Painting outdoors on a beautiful fall day is one of life’s simple pleasures. Nothing more so than painting the changing seasons, during our annual family visit to Backbone State Park, near Dundee, Iowa.
Century Pine at Falcon’s Lair, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 in.
Built in 1920, Backbone is Iowa’s first state park, and every year my family spends several fleeting days there before winter sets in, hiking, relaxing, and for me—painting. Theresa enjoys cooking all of our meals in her Dutch oven, around the campfire. This year, we stayed in one of the newer cabins, called “Falcon’s Lair”. My brother Pat came up from Rolla, Missouri, and joined us for the weekend. Just outside our cabin was this enormous Ponderosa pine, planted the same year the park was built. I decided to make it the focus of my painting.
Harley looks out on the century pine.
To paraphrase the late TV artist Bob Ross, this was no “happy little tree”. This particular towering pine appeared to be an old survivor. It had lost some big limbs over the years, and it’s bark was as rough and craggy as an old man’s face.
Rarely in Iowa do you find such pine trees of this size, and especially after the violent derecho storm of August 10, which destroyed so many stately trees across Iowa. I painted this in memoriam to all of those lost trees.
Pat Marlow, the Maker of Fire.
The painting took me 4-1/2 hours to complete, and the time seemed to fly. I prepped and stained the canvas ahead of time, using some marble dust mixed with medium to give the canvas a rough, impasto texture.
It’s a good exercise to paint plein air. It forces you to really look and study your composition. I roughed-in the main shapes and shadows with a dark brownish-black first. I used a limited palette—only 5 different colors of paint on this canvas.
We brought up a load of logs from some of the trees we lost on our own property, and used them to build campfires on Friday and Saturday nights. Everything that Theresa made was delicious—a cast-iron skillet pizza on Friday, and apricot chicken with potatoes and cornbread on Saturday. We listened to classic rock from Simon & Garfunkel, Bruce Hornsby and Tom Petty after dinner, while gazing into the fire and singing along. It was glorious.
Apricot Chicken and Corn Bread.
Sadly, we may not be able to repeat this experience next year. The park ranger told us they will be doing some major renovations to the park, and the cabins will not be available. Apparently, money from the estate of Marge Schott, a wealthy and famously racist owner of the Cincinnati Reds, will pay for the renovations. When Ms. Schott died, she left her vast fortune to Schottzie, her St. Bernard. Eventually when her dog died, the money was divvied up and given to state parks across the country. A good thing for the parks. But it’s sad that we will miss a year of enjoying Backbone.
In this age of Covid-19, it was wonderful to get out of the house and office, away from the news, angry political ads and social media, and simply enjoy nature again, if only for a few days. It’s even better when you can relax to piano concertos by Mozart, while painting this elder statesman of a Ponderosa pine, and try to capture the vivid colors of leaves, the wood smoke of the campfire, and the rugged character of the oldest state park in Iowa.