In Dialogue
Thomas Motley’s first novel, The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country, is rooted in stewardship—a shared responsibility for the earth, animals, and one another. This theme has become more central to his paintings over time, though respect for nature has always been part of his work. His non-fiction writing and lectures on organic farming have also reflected this idea.
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Motley grew up in a family of farmers, where food was part of a daily cycle from seed to plate. Caring for animals, tending crops, and understanding the land were constant lessons. This hands-on upbringing shaped both his perspective and his work, reinforcing the balance between nature and human effort.
The Art of Farming reflects this balance through the rhythms of farm life, where patience and adaptability are key. The novel follows Sam, a caretaker tested by a little donkey named Sol, who veers between accidents and deliberate mischief. But Sol is also a loyal companion and a reliable guardian of his flock. For over a decade, Motley and his wife Rebecca grew and sold organic heirloom herbs and produce, including edible flowers. Working with chefs extended their creative work into the kitchen, while participating in farm-to-table fundraisers supported family-based agriculture—another form of stewardship.
To mark the opening of his exhibition Earth Matters: Sun Moon Carbon Water at J. Peeler Howell Fine Art in Fort Worth, Motley also held a book signing for The Art of Farming. The gallery hosted an “Evening of Stewardship” on December 14th. In the following interview, Motley discusses the connection between stewardship, art, and farming in The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country.
You are a painter and an educator. What brought you to write a fiction book about farming?
I’ve written much over the years about art and organic farming, separately. The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country unites these two life-long passions through the stewardship of Sam, my artist/farmer, for the plants and animals in his care. My artist wife, Rebecca, and food author, Sharon Hudgins, have kindly stayed on my case for a long time to write this book.
The narrative seems to underscore some autobiographical elements—your protagonist, San Bartlett, is an artist and a retired teacher, and you also grew up on a farm in Texas and are passionate about growing crops. How does research meet biographical elements here?
My parents, Dub and Doris, were born on neighboring farms near a small central Texas town settled by my mother’s ancestors. All my family were farmers. The crops were mainly cotton and corn. Some cattle were sold, but most livestock and poultry were for family sustenance. Several uncles made extra money on the rodeo circuit. I was born in Beaumont, where my dad was a roughneck in East Texas oil fields and on the first off-shore oil rigs in the Gulf. All the men I grew up with had served in various theaters of WWII around the globe.
The gravitational pull for Dub and Doris and all their many siblings was home, back in Hill County, so that’s where all family reunions, summers and holidays were spent. My many cousins and I, right through adolescence, worked all the relatives’ small farms to help everyone succeed. Childhood summers were spent working on family farms. Communal expectations were high, even for those family members living in urban settings. Every family had a garden, even those living in large towns on tiny lots.
I knew where food came from and how to grow it. From the earliest age, I could contrast the verdant landscape of my birthplace, the Texas coastal lowlands, with that of my cousins up north in dusty, more arid central Texas. Beaumont and environs are at or below sea-level, like the Netherlands. It’s rice country. Fish and seafood dominate coastal dishes, the major style being Cajun. I swam and fished in the Gulf, in water that reached all the way to the horizon. My child’s eyes witnessed hurricanes on the coast and tornadoes on the prairie.
I taught studio art and art history for decades at the same college in Dallas. The last ten years or so of that life, like Sam Bartlett in the novel, I was able to stop teaching summers and became a farmer. Rebecca managed our small business, growing and marketing organic heirloom herbs and produce at farmers’ markets on Saturdays and to a handful of well-known chefs.
The novel is rich with visual descriptions, evidently coming from your artist’s eye, and references to painting and art history. How does your visual art practice inform the writing and vice versa?
My first drawings, from age three, were always the same subject: a barnyard with a cow, a horse, a pig, chickens, and a rooster on the barn’s roof. I had that scene down so good by the First Grade that my teacher called Mom for a meeting at school to discuss my drawings. Doris was greatly relieved that I wasn’t in trouble. Drawing was simply play, in her farmgirl’s eyes.
Most of my mature paintings have been large abstracts, inspired by the thin pours of Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, with a fair amount of De Stijl thrown in after a Fulbright grant to Holland. Before the epiphany I experienced with color field paintings at age twenty, my adolescent concerns were in figurative illustration, with heroes like N.C. Wyeth, Ben Shawn, Leonard Baskin, and Tom Lea.
I have drawn landscapes, plants, and animals all my life, even while simultaneously pouring giant abstracts. Through daily sketching and my long career teaching drawing, I’ve rendered nature, studying its tactile presence in dry and wet media. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins’ term for nature’s energy as “Instress” and “Inscape” to describe the manifested form of the thing that appears.
Teaching students how to articulate their comments and observations made during critiques has informed my own writing tremendously. Also, I encourage students to develop a mental outline of compositional principles. This device helps serve as a checklist when making art and as an effective analytical tool when critiquing or describing art made by others.
Solomon, your protagonist’s miniature donkey, is a vibrant character in your novel (and so are all the other farm animals). How did you develop these animal characters, and what role does Solomon play in the novel?
The animals in my book have Biblical or Classical names, such as Solomon, the miniature donkey, or Nike, the spotted hound. All the domestic animals and plants in the book were in my charge at one time or another, with different names, of course. Each chapter begins with an ink drawing of a character featured therein, portraits of my four-legged wards.
Solomon is the main antagonist in the novel, ever alert for ways to outwit his kindly artist/farmer caretaker. Sam’s partner, Annie, daughter Liz, and all visitors to the farm fall under the spell of this conniving equine charmer.
I am curious to learn more about your writing process.
The structure of my book is borrowed from Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. His novel won the National Book Prize in 1949 and is the best book written about Texas sharecropping. The Art of Farming unfolds as do the seasons. The actual writing and initial editing is done in my studio, but much of the source-related material is written in the research library of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Ft. Worth.
Studio tables have dozens of stacks of working episodes, each document labeled with a seasonal designation such as “Mid-July Shearing.” I also use a large dry-erase board, with prompts about completed events or unexplored ideas, adjusted weekly. I prefer to write from roughly 6:00 a.m. to about 1:00 p.m., though often the muse rousts me at 3:00 a.m. to get up and write or paint. My studio has lots of windows, so I enjoy sensing the world outside, changing from dark to light as I work.
When I write, the friendly voice in my head is that of E.B. White. I began reading his engaging and descriptive New Yorker articles as a college freshman. I have all his books, essays, and letters. He wrote passionately about urbane NYC and about his little chicken farm in Maine, sometimes in the same article.
The main reason it took me a few years to finish The Art of Farming was my lack of confidence in writing dialog. I wanted the protagonist to speak directly to the reader, as in a conversation, and observe real-time situations with first-person accounts. Walter Mosley’s brilliant creation of Easy Rawlins gave me the solution. Farmer Sam lives and tells his own experience, inspired by Private Eye Easy Rawlins.
And the publication process?
Stoney Creek Publishing, a member of the Texas Book Consortium, is distributed by A&M Press. Loren Steffy, Publisher, kindly took a chance with my book’s odd combo of art and agriculture. The Art of Farming cover is my acrylic painting, Cornfield at Sunset. Each chapter begins with an ink drawing of a farm animal featured in the text, such as Homer, the blind lamb.
Give and take between myself and the publisher’s teams of cover designers, interior page designers, and PR staff has been an education. The Art of Farming has been a communal achievement, kind of like raising a big pole barn.
You are working on a sequel. What would that be about?
Themes hinted at in The Art of Farming, progress. Development encroaches on Elysia’s idyllic Heritage Square but will be rebuffed by the town council. Having published only nonfiction works before, it’s great fun now to hear readers ask me about, say, the future of the neglected swayback horse-with-no-name or what latest mischief Sol is up to. Lastly, it’s strangely invigorating these days to meet readers at book signings who know me only as “T.D.”
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The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country, written and illustrated by T.D. Motley.
Thomas Motley is a Texas painter. Motley is Prof. Emeritus of Art, Dallas College.
Motley has lectured at the Dallas Mus. of Art, the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Austin, the
SMU Meadows Mus., and The Amon Carter Mus., Ft. Worth. He has published art
museum catalogs, art periodical critiques, and reviews, and NEH research papers on
classical art. He is a contributing author for Eutopia and Art Spiel, and has written
articles about Mid-Century Modern Texas artists for DB/Zumbeispiel and the Grace
Mus., Abilene. Motley has received Fulbright Grants to Belgium, the Netherlands, and
the UK. He is past Board President of Artist Boat, a Galveston non-profit, and was Chair
of the North Texas Fulbright Teacher Exchange Peer Review Committee for many
years. Motley was a printer in the USAF, a Technical Illustrator for Ling Temco Vought
Corp, and a resident cartoonist for the infamous Dallas Notes from the Underground.
@tomdmotley