Planting and Painting the Landscape: A Sequel to the Art of Farming - Paperback

by T. D. Motley (Author)

An artist-farmer who defends his homestead with paintbrush, shovel, and love as the modern world presses in.

Planting and Painting the Landscape is a warm, reflective novel about an aging artist-farmer, Sam Bartlett, who tends thirty acres of North Texas land while wrestling with memory, creativity, and change. A sequel to The Art of Farming, it blends richly observed scenes of daily farm work--gardening, livestock, and Saturday farmers markets--with the inner life of a painter whose nights belong to the Muse and the stars. As Sam and sidekick Annie navigate suburban sprawl, family transitions, and the encroaching language of "branding" and "development," the farm becomes a fiercely protected sanctuary where stewardship, community, and craft still matter.

Told in Sam's wry, intimate voice and accompanied by the author's own illustrations, the novel celebrates slow work--stretching canvases, building raised beds, mentoring teens, and cooking shared meals--as a quiet act of resistance to a noisy, hurried world. Readers who love character-driven rural fiction, art and nature writing, or stories where place feels as alive as the people will find themselves at home in Elysia's fields, verandas, and dark, star-filled skies.

Author Biography

T. D. Motley is a Texas painter and academic. Born in Beaumont, he's been drawing since age three. His family has farmed in Texas from the mid 19th century. He and artist wife Rebecca live in Fort Worth. The couple marketed their organic, heirloom herbs and produce to North Texas chefs and farmers' market customers for years.

Motley has lectured about and published articles on organic, no-till farming and gardening, heirloom herbs and produce, and soil sustainability. He has written agrarian essays for EatGreenDFW and Edible Dallas & Fort Worth.

T. D. Motley is Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Dallas College. His drawings and paintings have been selected for national exhibits and are included in public and private U.S. collections. Motley's artworks are available at J. Peeler Howell Fine Art Gallery, Fort Worth.