Alice Leese - Tales from the Big Bend

This is the Big Bend series, and most of these works are painted plein air, which is just a fancy French word for painting outside, except for this one. That's a studio work, and this one. In the studio, you have more control over how long you're painting, light conditions, weather. It's just a more controlled environment. When you're painting outside, you can't control what the sun's going to do, whether it's going to be covered by cloud in 10 minutes or whatever. But if you're painting from a resource in the studio, then you can control some things. I like plein air because it's spontaneous and it very fresh looking. You can capture a specific location, and you need to do it within about 2 hours because the, the sun's going to move and the light's going to change. So you don't want to be painting on the same painting 2 hours in because you're just, you're doing what they call chase, chasing shadows after that. This This one is the view from Soto Vista, and you can see way over in the distance Santa Elena Canyon when you're up on— it's a real high spot in the Big Bend, and when you're up there, you can see, you can see a long way, and almost seems like you can see forever. This is a view of Castellón, which is across the river in Mexico. It's in the Chihuahuan Desert, and where I live here in the Permian Basin is at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. We have some of the same plants, and I can use the same color palette on paintings from here as I can on the ones down in down in the Big Bend. And right next door to Big Bend National Park is Big Bend Ranch State Park, and that's where the River Road is. The River Road is a highway that runs kind of at the southeast part of the Big Bend Ranch State Park and runs right along the river. The Rio Grande River. You can go from Lajitas to Presidio, and it's just a beautiful drive, and every Texan needs, needs to do that, just like every Texan needs to visit Big Bend National Park. Up at the top is Burro Mesa. That's a volcanic mesa, and there's yellow orange and pink layers of volcanic, what they call tuff. Of course, if you're in the Big Bend, uh, you're gonna paint a painting of the window. The window is a kind of a notch cut through the Chisos Mountains, and you can see all the way down to the Chihuahuan Desert floor. It's a long way down. Here's a view of the Chisos Basin. You can see a couple of the ranger outbuildings there. Chisos Basin sits at about 5,000, I think almost 6,000 feet, and you drive up off the desert floor up into the basin and the vegetation changes. You get into more junipers and pines and they're kind of scattered in amongst the prickly pear. Up at the top is Castellón Peak. Castellón is an old ghost town in the Big Bend. And this large painting is a— this is a 12 by 20, and it's a view of the Chisos Mountains. And looking up those mountains from the desert floor, it's fun to think of if I just drove up there, you know, it'd be nice and cool. And that's the Big Bend series, and thank you for listening to this little explanation and I hope that all of y'all someday get to visit the Big Bend. When we were small kids, my dad would take us— my mom and dad would take us there and we would camp almost every year. And so I kind of just grew up with it and didn't think it was a big deal until everybody started going. Happy painting from the Whitey Ranch. Over and out. Boo! Boo!