Goat Hauling

The goat hauler is making a turn, a change of direction. For a moment (that in this instance will never change as long as the painting remains), the truck driver and his trailer full of goats are moving in different directions at right angles.  This is no news story event but visually, it is a magnificent painterly event. Perspectively, it is very rich and the scene in its entirety allows me an opportunity to do some of my favorite things; to play with combining different qualities of space and to do it with favorite subjects: pick-up trucks and cowboy-hatted drivers, and, of course goats, those curiously temperamental biblical animals with the body of a deer but the grace of a walking duck. Against the big outdoor space of a hot South Texas day, there are the confining spaces of the cab of the pick-up containing its driver, and the box-like network of steel crowding together multi-colored goats.

            The box gives us three angles of vision: two side views and a little top view. Some goats are in the shade, some in direct sunlight. Their dappled markings are never far removed from variations of earth tones and they are, as far as light and shadow are concerned, a painterly challenge of some complexity. Light and particularly the light of South Texas make wonderful events from ordinary things. I have observed that places near oceans produce a limpid transparent, softer light than the more scenic inland areas or mountain landscapes. Light, not scenery by itself, is the greater part of my subject. The Netherlands, the country of Rembrandt, Van Ruisdael, and Vermeer is also flat and near the ocean and has a similar soft, pristine light.