Painting with a big brush and lots of paint

A few days ago, during the last days of April before the big snow storm hit, I had the opportunity to sit down and enjoy the sounds of spring at my home on the eastern plains. The sun was heading towards Pikes Peak off on the horizon, the clouds were lit beautifully and the sky took on the mauves, pinks, and light blues of a pastel palette. I glanced at my phone to see the time, it was a little before 5 pm and I knew I had some time. The "magic" hour where the sun is low on the horizon and the countryside takes on the warm yellow tinted light wasn't far from arriving.

I could not resist the temptation to grab my watercolor field bag and try to capture the moment. As a boy growing up on the far stretching plains of Colorado where farming and ranching exist side by side and looming giants made of Pikes Peak pegmatite lie low across the horizon like the arched back of a distant dragon I used to dream of traveling to far off places-to paint. My next painting waited just steps from the front door of my home. So what became of the boy who once told a rural magazine reporter he would some day be an artist in Africa? 

He stepped away from art for a time, and then returned. He traveled to far flung places, but found his true subjects were in his boyhood memories and the place he still calls home. After earring an undergraduate degree in art and a terminal MFA degree in painting he prefers to walk out his front door and capture the scenes he has known all his life.

I cried when I returned from a trip to the looming mountains far to the west when I was told by my parents that they had sold our farm place and we would be moving to town. Fate intervened, and I have lived almost my entire adult life back where I dreamed of leaving as a small boy.

I painted Eastern Colorado Sky from a chair, under an old Elm tree which had just began to show yellow-green glimpses of renewed life. The water took to the paper and when just a shimmer remained I charged pigment into the sky. Careful to leave some white like I had learned in some far flung place. I then used a thirsty brush to absorb plenty of solid earthen color to firmly place the ground and looming mountains.

Painting the sky from my own sense of place reminds me, invigorates me, and makes me happy to be home.

I was pleased with the results of my time under the old Elm.  I believe if you close your eyes and listen carefully you can hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods and the sounds of Red-Winged Blackbirds in the bushes and cattails. I see my little half-naked self running to catch a snake and then stopping to look west at the sky and those lumbering sleeping dragons.

JR Monks