Palm Valley Lutheran Church sits on what used to be the blackland prairie of Williamson County. The rich dirt is still there under all the concrete. Not long ago the church was surrounded on all sides by green seas of agriculture. Now, it’s boxed in by new residential subdivisions of Round Rock and a roaring, busy highway. The red brick chapel has a slender white steeple that has pointed folks the way to salvation for over 100 years. On Saturday morning it’s pretty quiet there and the perfect spot to paint.
Old, out of the way church houses resonate with a positive energy and Palm Valley was buzzing. Decades and decades of happy events unfolded there: weddings, baptisms, picnics. And some sorrowful ones, too. The cemetery covered acres. The plaque on the wall said the church was founded by Swedish settlers. The names in the cemetery, those closest to the chapel, seemed to back that up. Those people were a long way away from Stockholm and the nearest IKEA. But I guess they made it work as immigrants do.
I found a shady spot to set up under a small oak tree in the cemetery, looking toward the church that sat on a low rise. Shade is essential to plein air painting here, where the heat is in the high 90s and the direct sun on your canvas blasts away any nuance the eye can pick up between chroma and values. A big bottle of cold water is a necessity too, even if you paint fast. There were hundreds of headstones between me and the church – granite, marble and limestone memorials. I took note of some of their funny names and the dates they strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage. They were good company if you are looking to concentrate. The breeze smelled like cut hay and heat. The traffic noise was broken from time to time by the blast of a train rumbling along the tracks paralleling Highway 79. It was very easy to generate the right frame of mind and try to capture the summer colors.
My pallet had 8 blobs of color, the darkest being burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. To start, I drew a vine charcoal sketch on the 8 x 10 canvas board to get the structural proportions right, then painted over that.
I left my good brushes at home and used two worn out flats, a hog bristle and a synthetic. As I painted, I squinted at the subject like you are supposed to do when working plein air in order to de-emphasize details and push big shapes and colors. But I just couldn’t omit all those headstones and left in the Andersens, the Borglunds and the Palms. After all, it’s their church and I was just a visitor.
