Page 15 - Erath

Out back of the large house, hens scratch in the brown dirt of the chicken coop for the baby chickens that follow after them. One proud rooster stands sometimes on one leg with head lifted high. He turns that red head sideways and then back as he inspects the visitors. A short motion light, operating from solar-power, stands guard to scare away any wild critters coming out of the surrounding felds intent on having chicken for a midnight meal. The Lincoln’s vegetable garden is lush with rows of ripening tomatoes, green beans and yellow squash. Ripe fruit hangs from the drooping limbs of a tall fg tree beside the asparagus patch. In the middle of everything is a large container flled with vegetable compost. Everything seems to be in tune with nature.

“Mike and I like the feeling that we are survivors,” Debbie said. “In case we ever have to, we know how to live off the land. We know how to hunt and fsh. Every season we take a deer for food, not for the trophy.”

For Debbie and husband, Mike, a big part of peaceful living is respecting the many advantages of being one with the land: using it, restoring it, enjoying the harvest it produces and the healthy life it provides. A stroll around the property where the Lincolns live near Morgan Mill is to hear the comfortable sound of a manmade waterfall rushing over carefully placed ancient rocks. The running stream plummets into an irregular shaped pool where Koi swim, some more than a foot long, and hold their mouths to the ripples on the water’s surface, waiting for pellets of food dropped from the artist’s hand.

For Debbie Grayson Lincoln is an artist, working with oils mostly, and creating fne, continuous line-drawings, pastel water colored pictures as well as reaching into other mediums. Her medium of choice is always oils. “I’ve been painting all my life,” she says, referring to her childhood when she stood on a chair at her Grandmother’s big round table and dabbled in oils. “Grandmother Grayson was an artist,” Debbie said. “My earliest memories are of being extremely messy after spending a day with her and her oil painting.

“I paint in oils what I see in Morgan Mill and what I observe on the once a year trips Mike and I take throughout the United States. I take hundreds and thousands of photos and then put those on my computer. When I am ready to paint, I have an enlarged photo on the screen to see as I work. I can add, subtract, change background scenery, create people, trees, horses, clouds wherever the feeling inside takes me. I ‘live’ with my painting, feeling the emotion and I attempt to put that feeling on the canvas.”

Debbie’s work has been accepted by the Dutch Art Gallery in Dallas and sales there are going well. Customers at the gallery like the artist’s subject matter which includes horses, cowboys, Indians, wild critters, and the Western way of life

in general. A very strong outlet for artists is the Daily Painters website. “The market is for both small and medium to large works,” she said. “Blogs may post a different painting a day. There are approximately 160 members from around the world with a variety of work in many mediums. I have found this to be a great way to promote myself and you must be able to do that. The term ‘starving artist’ was not arrived at carelessly.” Dan Vanderburg, a fction writer that lives in Arlington, found Debbie’s work on the Daily Painters site and has commissioned her to do illustrations for two of his most recent books. His frst book was Legacy of Dreams for which Debbie was commissioned to do the artwork. His second book, Finding Rosie , challenged Debbie to come up with a painting for the cover. The book is roughly the story of a red-headed boy captured by the Indians and his adventures including an escape through the snow covered prairie on a paint pony. Vanderburgh explained the story to Debbie and then commissioned her to do the cover painting.

“So I needed a red-headed boy about thirteen years of age, wearing a heavy buffalo robe and riding a paint pony through deep snow,” Debbie said. “Ok, I borrowed a 12-year-old neighbor girl, took a photo of her riding a pony of mine. The pony wasn’t paint, but I knew that I could handle that with my brush strokes. Now I needed a buffalo robe and pictures