When it comes to painting outside, painting is the easy part. The hard part is finding the right subject. For landscapes, you can hunt high and low for just the right spot, one with good composition, good light, good shadows, shady setup, good colors. Those are the kind of places that the painting books push you to locate. I’m convinced they don’t exist and if they do, I will burn up all my time and energy finding them. The trick is improvisation: find something close to the mark, manipulate the other factors as needed and paint that. Parks work well.
In February, I traveled to the state park near Glen Rose in North Central Texas just southwest of Fort Worth. For the state to name these 1500 acres on the Paluxy River “Dinosaur Valley State Park” is more than a little deceiving. Generations of children who visited the park have
been disappointed to find, as I did, there are no dinosaurs there. There are some impressive dinosaur footprints at spots in the rocky river bottom. But that just lacks the same WOW factor, especially when you are a kid. But the park is a beautiful place, with low, rough hills of exposed, limestone laid down millions of years ago when that area was coastline. It’s impossible to understand what you are looking at without some understanding of geologic time, which most of us don’t have. You should go there and see it.
I had intended to paint the river there. The water reflects a nice minty green, with blue stretches where it is deeper. But when I got there and hiked around to find a spot, it became clear that carrying my gear down the steep bank would be a chore. Plus, the most flattering light and shadow in the river bottom came in the early morning when it was chilly down close to the water. 
The hilltops in the park had their own problems. The colors from there were grand and the elevated perspective allowed you to see the lines of the scrubby hills for miles, turning less green and more blue as they receded to the horizon. Really fun stuff to paint. But it was a long way up to the top of the hill. The tripod that holds my little painting box is ungainly and heavy. Plus, the wind on the hilltop kicked up from time to time which is no good for painting.
What I settled on was a grassy valley curving along the river’s edge, a dozen or so acres with two low hills in the distance. It was a beautiful spot, an arresting image that got your imagination going. And it sounded just right. The light breeze moved the tops of the tall grasses like waves, making a pleasant whistling sort of rattle, enough so to make you look at your feet to make sure a rattlesnake was not nearby. “Forget the river. Paint me!” the field said. The interpretive guide sign explained that the native grasses simulated what much of this part of the world looked like before the land was settled and put to work for cultivation. There were “seas” of this stuff back then, an apt word to describe terrain so vast and featureless that those unfamiliar with the terrain feared getting lost in it. Lest one be tempted to simulate that experience, the sign warned visitors to stay out of the grassy field.
I found a spot on the edge and set up at 10:15 in the morning. The sun was behind me and cedars gave my easel some shade. The books all say to look for those morning shadows for landscape painting, to create depth and drama. But this was Texas. When God turns the lights on in the morning, what shadows are there are soon chased away by the big sky and high sun. Rather than fuss with that, I focused on getting the colors right. There were only four: blue sky, deep green cedars, grey leafless hardwoods tracing the depression of the riverbank, and pale yellow grass. As far as the composition goes, there was nothing there to lead the eye, or the other visual tricks good paintings aim for. So instead I labored to somehow suggest the gentle stir of the grass, like a great, unseen hand softly brushing over the top of the bluestem.
For an hour and forty minutes, the only sound I heard was the grass. And it was the finest morning I have had all year. Seven colors and two brushes.
