which is a lot of title for a little piece.
It has a backstory of course ...
so settle in ... this one's a real shaggy dog (as my mom used to call my ramblings).
Just before we headed to St Louis a couple of weeks ago, my eye caught on this illustration in a New York Times article ...
which led to a Google search for information ...
and more images ...
planting a seed in my mind.
While in St Louis, I jotted ideas down for a new Triangulation piece (the original Triangulation project can be viewed at
in anticipation of our planned summer road trip to Taos, New Mexico and Glenwood Springs, Colorado with a quick hop over to St Louis before heading home ...
Now I've mentioned before how much I love driving through Oklahoma
as memorialized in this Remember 2016 patch (which also brings me back to Girl Scout days) ...
But I wasn't always a fan of road trips, as noted in a 2009 blog post entitled Crazy Country: A Little Farther West, which was about our original journey from Virginia to Texas ...
Thankfully, I've learned that driving in the Southwest and Midwest is nothing like East Coast driving.
Anyway, it was with Triangulation II in mind that I decided to create a test piece. During the drive down I-35 from Oklahoma City to the Texas state line I made careful mental notes of the sights along the way and mused over which bits of thrift store linen might stand in for them.
Once we got home, I quickly sketched out some possibilities ...
In truth, I almost abandoned the project as the colors were so vastly different from my usual comfort zone, but decided to soldier on, trying to be true to what I recalled seeing.
The fresh green of spring grass and the clear blue of cloud dotted sky ...
splashes of Indian paintbrush orange and masses of little yellow flowers ...
the dusky purple of wildflowers along the edge of a red dirt infused stock tank ...
and above all, incredibly dense patches of pink primrose ...
And the highway, in grey patches that I almost stitched together, but ultimately left apart to recall my less-than-steady attentions, the left slightly wider to denote my preference for taking the fast lane ...
I made sure to note the striping, how white precedes black with long intervals between both, here still tinged with the vestiges of water-erasable marker ...
Last, but not least, the power line ...
one of many that sailed overhead as my inner soundtrack played "oh what a beautiful morning ..."
And if some of the clouds are a bit scawumpus and the power line not quite the right arc, still I'm OK with it (now humming "LA HO MA ... Oklahoma!")
