I’m a landscape painter inspired by nature’s small surprises. In this case, finding such a rich display of color in the desert was impossible to ignore.

I paint real places, most of them close to my home in the Davis Mountains, remote ranch country near Marfa. The landscape in my painting lies a few miles above the Rio Grande on a teeth-jarring ranch road that leads through private land all the way from the serenely rolling hills of the Marfa highlands downward to the river. You can’t get out and hike, but you can drive unimproved that stretch of “road” as far as you dare.

A few miles out of Marfa, you run out of pavement. The terrain abruptly changes with a dramatic drop into rugged Pinto Canyon, with its vast expanse of untamed arroyos and jagged cliffs spotted by cactus and lechuguilla, the road winding ever downward past the point of no return, the place where you realize you’ve no room to turn around, your phone has no service and you haven’t seen another vehicle since leaving town. This is where you also check your water bottles and contemplate the state of your spare tire.

And then, as suddenly as the flats tumble into those wild, deep canyons, the land levels off. Scattered scraggly cottonwoods hint at hidden water, and the grass stands a bit higher in the wind, but there is no question that you’re still surrounded by parched desert.
The closer we got to the river, though, the more connected to the land I felt. The wildness of the canyon inspires, but it also overwhelms. The low land easing toward the river invites you to linger, to rest a spell in its rough furnishings of boulders and prickly pear.

We’d driven for hours that day. Our day was running low on hours now, and we knew we’d never make the river. If we didn’t backtrack soon, we’d have to brave the drive back up that lonely one lane of dirt in total darkness. Searching for a wide spot to turn around in, we rounded one last bend. The light changed. A cloud floated overhead. Rocks that had been colorless all afternoon were now patinaed in jewels. A quote from Harper Lee drifted into my mind—“a thousand colors in a parched landscape…”
I suddenly knew just how I wanted to paint that last bend in a road through an uncompromisingly harsh land.

I took a dozen photos with my iPhone. All the way back, I found myself noticing colors where before I’d seen none. Back in my studio, I decided to paint on a surface large enough to allow me to apply zillions of light layers of soft pastel so that each unblended color shows through subsequent layers to create subtle variations. Because that’s what those rocks were, layers upon layers of subtle change.

This would be a different painting in oils. Soft pastels are a very sensual medium. They kept me connected to the earth, a little wild and free with my strokes. And those rich, vibrant pastel pigments would, I think, be what author Harper Lee would have chosen to use to make her phrase come alive.