Rackstraw Downes in "Balance" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

I was driving across the landscape

and there was this endlessness in Texas

theres almost nothing

it is desert

and it is just a little bit

of scrubby vegetation here and there

and suddenly in the middle

of all this emptyness

where these pink mountains

around the edge of it

every direction there were is hills

drown in this emptyness

there will get these tiny little structures

was made out of pine

with corrugated roofs on it

because in the desert

shade is the loss priceless

thing you can get

shade and water

took me out of there

there were no ground

to stay a racetrack

and so these corrugated roofs

were shelters for the horses

There were a judges tower

and than there were two

spectator shelters

I was fascinated by

these lovely areal structures

which lift so lightely on this earth

and i ended up making five drawings

that really interested me

one of them i've never painted

but i made four large paintings

that went together

they're all at the same height