Where the pavement ends--stories and paintings

"Morning in Ocate," 11 x 15 watercolor, 300 lb. d'Arches cold press paper

I love unpaved roads, especially remote state highways that are still just gravel, or dirt. They beckon with discovery and stories, and paintings.
Six years ago, this Labor Day weekend, I found one on a New Mexico map, and set out, leaving I-40 at Endee just across the state line, onto the back roads of little traffic and wide open spaces.

Unpaved NM 120, the smooth part in the Sangre de Cristos

Heading for 17 miles of unpaved state highway, NM 120,  in the Sangre de Cristo mountains south of Angel Fire. Some of it was well maintained. Other portions were barely two rocky ruts in dense forest.

Where the pavement ends, I found the community of Ocate, on the mountain branch of the old Santa Fe trail, with an old adobe with colorful rusting tin roof that just begged to be painted. 

It must be an old store, and I've tried painting it several times. I'm still not satisfied, in doing justice to that beautiful roof, but this is the latest version--painted this time with more color, more freedom and without looking at the photo. I'm happier with the roof, but it, like the unpaved highways continues to beckon.
There are two other unpaved stretches state highways I've traveled in New Mexico...NM450 west of Kenton, Oklahoma, and NM 112, through the Jicarilla Apache reservation south of El Vado Lake.
I have found others that need to be traveled, mostly in the southwestern part of the state. 

In the meantime, I'll settle for memories and watercolors. Also, here's the 3 x 4 preliminary value sketch. I chose yellow-orange, blue green and  blue violet for a triad from the color wheel for color harmony.
If you care to travel those back roads, search "back roads journal" on this blog. Here are the link to two of them, and the first painting in Ocate, from six years ago.

https://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2013/09/back-road-journal-new-mexico-ii.html
https://clarkcoffee.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-mexico-provoked-painting.html

Where the pavement ends--Back roads in color

Where the pavement ends, watercolor, 11 1/2 by 13

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Ocate, New Mexico...I passed through the old village three Septembers ago, on the back roads. This old store is where the pavement ends on NM 120, west of Wagon Mound near the old Santa Fe Trail.
If you keep driving, and I did, the "highway" turns into one lane, sometimes two ruts, over the mountains for 17 miles until it comes out in the valley south of Angel Fire. I was thankful for my all-wheel-drive Subaru Outback.
I've tried to paint this structure several times. I think I'm getting close, to the color on the backroads.

Back roads journal, New Mexico--II

Abandoned store at Ocate,  NM 120, at the end of the pavement. What a roof.  It breathes "weathered."What a painting to be.

Weathered adobe, wood and geography at Ocate.

Weathered. There's got to be some personal symbolism or identification for me to so love that word, and the many times I stop to take photos of weathered buildings and fence posts and more. 
So it was this trip. Rusting tin roofs. Drooping wooden rafters. Vacant windows. Peeling adobe.  Eroding granite and limestone in the mountains. But to really discover weathered, you have to get off the main roads, take the less traveled roads, slow down and look and feel.

Abandoned dugout in a nameless Texas Panhandle canyon.

Weathered...it makes you realize how small and impermanent mankind is...our monuments return slowly to dust, while the ancient earth also erodes, on a scale of size and time that dwarfs us. Those are lessons from the back roads, where there is time and space to think.

Abandoned church at San Isidro cemetery on NM 94, tin, adobe, wood, mountains, graves, weathering away.

More than man-made posts weathers...eroding Hermit's Peak, from dead end NM 266 near San Ignacio.

The "Tooth of Time" weathered landmark on old Santa Fe Trail, on NM 26, near Cimarron.