MIDNIGHT WEST OF DENVER
I felt sorry for Raymond when I got that letter that I posted with yesterday’s drawing. Like so many highly educated people, he approaches old works of art with a guide book and a preconceived notion of some emotional response. A response which is elusive, and impossible to engineer of fabricate. Expecting to be moved by something usually guarantees that we will feel nothing at all For example, I have never been to Saint Peters, and I have never seen the Sistine Chapel. But every time I talk to someone who has, I always here the same story, something like this.
“There were hundreds of people all going through at once, we couldn’t stop. We looked at the ceiling with our heads thrown back, walking, and everybody was bumping into everyone else. The man on my right kept bumping into me with his camera. Thinking about that, a contrasting image occurred to me. It is 8;00 A.M. and tourists are making their way through the Sistine Chapel. But it is also midnight somewhere West of Denver. A trucker is out on the turnpike, there is almost no one else in sight. He has to drive all night. He can see the Rockies in the distance, and he thinks, “morning will come and I won’t have reached them.” He is terribly bored, he lights a cigarette, blows the smoke out the window, and turns on the radio.. It is Bonnie Rait, singing:
Rock steady all night long,
Rock steady till the light of dawn,
Slow and easy, tried and true,
Rock steady,--------just me and you.
He feels a long rush of blood to his face, the hair on his neck stands on end, and he experiences a long moment of elation. He settles himself in his seat, and his boredom returns, another song comes on the radio. It’s R.E.M., embedded in the lyrics is the phrase, “Just a truck stop, instead of Saint Peters”, The trucker thinks, “I wonder what sand peters are.”
Dimensions: 7” x 7.4”
Materials: Acrylic paint on watercolor paper
Signature: In the bottom right Richard Britell, Sept. 5, 2002
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