ON FIELD PAINTING IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE BIG HORN MOUNTAINS

by Kimberly Trowbridge

One rolling hill is like another, but not exactly. Each one a slightly different tint of soil and rock exposed at the surface. Each one offering a new vantage point across the high plains.

It was mid-September when I arrived at the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The range starts north, near the border of Montana, and arcs south into central Wyoming like a cupped hand.

I was on the eastern slope of that cupped hand, amid the soft, undulating foothills that descend toward Piney Creek.

When I arrived, summer still lingered.

My body buzzed and hummed with the surrounding hues of yellow and violet.

…

I soon identified my theater and oriented myself within it. Out in the open field, I’d be facing west into the dying light of each passing day.

My motif: a large pile of purple logs in front of a yellow field interspersed with the upright stalks of mullein.

In the distance: the horizontal bands of hills leading up to the spine of the Big Horn Mountains, cut sharp against the sky. 

…

Being a field painter means actively organizing my sensations in nature. Using shape and color to orchestrate an image that embodies my external and internal experience.

Being on the field is a surrendering to the sentient mammalian body of myself. Tune me, play me, nature. Imprint your color and form on my mind and body. Show me who I am, standing here with my keyboard of colors, ready to sound your chords as you touch me. 

But it is also just work. And often a brute push against the elements while engaging the will to stay put on the field. A building-up of marks and a scraping them back down. A constant tension trying to balance the big unifying thrust of shapes with the smaller nuanced relationships.

On the field it is a battle with the mind, to silence the nagging desire for comfort, for additional gear and supplies that would solve all my problems. It is a pressing onwards, past the self-doubt and inner voices that scream this is futile. And always there is the seemingly imminent need to respond to another email, another text message.

…

Wyoming had me at yellow-violet.

The worn, wooden fence posts appeared purple against the dry yellow fields.

The tender astonishment of hiking through milky yellow grasses and coming upon the violet ovals of tamped-down grass where warm deer bodies had recently rested. 

And most of all:  it was the way the shimmering yellow fields dissolved into the cool lavender light that touched the wavering seedheads in late afternoon.

…

I was voracious for distances. In the thousand acres of foothills, I hiked up and over and down and up and over again. I climbed hill after hill, hungry for more vistas, more terrain to traverse.

My body was moving as though if I walked far enough and hard enough my true self would come to the surface, muscular and mineral.

I bought water shoes and hiked up the creek, thirsty for the richness of the land and my body’s surrender to it.

…

There is a distinct rock in the area called “clinker.” It sounds and looks like shattered terra cotta flowerpots. It appears pink from a distance, a soft blush of an entire hillside. Or you’ll see it exposed in patches where it was thrust to the surface of eroded, craggy hilltops.

The highways are red with it.

It is made by the embers of coal once struck by lightning. Heating and tinting the adjacent shale and sandstone into shades of red that range from bright orange to deep maroon.

…

One afternoon, hiking among sagebrush and white-tailed deer, I got hacked out of my Instagram account.

Huh.

I’ve been hacked on a hilltop in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming.

In a panic, I could see all of my contacts, like stars, shooting rapidly away from me until totally out of reach and in the darkness.

It felt like the air got sucked out of the vast landscape and I was there in a soundproof enclosure on a hilltop. I could scream and there would be no sound.

I felt my aloneness.

Inhaling the scent of sagebrush awoke me.

And the purple fenceposts marked time and distances.

And the black silhouettes of cows dotted the hillside like letters.

And my boots, they were walking over an ancient seabed of undulating hills in every direction.

…

Remember when I told you how it was the way the shimmering yellow fields dissolved into the cool lavender light that touched the wavering seedheads in late afternoon that really got me?

What I meant was this:  The yellows and violets were the same value, the same degree of lightness. They were equally pale, shimmering against each other. The boundary between them was nearly diminished.

I could feel it in my body.

It was a glimmering moment in the cycle of seasons, witnessed.

A perfect harmony of my own longing to be precisely where I was.

The warm yellows of late summer lingering and mingling with the pale cool lavenders of autumn.

…

One of the biggest questions on the field is scale.

Where do you stand in relation to your motif?

Are you up close, inside of the thing, or are you seeing it from a distance?

What is the appropriate size of shapes for your canvas?

What is the scale of your thought?

From where is it that you are building reality?

…

Back on the field everything was changing. Autumn came swiftly and loudly. The trees in the middle-distance turned a flamboyant orange and tangerine.

It was no longer late summer’s yellow-violet;

there was a distinct shift towards orange and blue.

It felt brash, out of tune.

The ultramarine hills were an abrupt contrast to the warmer hues.

…

Each one of my motifs: the tall stalks of mullein, the large pile of logs, the shimmering field— they were all intentional foreground excuses for me to climb over and approach the horizontal bands of space behind them.

It was the far away trees and foothills and mountains that held my message: a frieze of colored tiles lined-up in the distance.  An alphabet the precise size and scale of my script.

…

If I stayed on the field long enough, into the evening, when the sun made its final dip behind the ridge, the sharp silhouettes of the Big Horn Mountains turned magenta. 

A perfect hue-bridge, uniting the warms and cools.  

And then, at night, under the black sky of the new moon, the prismatic embers of day continued to flicker and rise in my body. Every thought and memory that passed through my mind was tinted and arranged within this colored stratum.  

…

I think field painting is, for me, a way of locating, finally, where I am in the universe.

It is a process of erosion, of shedding all the layers and exposing the sentient self who is standing here on the field, organizing shapes of color.

It is the writing of a visual poem that locates my body in relation to my surroundings.

The act of painting is the making of the map that reveals my placement.

…

View my Wyoming Paintings HERE