Spiderweb Arch

Painting 1.34 Spiderweb Arch. This one almost felt routine, so it must be time to try something new. My goal has always been to work towards an abstraction of the landscape that I'm trying to depict. I want the paintings to be simple and to evoke things like sunlight and shadows, blue skies and red rock. In this painting that was almost taken too far in that there is no middle tone on the rock. When looking at these formations in person, you'll notice that the shady areas sometimes glow with warm light reflected from the surrounding sandstone. The reflected light can't reach everywhere so there are then shadows within shadows. So my two goals for the next painting are this: warm reflected light and something else new that I haven't tried to depict in a painting yet. If these paintings are going to become abstract it will be because I can develop a shorthand for showing what I have seen, but I need to feel confident with a literal depiction first.

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Swinnerton Arch

Painting 1.27, Swinnerton Arch, Monument Valley, Arizona. I tried to put something other than a blue-blue gradient in the background. I didn't think that wispy, painted clouds would stand up next to the solid shapes of the stones so I painted solid looking clouds. I only wish that I had put some on the other side of the sky to balance it out a bit. Other than that, it was a relatively quick and simple painting. I need to start looking for a new way to depict my subject again because I'm starting to get a little tired of increasingly literal translations of a picture. This is showing in the quality of the paintings, especially here where I've started to copy the picture that I'm looking at rather than attempting to depict a three dimensional object. This is particularly bad in the top left corner of the arch. What is that up there? It certainly doesn't look like a three dimensional chunk of sandstone. It looks terribly flat when it should appear to loom over the viewer.

The advantage that painting has over photography is that you can pick and choose what you depict in order to make the scene more understandable to the viewer. When photographing a feature like this, you'll have to move around to find the right angle where the most features are visible so that the viewer of the photo will be able to piece together in his mind what it would feel like to stand in the place where the photo was taken. Even then, some burning and dodging is necessary the highlight and correct the photo to make it more understandable. In a painting, you can simplify shapes and add highlights that give the illusion of depth. This is something that I've failed to do here, and I'll need to work on it.

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Bowtie Arch

Painting 1.26, Bowtie Arch, Utah. After my frustration with the last painting I wanted to pick a simple subject. Rather than trying to convey dramatic sunset or sunrise lighting I wanted to paint something under hot midday lighting, the way you'd actually see most of these arches. The shady area under this arch would be very inviting after a long hike with little relief from the sun. I also made the sky behind the arch a simple white to blue gradient without any brushstrokes to create ray-like streaks of light. The extreme rang of tones in most of the skies in my paintings is probably a result of my using a polarizing filter when I take pictures out west. A polarizing filter when oriented correctly will darken the sky in a photograph while leaving the horizon relatively light. Because many of the pictures I paint are from photos I have taken, I am used to the skies appearing this way and enjoy the effect.

I tried again to give depth to the painting with the "desert varnish" created using a wash of brown and black paint. It didn't look as natural as I had hoped, and the effect was diminished. I also struggled with the color choice to indicate that the foreground at the bottom of the painting was flat and not part of the rock wall. I thought that I lighter color would indicate more direct lighting from the sun, but perhaps it still isn't light enough.

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Teardrop Arch

Painting 1.25 Teardrop Arch, Monument Valley. I really don't like this painting. However, I find that putting thought into why things don't work can be even more useful than appreciating the things that do. In my mind, this scene had a lot of interesting elements: dramatic sunset lighting, a beautiful scene in the distance which could be made to fade into the horizon and a closeup of a shadowy rock wall. I really enjoy painting all of these things, so I thought this would be a joy to work on. My first problem was choosing a small 11x14" canvas on which to do the painting. 11x14" is a great size for trying out ideas before attempting them on a larger and more expensive canvas. They also allow me to complete paintings quickly, in two days for me if it's working. The problem here is that the scene from Monument Valley in the distance could have been its own painting and I was trying to paint it as such. This means that I had to fit an entire painting's worth of detail in a 3x5" space. Some people can do this very effectively and sell loads of tiny paintings, but this is something that I have not been able to do up to this point. The result was a scene that didn't convey the immensity of the actual site and didn't fade into the horizon the way I wanted it to.

The second problem was with the arch itself. I was attracted to it because of the large crack through its top and the wonderful shadow it casts at sunset. However, aside from this, the rock face is relatively smooth and shadowless. I tried exaggerating little cracks that I saw in the surface of the rock by giving them larger shadows to add interest but to me it ended up looking fake and unrealistic. Weathering in rocks is governed by random distribution of weak points in the stone. The result is almost always stunning, but the randomness is difficult to fake. A person trying to create a random array of lines will almost always unknowingly imbue them with some order which will be obvious when one steps away from the painting and looks at it.

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Mesa Verde

Painting 1.24, Mesa Verde, Square Tower. I enjoy using cliff dwellings as a subject because they provide a point of interest that is small in comparison to a natural feature like an arch. This gives me a chance to paint a small detailed portion of a cliff wall. Painting a cliff dwelling also usually means that there will be no sky in the picture which I think makes the paintings feel more abstract because the viewer only sees shadows on rock and can only guess where the light is coming from or what time of day it is. The light here could be from a sunrise or a sunset or it might even be night and the walls are illuminated by firelight. The sky doesn't usually play a big part in the pictures that I paint except to act as a smooth gradient in contrast to the jagged and absolute shading on the rocks.

Another note on the subject in this painting: while it is very likely that these structures were built using stone similar to the stone on which they were built it was important to me that the two surfaces look different in the painting. Almost as if the life had been drained from the stone when it was hewn into blocks for use in building houses. It is easy to think of Anasazi structures like this as being part of the natural landscape because both the buildings and the landscape were around long before we ever where. However, my interest in this area is not archaeological but geological and these structures are just man made objects deposited in the landscape.

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Double Arch

Painting 1.23, Double Arch, Arches National Park. After that last painting of the white house ruins I was trying a new approach to depicting the dreaded but beautiful "desert varnish". What I tried to do here was to paint the highlights and shadows first, and then go back with a very wet brush containing some dark brown and lay down the strips of varnish over both the highlights and shadows with one stroke, darkening them both at the same time and forming a link between the two. Too often, either the shadows can look like dark shapes floating on the highlights or the highlights look like strange aberrations amidst the shadows. Having a continuous line through both reminds my eye that they are different aspects of the same object. I was especially pleased with the area in the top right.

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The White House Ruins 2

Painting 1.22, The White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. I decided to revisit the subject of one of the first paintings I ever completed. I had changed the style of my painting a lot in the intervening time and had always wanted to better convey what I loved so much about this cliff dwelling. The most interesting pictures of this location are taken from the canyon floor. Only at that angle do you realize how the canyon wall extends out of the ruins then curves upward toward the rim. Desert varnish is plentiful at the rim and strips down the canyon wall towards the gap where the Anasazi built these structures. This gives pictures a sense of isolation as the brilliant sandstone fades to black at the top of the frame. I'm still not quite satisfied because I don't feel like there are enough hints in the shading of the rock to convey the shape of the cliff to the viewer. I also still feel like the buildings stand out too much. They are extremely old, likely made from the same stone that makes up the canyon wall and they should look like part of the canyon wall.

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Surprise Arch

Painting 1.21, Surprise Arch, Arches NP. I'm hesitant to post this painting because I am not very satisfied with the results. I do think that it provides an excellent example of how taking too much time off between starting and finishing a painting can have a negative effect on your work. I had finished the last two paintings rapidly over the course of a couple days. I started this one excited to try out what I had learned from the last two. Then I went away for the weekend and by the time I got back I had forgotten most of the ideas that felt so fresh before I had left. Its kind of like a dream that is so clear right after you wake up, but fades away much faster than you expected it to. When you try to revisit it later, you realize you have no recollection.

The other problem that I encountered with this painting was the choices that I had to make about highlights and shadows. I was so sparing with the use of highlights around the edge of the painting that those areas seemed very empty when filled with a black shadow. I tried to minimize this effect with the addition of a lighter shadow layer but the parts just don't seem to fit together. I really love this location in the fiery furnace in arches national park and will definitely revisit this in a future painting.

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Gemeni Bridges

Painting 1.20 Gemini Bridges, in Moab, UT. One thing you'll notice when looking at formations like this is a faint but warm red glow in the shadows created by light reflected from the ground. I realized that up to this point I had been ignoring this aspect of the scenes that I had been painting and wanted to try to recreate it here. I'm not sure how well it worked out, but one thing that I am happy about is the look of the upper left hand potion in the foreground. I struggle a lot with making the rocks in the painting really look "3D" and in this case I really feel like you can tell that those jagged rocks are protruding from the sandstone. The only problem is that I can't really put my finger on what makes it look better than the other parts of the painting to me. Maybe it's the highlighting around the edge of the rocks, or is it the darker color of the whole area? In any case I'll have to keep trying different things to create this effect in subsequent paintings.

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The Big Eye

Painting 1.19 The Big Eye, Arizona. This is a remake of a painting that I attempted some time between 1.12 and 1.17. I wanted to accentuate the contrast of the darkened rock wall to the light shining through the arch and catching little bits and pieces of the sandstone floor in the foreground. The mistake that I made with the original was that I didn't focus on what I was interested in, the eye itself, and tried to include too much of the wall in shadow. At the time I was frustrated with my recent paintings and tried to recreate the feel of the painting I did of the white house ruins in canyon de chelly (1.3). This meant trying to add all kinds of exaggerated shadows and details to the dark portion of the wall which really just distracted from what the focus should have been, the eye. I also tried including some more noticeable highlights in this painting to really give the impression of light flowing through the arch.

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Hope Arch

Painting 1.12 Hope Arch, Arizona. This was the last painting that I finished for a long time. After I finished it I was very happy with it at first, but the more that I looked at it, the more the exaggerated differences in color between the strata began to bother me. Not only that, but the divisions between the strata were looking kind of arbitrary. I always paint the full shape of the subject in black on top of the sky before beginning to fill in the color. I kept a small sliver of black showing through between strata to accentuate the division. As water soaks through the sandstone and reaches a junction between strata it will often be easier to flow out through the sides of the rock than to continue downward, this results in some amount of pitting visible at the surface between layers. So I felt that these black borders should be some shade of the color which they border to reflect the fact that they are just shadows caused by the weathering of the rock. The next 5 paintings would be a frustrating transition to an alternate portrayal of sandstone.

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The Maze 2

Painting 1.10, Pothole arch in the maze. This painting finally forces me to deal with figuring out a way to paint desert varnish, the streaky dark clay deposits that form on the surface of wet sandstone. When I'm working, I try not to become too preoccupied with details in the landscape that I'm recreating. This is important to me because the uncluttered simplicity of the desert landscape is one of the things that draws me to painting it. However, in a picture like this, the intricate patterns created by the desert varnish provide much of the interest in the subject. The tricky thing about depicting desert varnish is that the streaks seem to be sitting on top of the sandstone while at the same time fading into it. In this painting they definitely appear to be sitting on top of the stone. In future paintings I will try to tackle this problem again with an approach that renders these features with more subtlety.

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Park Avenue at Sunrise

Painting 1.5, Park Avenue in Arches National Park. Park Avenue is one of the first things that you see as you drive up into Arches. The first time that I saw it was at 4 in the morning. It was still almost entirely dark but I could make out the shapes of the rocks that I was driving though by seeing where the stars were blotted out. After longing to visit Arches for so long it was indescribably exciting to recognize the looming dark shapes of these famous rock fins as I drove into the park. I still think that the best way to visit a national park for the first time is to drive in while it is still dark out. That way, your imagination takes over and every shape on the horizon seems bigger than it really is. Finally, when the sun comes up the landscape in your imagination slowly dissolves as it is replaced by what you see in the pictures.

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