I started this painting in 2010, with the road from Cimarron, New Mexico through Springer to Dalhart, Texas in mind. This was at a time when I was beginning to paint regularly again after a long period in which I was more focused on teaching and writing and painted sporadically. I chose to work on hardboard primed with flat white latex housepaint (which was my surface of choice when I first started painting over fifty years ago). I thought the piece was more or less finished, but I abandoned it and didn't rediscover it until just a few weeks ago (in 2021). That road (which could well have been the one Woody Guthrie took when he left Pampa and headed for California) was still on my mind and provided the pattern for what became a new painting. I was in a winter mood, so I transformed a piece that had been decidedly yellow (reflecting the dry stretch from Springer to Texline that a clerk in Cimarron once described to me as "90 miles of nothing" when I was passing through on the way from Taos to Amarillo) to wintry white and blue. I am forever fascinated by the way the lines of the "built" environment (in this case, the road) pick up lines from the "natural" environment (in this case the horizon that rises with low mountains in the distance) as themes on which they play variations.
- Subject Matter: abstract landscape
- Created: March 2021
- Collections: abstracts, landscapes