Quiet Backroads

I’m out for a walk at six o’clock in the morning. It’s already humid and heading toward hot, so an early start is pretty much a necessity. In the fading darkness, a phrase pops into my head, unbidden: “land and sky.“

Well, maybe it isn’t entirely unbidden. Dawn is coming on, and the trees are still mostly dark silhouettes. Every now and then, a bit of architecture emerges from the darkness: a barn, a farmhouse, a utility pole. The landscape is reduced to a few simple shapes: land below, sky above, trees in between. And it occurs to me that this is pretty much what my sketching and paintings have been about this summer.

Land and sky.

It might even make a good title for a series of paintings I’ve started. (Do I really need to give the series a title? Probably not. But I’ve discovered that giving myself a little framework can be useful. A title gives me something to push against. It helps focus my attention when my mind inevitably starts wandering off in different directions.)

And my does mind wander. “Land and sky” sounds pretty grand, though, doesn’t it? It makes me think of places like Montana. Big skies. Huge expanses of open range. Mountains somewhere on the horizon.

That’s not where I live.

There are no mountains around here, unless you count the rolling hills of the Ozarks. (I don’t.) Most of the land is divided into large farm tracts, with fields bordered by fence rows thick with trees, or forests of oak and walnut. There’s not a lot of verticality. What we have instead are quiet backroads. Horizontality.

Dusty gravel roads. Cornfields stretching toward the horizon. Barns that seem less like they were constructed than gradually grew in place. Old fence rows so thick with trees that you literally cannot see what’s beyond them. Houses tucked into the greenery. Utility poles following the road as faithfully as any companion. This is the landscape I’ve been paying attention to lately.

And summer adds its own complications. July and August in Missouri are not exactly designed for leisurely outdoor painting. The mornings ocassionlly start pleasantly enough, but the heat and humidity arrive with remarkable efficiency. Even when there’s a breeze, it can feel less like cooling air and more like someone has opened the door to a very large sauna.

Sometimes I give up on the idea of standing outside and climb into the front seat of my truck instead. It’s actually not a bad place to sketch. The windshield becomes a giant picture frame, the air conditioner is close at hand, and I can sit there with a sketchbook while the landscape does its thing outside.

The graphite sketches I’m sharing here are some of the results of that wandering. They’re not necessarily drawings of places I intend to turn into finished paintings, though some no doubt will be. But many are simply ways of looking. A tree here. A barn there. A stretch of road. A particular arrangement of land and sky that catches my attention for a few minutes.

Not every sketch needs a job. Some of them can simply be records of noticing.

And that’s really what this summer has been about. I’ve been spending time on these quieter roads, looking at familiar territory with a little more attention. I’m interested in the way a road disappears into a tree line, how a barn sits against a summer sky, or how the early morning light can reduce an entire landscape to three or four simple shapes.

The places aren’t spectacular., and that’s kind of the point.

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Most of these sketches are fairly large at 20 x 10 inches, but drawn simply, loosely, and quickly using a water-soluble Lyra graphite stick on heavy Bristol sketchbook pages.