This beautiful vantage point sooner or later will be someone’s mountaintop refuge. Our realtor told us to check out the view. We wound up Rock House Road past ever more remote cabins and homes until we got to the top. Our ridgeline and Rock House Road are obscured by the trees on the right side. The distant road below, Highway 209 passes straight through a valley nicknamed the Flats, Nearly all the rest of this road consists of hundreds of serpentine twists and turns along a steep gorge for miles in both directions. It’s very popular with groups for motorbiking, cycling, and sports cars. About midway down the Flats is a left turn that takes you to Max Patch, right on the edge of the Tennessee-North Caroline line.
I did a preparatory sketch and rough tonal study before I went out to paint it. I chose a vertically oriented canvas, not typical for a landscape. Here is what that looked like.
I put a long, enjoyable afternoon into laying out the basics of this painting. I braced the canvas with one hand while painting due to strong mountaintop gusts, and the pulses of wind reminded me of sailing on the Mississippi Sound. The first pass turned out well and I might have stayed with it. I liked the foreground and the general softness of some of the foliage a lot. When I got it home, though, I began to ask myself, where are the clouds casting those shadows on the valley? Other details called out for improvement.
Just as when I painted Max Patch, I questioned whether the mountains showed the atmosphere of the Smokies. So after laying down the first version, I took it down the road to look at it overnight. I went up the next morning and refined things along the way. This time the wind had laid down and I was able to work with both hands so I got a lot done in a shorter time. I got more precise on parts of the meadows in the Flats. I also laid the sky colors in more carefully and built up a dark blue shadow on the left side of the foreground which really excited me. It reminded me of the blues Matisse used in his North Africa scenes. I also shaped the horizon line more accurately - these are subtle things that aren’t always captured well the first time out. On both days, I was working from paint laid out on my palette, plus a hand-held paper palette for mixing with the larger brushes. Again, as I did with Max Patch, I went into the foreground with a thin brush to put in lines of grasses and foliage to strengthen the look of the areas of color painted with a big brush.
I put this aside and started another version of the same scene in a very flat, almost stained glass abstraction. It was fun to do in the moment, but I have put it aside for now.
The remaining details to tidy up were to extend the dark blue on the left foreground up the length of the trees and foliage, to add the clouds, and to go over the road and suggest the turn at the top. With these done, I was happy to put it aside. What an incredible location, and it was right up my road!
