The Road to Nowhere

April 25, 2011

I have always been mesmerized by heatwaves. It's no accident that the name of the cafe where The Doper Roper and Honkytonk Sue hang out in, is called the Heatwave Cafe.

As a young kid traveling with my family, I distinctly remember seeing that high desert phenom of rippling heatwaves at the crest of a hill, on Route 66, west of Holbrook, 1950s, and an oncoming car floating in that heatwave, suspended in mid-air.

This is not an easy atmospheric effect to paint. I have tried it more than once without success, but this morning I grabbed a painting out of my M file and was pushing paint around and, by total accident, hit on the effect, by backing in the distant mountains. I call this Road to Nowhere:

This was exciting, but I was supposed to be finishing another assignment. Which led me to this conclusion:

"Sometimes I do my best work when I should be working on something else."
—BBB