In this part of Texas, the Spanish who first stumbled through the brush and rattlesnakes to find the “rivers” got to name them. They didn’t put much stock in what the locals called their streams. In other areas of North America, there are evocative names for the rivers, tied to people who lived there and moved on, names such as the Mississippi, Potomac and Black Warrior. That’s not the way the Spaniards handled it in Texas. Maybe the explorers were in a hurry or lacked creativity, but often the names they picked to log on their maps for the region’s watercourses lacked imagination. Here in the dry and rocky part of the state, you find rivers named for rocks (Pedernales), trees (Bosque), cows (Lavaca), nuts (Nueces) and shells (Concho). Sometimes, the expedition leader was a devout man or maybe the party’s cleric was given the honor of naming the river. The church gave them a long list of religious names to choose from: Saints Mark, Gabriel, Anthony of Padua and the Holy Trinity, to name a few. That’s how the most mellifluous named river got on the map: the Guadalupe.
The Guadalupe River was named in the 17th century by Spaniards looking for sneaky Frenchmen who were said to have set up shop somewhere along the coast. The river was named in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a New World Catholic celebrity whose image was painted everywhere and was big in Mexico City and beyond. The name sounds much nicer in Spanish, but most people in Texas just pronounce it “gwad-a-LOOPY”.
The river rises west of Kerrville in Central Texas, cuts through the limestone Hill Country and dumps into Canyon Lake near New Braunfels. What trickles out of the dam there runs through Cuero, Gonzales and Victoria in South Texas and drains into the Gulf after a few hundred slow miles. Like alot of rivers here, it can switch from dry creek to raging torrent in just a few hours. When the river is in a good mood, you can float an inner tube on it, kayak down it, catch fish out of it, camp next to it or paint it. At one point or another, I have done all five. Sort of like the “seven ages of man” speech from Shakespeare.
With “eyes severe and beard of formal cut” I went to paint at the Guadalupe River State Park near Boerne in the fall. The stretch of the river that runs through the park property is packed with people during the summer months but not so much when temperatures fall and the days are cooler and shorter. The live oaks keep their olive green leaves year round. But the cypress, pecan and buckeye trees along the water have leaves that turn rusty red, yellowish or gold before dropping off, in a process that takes place over just a few weeks. The water, where it is wide enough to catch for a while, reflects the colors found on the bank.
I tried to refract that light onto my 8 x 10 canvas, set up in the shade of the morning on the gravel bank. First, I drew a pencil sketch in my little pocketbook to simplify the view and identify where the lighter and darker areas were. Next, I used that sketch to paint the scene onto the canvas with thinned down violet, brown and green. Finally, came the colors, squeezed from 10 tubes of oil paint. That’s about twice as many colors as the best painters need for this kind of thing. But I wasn’t being graded out there. No judging!
There were noisy, scarlet-colored cardinals everywhere and the feet of my three-legged stool kept sinking into the gravel. I finished working on it just as the sun got square overhead and altered all the shadows. It was the perfect way to spend a Monday morning there on the Rio de la Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.
