A Day, or Two in the Big Bend

Marfa Gallery

Texas Window

After driving 400 miles (7 plus hours) and getting home at midnight, catching up on email, editing photos, getting a few hours of sleep, and having take out deli lunch, it is time to post about my trip to the Big Bend area.

Tacos, Alpine, Soap Tree Yuccas, McDonald Observatory, boots, javalinas, U.S. Border Patrol, trains, deep blue sky, huevos rancheros, cattle ranches, Chinati Foundation, 80 mph speed limit, oil pump jacks, sand hills, Cracker Jacks, mysterious lights, Pecos River, Mt. Livermore, Creosote bushes, Marfa, adobe walls, horses, art galleries, football, screen doors, Food Shark, Cafe Bustelo, dogs and chickens, Fort Davis, Blue Agave, Andy Warhol, Hotel Piasano, Milky Way, mountains.

Daytipping on Rt 66

We took a spur of the moment day trip today to Tucumcari, New Mexico. Tucumcari, for as long as I remember, boasted it’s “1000 motel rooms”. My intent was to shoot the signs of the many motor courts and motels there from the heyday of American travel on Route 66. Instead, I ran headfirst into 2010.

The photos above are most of the remaining post-war signs that that greeted tired and hungry travelers for decades. Things change. There are new motels are on I-40, and most of the old have been “removed”. My fault for not stopping any of the two dozen times I’d passed through over the past 35 years (always with film and cameras)… What should I have expected when kids in the Brazilian jungle wear Bart Simpson tshirts?

Dinner at Del’s was good – both American and Mexican.

In the print shop.

Inks

Taken at Vermillion Editions at Space 70, Sunset Center in Amarillo, Texas. The print shop was founded in Minneapolis, MN in the late 70′s by master printer Steven Anderson. Vermillion became a leading printmaking studio for artists such as Chuck Close, Red Groomes and Robert Rauschenberg.

In 2009, West Texas A&M University, in Canyon, TX,  purchased the studio, and moved it to it’s present location as a teaching facility.