Ranch House in the Texas Caprocks

Throughout the years from the 1980s to the present, I have done many small landscape ink drawings. These drawings were inspired by the landscape ink drawings of Vincent van Gogh in the 1880s. Most people recognize Van Gogh's works as being impressionist paintings, but it was his ink drawings that I was interested in studying. My early landscape ink drawings were modeled after his style, but by the late 1980s my own style emerged. One of these drawings was done in 1988 and was called "Ranch House in the Texas Caprocks." It was sold to a collector, but I still had the photo of the scene. Years later in 2019 I decided to redo the scene and to put it into print. The back story about the scene has a Hollywood connection. Here is that story. My grandparents lived in a town called Canadian, Texas which is located in the northeast corner of the Texas Panhandle and is about 100 miles from my hometown of Amarillo, Texas. We would go there to visit them at times. There is a geological formation that runs across the Panhandle called the Caprocks. These carved out and eroded hills with steep sides and flat tops span several hundred miles and they start just northwest of Canadian and transverse in a southwestern direction across the plains. These hills can reach upwards to 1,000 feet high. When I was a boy my parents would drive out from Canadian and take my brothers and me to the Caprocks and we would romp up the sides of these hills. It certainly was an adventure to climb them and then to stand on top of them with a magnificent view of the plains. I did not even think about the dangers of falling, it was just fun. As an adult I would still drive out to the Caprocks and climb them. On several occasions I would drive out of Canadian and go to my so-called secret place to an intersection in the road. It was in the middle of nowhere. The vast flat landscape extended as far as the eye could see. I would get out of my car and just stand there soaking in the quiet and serene feel of the place with just the sound of a high plains breeze in my ears. I could see in the extreme distance towards the west the faint outline of the Caprocks peeking above the flat line of the horizon, the same hills I had climbed at different times. Sometimes I would stand in the middle of this intersection and look north towards Kansas and to the west towards Amarillo and to the south towards Canadian. These roads were blacktopped, but the road to the east was gravel. All of them extended in a straight line until they disappeared on the horizon. I did not have to worry about traffic. I never saw another vehicle while I was there meditating. Years would pass and then one day I watched a movie called "Cast Away" starring Tom Hanks. At the end of the movie he is standing out in the middle of an intersection in the middle of nowhere. The scene looked very familiar. I researched it and found that the scene was filmed at the very same place I had visited years earlier. At the end of the movie, Hanks standing in the middle of the intersection and behind him looking west is the faint outline of the very Caprocks which I climbed and the very Caprocks depicted in my ink drawing.