Terlingua
An actually-rainy rainy season has brought green to unexpected places around the Big Bend—and it’s also brought back earth artist Colleen O’Brien. Most recently of northern New Mexico, O’Brien will darken doorsteps, barstools and rocks in Far West Texas over the next few months as she plugs away at an ambitious body of work that began in Terlingua years ago.
O’Brien is a Texan by birth whose parents had a love affair with the Big Bend in the 1980s. As a result, she’s been steeped from birth in the beauty and legend of Far West Texas. “We had a framed picture of Clay Henry in our house growing up,” she said, referring to the famous beer-swilling goat who serves as mayor of Lajitas.
Most people intentionally avoid the Big Bend in late summer, but O’Brien has made it a habit. In 2022, O’Brien spent the month of August at Willow House, which offers fellowships and retreats for artists. In August 2024, O’Brien returned, this time to Big Bend National Park, where she took part in the park’s reinvigorated artist in residence program.
Across these two residencies, O’Brien painted earth works in her signature style—large scale work with natural materials created en plein air that mirror the shape of the land and the flow of its drainages. The Big Bend, internationally known for its violently creative volcanic geology, is an especially rich text. “All of a sudden I had this large body of work that sort of amounts to a survey of the region, through the paintings,” she said.
O’Brien’s process is part old-school landscape painting and part backcountry adventure. She started out making large-scale oil paintings, but as her work fixated on landscapes, she began to feel trapped in a traditional studio environment. Now, most of her paintings are created in one session in a singular location—usually a large rock. She spends a lot of time driving around and scouting locations, trawling for places that look hospitable enough to spend a few hours out in the elements. “The worst thing about painting a landscape and being inside is you just want to be outside,” she said. “My studio pretty much exists out of my car.”
The all-in-one-take approach is key for both theoretical and practical reasons—in one session where O’Brien had to bail on a painting as a flash flood loomed, she returned to find that a curious deer had used it for an outhouse.
Most of the time, O’Brien gathers elements from the scene around her work space, using different types of dirt, soil and rock for a range of pigments and textures. She had to rethink her process ahead of the residency in the national park, which abides by strict federal “leave no trace” regulations—she couldn’t take materials gathered within park boundaries outside.
The park helped her figure out a workaround, helping her connect with private landowners who would allow her to harvest materials that mirrored the conditions of promising sites in the park. As a result, her own personal map of the Big Bend grew exponentially as she got to meet new people and explore beyond the typical weekenders’ itinerary. “We did everything by the book,” she said. “It was really fun.”
O’Brien frequently posts image carousels and videos of herself making the work, which she regards as a kind of performance. It’s a way of documenting the landscape that mirrors the paintings themselves—who are, in a way, witnesses to their own creation. “My philosophy on abstract painting is that it’s a series of movements within a certain time frame,” she said. “My work is about hiking out there, driving around, wandering, finding the right rock, rubbing your hands on it, putting your hands in the dirt, listening to the water run by you. And then at the end, you’re left with a record of it, the physical painting.”
“I feel like art can give you a lot of access to senses and emotion and memory and smell,” she continued. “What I want for my paintings is for people to be transported to a place. I don’t necessarily want people to necessarily look for figures or anything that’s representative.”
While O’Brien considers herself a student—and steward—of the landscape, she does have an academic background in art. She studied at the Land Arts of the American West program at Texas Tech, which gave her room to breathe and the opportunity to study monumental works of the Southwest up close. (Her teacher, Chris Taylor, is a frequent Marfa dinner table guest alongside wife Ingrid Schaffner, the former curator of the Chinati Foundation.) “People hate on Lubbock, but the sky is like 70% of your view and all that red dirt everywhere—it just gives you space to think,” she said. “You’re not just staring at concrete and buildings. I don’t want to see the built environment; I think it wears on your senses.”
On her last day in the Panhandle, she gathered a box of red dirt from the canyons—a sentimental tether of sorts. The box rode around in her car for months before it finally found a home at a solo show of her work. “It was a very emotional piece for me, but some of the feedback on it was funny,” she recalled.
Though her work took her away from the Panhandle, she’s found a way to keep herself centered in places where the sky looms large. She’s made paintings at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where God once told Georgia O’Keefe—a painter who also famously enjoyed working from rocks—she could have a mountain if she painted it enough. She’s also made work in Bisbee, Arizona, in a region known for mountain lion and jaguar sightings.
In all her years of painting in the backcountry, the Bisbee big cats came the closest to rattling her. Conventional wisdom holds that mountain lions see you more often than you see them, and that the best way to repel them is to act big and tough. “You’re not supposed to crouch down, and that’s my entire practice,” O’Brien said.
For now, she’s happy to be back in Far West Texas, where she feels like she can inhabit the role of the artist 24/7. It’s both an escape and a big responsibility—being adequately prepared to work outside in the desert in a place with few services has its risks, but the mental peace she feels out here is its own reward. “I like the pace of life,” she said. “And I’m constantly inspired by every single inch of this place.”
Follow Colleen’s work on Instagram @colleen_obrien or visit colleenobrienfineart.com.
