Painting with oils...and making a life

A very good friend of mine is a celebrated landscape artist. With a career that spans 62 years, he has lived for his art, never compromising on the means to earn money, sometimes to the dismay of his wife of 50+ years.
Having written freelance stories about him for various publications, I have had the opportunity to watch him paint in his studio many times.
A small home that he has gutted out in the center of a small Texas town, his studio is a treasure trove of his paintings, all sizes, scattered over the walls, and his watercolor on-site sketches fall over the tables and the easels, his desk and even on the two chairs he allows himself. He bought this house more than twenty years ago, just as his studio. He and his wife live elsewhere in town. He has replaced the old windows with huge ones as long as the house and put in skylights as well. To walk in there requires (especially in the Texas summer) a pair of sunglasses.
But I can never keep them on for long, no matter the brilliance.
The colors he uses demand you see them. Really absorb them. Savor them.
To watch him--and his method, is to learn how he views the world from the inside out, not the outside in--as I think most of us view the world. He sketches an outline to provide the focus of the work. This he does with a bunched up paper towel that he rolls into a point of sorts. Then he proceeds to shadow in what he's going to create. His blank canvas becomes a ghostly apparition of what is to come.
He works rather quickly on this outline. To get the flavor, he says.
I think he's right to do that. An idea, a concept lives in my mind as the kernel of a story and it becomes a useful thing, a vibrant thing only if I am true to the original concept.
Not easy to keep that focus.
Sometimes your focus must change, he tells me.
True. An idea so fleeting, so delicate can escape you like smoke.
Like the smoky sketches on his canvas.
He works then from the ghosts to bring them to life with the larger elements first. His plains of Texas scrub and rock. His gargantuan recreations of Big Bend's ghoulish mountains where dinosaurs once roamed. His rivers, silver and twinkling, rushing around the bases of huge cypress trees. He is a genious with the uses of colors to bring to life on the canvas those milli-seconds of our human observations of nature.
Satisfied with his grand view of the landscape, he'll correct how the sun hits the land. Or show how the thunder rumbles over the sky. He'll pick up a finer brush and begin the delicate work of finite details. The Texas wildflowers of bluebonnets and red spiky paintbrushes, the white cowmilk flowers, lovely blooms on ugly prickly stocks. But he is an impressionist, not a realist. He works quickly going with his flow. He'll drop in stones to the streams, sometimes--as often happens here-he'll dry up those creek beds. Make them pray in the dust for rain.
He will occasionally put in a few deer to reflect the reality of his subject. He never draws people. He wants to make a statement, he says often, that the land deserves his study. So many study people. That is not his mission in life.
I often think of him. His devotion to his art. His talent. His skill. At eighty-two, he declares that he is better than he ever was. He has improved with the years. He knows that his dedication and his persistence have made him a better artist. Becoming a better artist has made him a better man.
So making a living was never his goal. Instead, he has made his life from his talent, his dedication and his knowledge that he had his own brand of truths to reveal to others.