Book Launch for T.D. Motley at The Dock Bookshop in Fort Worth

Fort Worth author and artist T.D. Motley will be at The Dock Bookshop in Fort Worth for his new novel, Planting and Painting the Landscape: The Sequel to The Art of Farming.

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 stand-alone 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 his wife 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.

Texas painter and academic, 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 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. His first novel is The Art of Farming.