatisfied with the muted colors on the side of the car, and think I can try a few tricks to enrich them. The foliage also needs more work.

(Next day) After falling asleep around 2:30 this morning and sleeping till nearly 7:00, I rose to a more promising dawn, and the moonless night river yielded to a sunny morning drive, my Jeep cutting across the countryside, and my heart filled with a renewed sense of adventure. By mid-afternoon things were hopping in The Gallery at Redlands in Palestine, as I met several new friends, and managed to frame two more watercolors, finish my Eureka Springs passenger rail car, and break ground on the old #610. This is a retired Texas and Pacific 2-10-4 steam locomotive, the largest I’ve seen in over ten years. Seventy of these 600-series locomotives were manufactured, and this is the only one that still exists.  Right now, I’m waiting for the background of the painting to dry so I can begin work on the actual locomotive.

Old #610 Texas and Pacific in Progress

The draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line.

Rico Lebrun

I anticipate a struggle and plenty to learn as I attempt to render the details on this complex locomotive.

Eureka Springs Rail Odyssey, 16 x 12″ unframed, $250

Finally I finished the Eureka Springs passenger car I started long ago and resumed work on yesterday afternoon.  A number of new paintings have been brought out to The Gallery at Redlands for display and sale as well:

Remnants from an Old Store, 11 x 14″ framed, $250

This subject was taken from the store where I gladly live when I retreat to the Texas wilderness.  Before retiring to bed last night, I walked into the store room and looked at this section of shelving behind the cash register, grateful for the memories of painting it last year.

Indian Corn, 14 x 18″ framed, $225

I worked on this piece last winter while visiting with my parents in St. Louis, and finally got around to framing it.

Palestine Memory, 14 x 18″ framed, $200

I painted this scene from the Gallery window during my one-man-show last March, and finally got it framed and presented in the Gallery.

I plan to spend the next three days and evenings in The Gallery at Redlands, making as many watercolors as I can during this period, and continuing to make friends in the city of Palestine.  So far, the experience has been fulfilling.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to remember.

I journal when I  feel alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.

 

 

 

 

Art as a Healing Balm

“Art still has truth, take refuge there!

Matthew Arnold, “Memorial Verses April 1850”

Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking before an adult Sunday School group at a local church. Most of this day was given to preparing my remarks, taking Matthew Arnold’s statement as my point of departure. A number of things have happened around me that have saddened a large number of people whom I love, and the tragedies have been mine as well. We lack satisfying answers when grief invades our lives, and sometimes it is all I can do to pick up the brush and go through that portal into the sanctuary of art, and give healing a chance. Thanks to time spent watercoloring, and resuming my reading of Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, I have managed to find some quality in this day.

The day has been cold and rainy, and I felt it necessary to keep a fire burning in the fireplace. In the comfort of that warmth, and ignoring the grayness outside as much as possible, I returned to this watercolor and have nearly finished it. The setting is the farmhouse where my grandparents lived in southeast Missouri. The old building is barely standing today, and no longer has the front porch where I have positioned myself with a guitar I purchased from my late uncle’s estate. Of course, being twelve hours away from this location, I had to settle for a selfie taken in my backyard. Only in my memories can I place myself on the porch of that ramshackle house where I used to spend the summers of my childhood.

I’m pleased that this painting has turned out good enough to frame and put into my March 24th show. Barring any unforeseen difficulties, I’ll complete it tomorrow and deliver it to the frame shop on Monday.

Thanks for reading.

I paint in order to cope.

I journal when I feel alone.

I blog to remind myself that I am not alone.