Traveling the Unknown Highway with Rocky Hawkins

By the mid-1970s, Hawkins recognized that he could never be satisfied by the constraints of the commercial art world. He left his career behind and became a logger for the next decade. He looks back on that time in the woods, felling massive trees in the Northwest, as a time of discovery, musing over the solitude and silence there.

Time out from his career became a catalyst for his interest in fine art. He pursued painting classes and developed his own style, learning to trust his intuition on the canvas. He became fascinated with Native Americans, the mysticism and creative qualities of the culture and looked to the work of N.C. Wyeth, Frederic Remington and Howard Terpning. As a result, even today the influences of Realism and Expressionism play into Hawkins’ Modern aesthetic.

He walks further up the hill, talking of the home he and his wife Kat reclaimed from an old broken-down ranch. They’ve transformed a dilapidated cluster of buildings into a tidy compound that reveres history and makes no overtures of vanity. The modest cabin where the couple live is nestled in a cup of gentle hills, protected from the wind and overlooking a meadow, then the ruins of an old homestead and beyond that, ranchlands rolling out into what seems to be infinity.

On the hill above their cabin, past what used to be the stud barn, is a refurbished horse barn that is his studio. He stops at the top of the hill. Before the studio, he detours to the old chicken coop, cleaned up for Kat’s garden shed. A plot for vegetables has been carved out on the sunny side and fenced to keep out the deer. Above this building is an old bunkhouse; someday the couple will fix it up as a guesthouse. Rocky smoothes his hand down the side of a wall, like a horseman feeling a fetlock. “Look at this old wood,” he says, pointing out the weathered beauty of it. This too will work into one of his paintings somehow — the texture of it, the striation.

Stepping out of the bunkhouse Rocky crosses the driveway, his tall frame making long, easy strides. The sky is an uncommon blue with a dash of clouds to the west. He stops
to talk about that color, the cloud formation. The mountains encircle this land and beyond them the horizon seems boundless. He takes in the scene with a smile, nodding as if to log the moment in his mind to use as material for his work later on.