It’s an arresting image, as you crest a hill and swing to the left on Park Road 4 a few miles north of Marble Falls on the way to Inks Lake State Park. A Bavarian castle perched on a bluff overlooking a wide stretch of the Colorado River in Burnet County, Central Texas. The limestone castle looks completely out of place there. But my what a spot to paint. I stopped there on the side of the road in October to try and capture the colors. I was just as out of place as the castle.
Park Road 4 winds through the west side of Burnet County. The road is nearly 100 years old, put in by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s. The CCC was all over Texas, a state that loved it’s wide open spaces but didn’t give a hoot about parks. The CCC was one of many New Deal Great Depression-era programs dreamed up by President Franklin Roosevelt’s staff to give people something, anything, to do when jobs were scarce and people were hungry. Young men of all races could sign up for the CCC so long as they were under 25, unmarried and didn’t mind doing unskilled manual labor and having most of their monthly pay ($30) sent home for their families to live on until times got better. Young women were not allowed in the CCC. But I am sure Eleanor and her staff came up with something comparable to help them too. The Roosevelts knew how to “go big.”
Those New Deal programs had their share of failures. But the CCC was wildly successful and employed three million people over its run. In Texas, armies of CCC workers set up camps and built state and federal parks, laying in roads to remote areas to draw visitors and building trails and cabins for them. The CCC built our state’s first parks, places where you can still go today to see something that people long ago had the presence of mind to try and preserve: Palo Duro Canyon, Big Bend National Park, the Bastrop pine forest, Garner State Park and the Indian Lodge in the Davis Mountains are some of them. The state got dozens of facilities built, all with free federal labor.
Park Road 4 connects two of those parks with old highway 281. Before you reach the castle, called Castle Falkenstein, you pass the old stone park headquarters for Longhorn Caverns, built with the help of the CCC. Castle Falkenstein looks a lot older than the park headquarters, but it’s not. The builders must have been aiming for an authentic Neuschwanstein Castle look and they came pretty close. No one is going to mistake the Hill Country for the Alps of Southern Germany. The castle looks like a great place to have a party or set up a telescope.
The late morning sun was bouncing off the creamy walls of the castle and the Colorado River was a ribbon beyond the hill. I set up beside the road with 8 colors and three brushes under a live oak tree in the ditch. I drew a charcoal sketch on my little 8 x 10 canvas panel, sprayed that with hairspray to fix it and then laid in the darks first with thinned down paint. The greens were doing what they do, defying whatever hue I managed to mix up between yellow and blue. Shadowy cedars with yellow tips and dark interiors bunched up near the paved road where they catch the rain that runs off. Hardier live oaks with deep roots and dusty olive leaves made a crown covering the low hilltop.
I had only one tube of blue paint, called “cyan”, which didn’t match the bright October sky unless I tweaked it. The naples yellow paint came out of the tube thick and hard to work with, like cheap toothpaste. I spilled most of my turpentine and left my paper towels in the truck parked down the road. But you do what you can do with what you have. That is what plein air is all about I think.
