Old Spanish Trail Studio
Lindy Cook Severns, Far West Texas Artist
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WHO AM I? WHERE DO I COME FROM?
WHAT DO I DO?
A kind elderly friend once labeled me a Renaissance woman. Her tactful way of saying I couldn't decide what I wanted to be when I grew up.
For years, when asked What do you do? I'd try to discern the questioner's mindset. Whether to talk about martial arts, creative writing or aviation? Gardening? Travel? After expounding on whatever field of interest currently consumed my time and/or paid the bills, I'd add, But I'm really an artist.
If the next question was What do you paint? I'd answer, Everything!
Now, most days anyway, I'm a fulltime artist who paints West Texas. It's more fun to paint what I know best, so I paint wild, empty spaces and broad bold skies. I paint the farthest reaches of the far west, the views not everyone gets to enjoy. I paint my home, a land of extremes where blossoms hide thorns and parched deserts flash abundant color. I paint places I love, be it my home turf or a favorite vacation spot. Life is too short to paint places I know less well.
I'm a native West Texan. Some of my ancestors harken back to the Texas Revolution (1836). Others arrived on the Mayflower, and if they'd known about Texas sooner, I suspect the first Thanksgiving would've been celebrated in Big Bend instead of Plymouth. Frontiers are in my genes, and Texas dust is in my blood.
Mom,watercolorist Bettye Cook spent hours drawing with the preschool me while Daddy, Dave Cook coached Lubbock High's basketball team to a state championship. Mom went on to become the art director for the NBC affliliate there in Lubbock. She often took me to her studio, a creative wonderland for a small artist.
This genetic blend undoubtedly led to my eclectic life pursuits: I hold a fourth degree black belt in taekwondo, which I taught for almost two decades; I met my husband Jim at the airport as I was finishing up flying lessons--this after earning a BA in English and Biology from Texas Tech. I've written a suspense novel I should try harder to publish. I'm an elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA), an alum of Kappa Alpha Theta, and a Scorpio. I've been known to bake bread.
Immediately after marrying Jim, I inadvertently piloted a small plane through unmarked power lines. Not a great experience. (I broke my back, among other injuries.)But this near-fatal experience shaped my adult life.
I believe each sunrise is a gift to be savored.
But I'm also convinced avoiding all risk gets you nowhere but discontented and dissatisfied with your life.
I not only flew again: I copiloted a corporate jet beside Captain Jim for nearly two decades. Now we've both hung up our wings--a good pilot plans his last flight--but every time I paint towering cumulus moving across the high desert, I find myself mentally weaving and banking, my silver-winged self skirting darkly turbulent chasms and penetrating wispy feathers of cloud before bursting into the deep blue sky of 41,000 feet.
Like remote expanses of Far West Texas, the sky is a world unto itself. a magnificently beautiful, alien world, unseen and uncharted. But I've seen it. I paint what I know.
Jim is 100% left-brained. I have a left brain, so we flew well together. He does not create. I know a piece is on track if he comes into the studio and says Man, I wouldn't have used blue there.
Having a life-partner who understands that sometimes an artist is incapable of logical speech is helpful. Having a mate who cheerfully cooks, then delivers a glass of wine to the studio and reminds one it's time to eat--that's priceless.
Jim's my best critic, my strongest supporter. He attempts to keep me honest as to the details, same as I kept him steady on the glide slope of an instrument approach. We approach art as a crew.
We spend days--weeks-- out with our cameras, driving, hiking, dodging snakes and seeking the right light on whatever place. We explore each painting before I put it on canvas.
Sometimes, I work on location. Often, I work from several of my own photos of the same scene.
Many paintings are a combination of plein air painting followed by hours of studio polish. Regardless, all of my paintings reflect real landscapes as accurately depicted as my talents permit.
WHO NUDGED AND PUSHED & SHAPED ME INTO A PROFESSIONAL ARTIST?
Mom taught me to draw, effortlessly as I read and write. Every morning, she took the time to draw a cartoon on my brown bag full of lunch.
Baby sis, Kathy Cook Nammour used to beg me to draw her paper dolls because she liked my colored pencil creations better than "store-bought ones". Colored pencils are the logical precursors to pastel painting. This makes Kat my first (and still dearest) collector!
My Midland Lee High School art teacher, Inez Parker assured me I was good enough to pursue art as a career. (Sometimes, you need someone to tell you such things.) Although my short stint in studio art at Tech was a major disaster during which I learned nothing except that I didn't want to paint to suit my professors, the seed of a career in art kept germinating.
Lubbock artist Peggy Benton Young taught a weekly oil painting class targeted at mature, hobby level housewives. I was in my twenties, still recovering from the plane crash. Each class, Peggy veered off-lesson to give her students personal attention. In my case, I gained a basic knowledge of oil painting techniques and a profound education in color theory that I still call on when painting.
Since my first workshop with him in the early eighties, Master pastelist Albert Handell of Santa Fe (via Long Island) has periodically shared his expertise. Albert has a bold command of value, shape and dynamic tension--elements that make the difference in good versus great compostions. He's also shared his intrinsic passion for creating.
In one of the only other workshops I've taken, New York artist/instructor, Ted Seth Jacobs taught me to put chi, the life force into my drawings. (I recommend his book, DRAWING FROM THE LIGHT WITHIN as the single best book on drawing I've encountered. Jacobs was a fellow black belt. We spoke the same language.)
They say that when the student is ready, the instructor will appear. I lack a formal art education, but I've encountered artists gifted with giving me what I needed to learn at the time I was receptive to that instruction.
I think the same saw holds true of place-- I've painted other regions--I still do--but ultimately, West Texas claims me as its bound apprentice. If my paintings are alive, it's because I'm painting what I'm meant to paint. (Which sounds very Presbyterian, doesn't it?)
& HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Jim flew jets out of Lubbock for 35 years. One day, infected with middle-aged crazy coupled with chronic wanderlust, we bought a big RV. We sold the country club home we'd designed and lived in 26 years. We packed up the dog and the parrot and set out to see America.
It was a grand plan, and we got as far as Fort Davis, Texas, a comfortable, familiar place to spend our first winter as nomads. I'd often painted the area. We'd vacationed there and in the Big Bend so often, we figured no adjustment necessary.
There was an adjustment. Living in a tourist town is vastly different than being a tourist there. We enjoyed being hailed by name at the post office. Were welcomed at the adobe Presbyterian church we'd always assumed was only a historic buildling. Were appalled to learn how many material goods were unavailable in a small town 3 hours from the nearest city. Loved the intelligent, diverse people we met. Marveled at the potential paintings hidden off the beaten track. Sort of wanted to stay.
True to plan, we left for Canada that May. Next stop: Taos, New Mexico. We'd originally planned to retire outside Taos. It's another longtime retreat of ours.
That was the beginning of the end of our big adventure. The parrot's passport didn't arrive in the mail. Gas prices skyrocketed. I'd left my pastels in storage. Call it artist's intuition, but our long-planned trip just didn't feel right.
We did a one-eighty for Big Bend country.
We've lived in the Davis Mountains ever since. There's still the wanderlust--we don't let grass grow too high under our tires, and I'm always ready to paint a new vista. But we're deeply rooted now in Far West Texas, and most of our explorations are of our big backyard, the one stretching from the Rio Grande northward, the borderlands where skies are big and bold, where sunparched men still tip their cowboy hats to the ladies, and where I'll never run out of things to paint.
WANDERINGS OF AN ARTIST IN FAR WEST TEXAS
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LINDY COOK SEVERNS
PO Box 2167 Fort Davis, TX 79734
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