Canyon de Chelly

1.70 Canyon de Chelly

Monument Valley III

1.69 Monument Valley III

Double Arch II

1.68 Double Arch II

Cedar Arch

1.67 Cedar Arch. Back to a more easily discernible depiction. I tried again to dull the sky to avoid that "popping" blue sky that is a dead giveaway that the subject is a landscape. Although the inclusion of trees undermines any efforts to conceal this fact.

Spiderweb Arch II

1.66 Spiderweb Arch II. I think that I've finally reached the point where the painting would not be recognized immediately as a depiction of a natural arch if the viewer was not told so. This is a good exercise because my goal is to create paintings where the viewer's interest in the composition is independent of his ability to recognize the subject. I'm not sure if this is interesting yet, but I'm at least able to decouple the composition in my head from the actual object that I'm trying to depict.

Skyline Arch

1.65 Skyline Arch. Three colors and simpler shapes. One effect that I like here is the way that the black underpainting shows through the light color used for the stone. I feel like it gives the stone a feeling of rough texture. I intentionally chose a drab color for the sky so that it wouldn't compete so much with the orange-red of the stone. I'm trying to continue simplifying the shapes depicting the arch and eliminating unnecessary details.

Landscape Arch II

1.65 Landscape Arch II. Alright, enough efforts to convey realism. I want to get back to focusing on the basic shapes of my subjects. The subject in this painting is the morning twilight sky as seen through landscape arch. When you hike just before the sun rises you can't tell how close or large the forms around you are, just their shape against the sky. It's fun to sit in a place and wait for the sun to come up to compare the actual arrangement of the features around you to the arrangement that you constructed from the limited data available in the dark.

Kachina Natural Bridge

1.64 Kachina Natural Bridge. I saved my favorite for last. Kachina Bridge is deep in a canyon, shielded by trees such that you don't see it until you come around a mound in the riverbed just in front of the bridge. The span of this bridge is very thick such that when you stand under it you feel like you are in the atrium of a large building.

This painting combines a lot of the things that I've been trying to figure out over the course of the time that I've been painting; trees, desert varnish and that glowing effect in shaded areas that comes from red light reflected by the sandstone in the sun. I'm happy with how far those things have come in the time that I've been working on painting this landscape.

Owachomo Natural Bridge

1.63 Owachomo Natural Bridge. I struggled to find a view of Owachomo Bridge that was interesting and made it look like more than just a thin stone connection between two masses of sandstone. I looked back through all the pictures I took when I was there and noticed this ledge that protruded out at the base of the bridge like some large bench. I also wanted to emphasize the greenery around the bridge. I am happy with how the bushes shown in silhouette under the bridge turned out.

Sipapu Natural Bridge

1.62 Sipapu Natural Bridge. Now that I'm finally back on track with the arch paintings I can get around to a series of paintings that I've wanted to do since my last visit to Utah in July. While there, I visited Natural Bridges National Monument for the first time. It is a small park, but packs in three of the largest and most impressive natural bridges that you will find in Utah. Natural bridges exist in a very different environment than most natural arches. A bridge forms due to flowing water and you will most often find them stretching over a riverbed where water wore its way through a cliff to cut off a goose-neck in the river. The presence of water creates a much greener environment around the bridge than you find high up on a cliff where most arches exist. Walking under Sipapu Natural Bridge, you view the massive span through holes in the dense trees.

A photograph of the canyons in this park can be almost unintelligible because of the layering of intricately carved sandstone canyons. I tried to sort out this confusing view by changing to color of the stone as it moved farther from the viewer. To explain this change in color, there is the approaching storm.

Paul Bunyan Arch

1.61 Paul Bunyan Arch. Painting progression. Back to my original subject! Arches. It has been a long time since I have painted an arch. Arches seem to look best at noontime when the sun is high and the arch casts shadows on itself. I noticed that I was adding lots of little bits of shadow to this painting and I tried to give the shadow more geometric borders.

The mass of stone on the right side of the painting is supposed to be much closer to the viewer than the rest of the scene. I tried to convey this with more vibrant colors and by making the area behind the stone completely immersed in shade. If this effect does not work, then it must seem very out of place.

Grand Canyon

1.60 Grand Canyon. Painting progression. Finally! I am able to use shadows in a way that creates a sense of scale and three dimensional space. I really enjoy the Grand Canyon at sunset as a subject. If you squint at it, the shady areas go black and the areas still lit by the setting sun seem to be floating, detached.

I took a much more realistic approach to the clouds this time, which was a lot of fun but seems to be from a different painting than the shadow and stone. I first tried to complete this painting with a more limited palette but was not satisfied and had to go back, adding color and detail. I like to avoid detail and will try to limit the amount included next time I choose this subject.

Cathedral Valley

1.59 Cathedral Valley. Painting progression. The clouds that came out so easily earlier were difficult to create this time. I also had a hard time finding something interesting to show in the shadows. I try to avoid painting too many small sections of shadow because I think it breaks up the shape of the stone like camouflage and undermines the sense of scale that I'm trying to convey. Here I tried to merge some sections of shade together but created some shapes that don't make three dimensional sense, most noticeably in the big shadow on the stone left of center. The shadow appears to be in front of the stone! Not nestled into a deep recess.

Lake Powell

1.58 Lake Powell. Painting progression. Painting Lake Powell, I always feel very conflicted. I want to show the beauty of what used to be Glen Canyon, but I also want to make a statement about what has become of it since the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. What I really want to create is an incomplete landscape, like Pompeii buried beneath volcanic ash. However, as with my last attempt at making a commentary on the impact of the glen canyon dam, this one is not visually compelling.

Monument Valley II

1.56 Monument Valley II. Painting progression. Monument Valley provides a great subject for painting. Its shapes are so unmistakable that it lends itself to depiction with few details. Also each form is dramatically isolated. Long telephoto views of the valley provide an appealing layering of shapes which keep the scene interesting. What I really wanted to depict here was the extremely warm glow that appears during sunset as well as the slow dimming of a clear sky.

Arches NP

1.54 Arches NP. Painting Progression. What a difference a new brush makes. I have a habit of working with a brush until the bristles are frayed an bent in every direction and the base has hardened with paint that never got cleaned out completely. I feel like it makes the pattern produced by the brush stroke more random and lends itself well to creating an interesting texture. Alas as I was trying to scratch the clouds into the background of this painting with a brush that worked more like a dirty palette knife I decided it was time for a new brush. Thrilled with the renewed freedom of a flexible brush, I flipped the brush back and forth and swept white paint across the sky to form my clouds. I kind of like them. I was trying to remember my lessons from the last painting of monument valley; trying to keep the shapes simple. I managed to do this pretty well in the distant background but started to get a little more detailed in the foreground. What I like most about this is the perspective. To me it captures the feeling of standing before these massive standing sheets of stone.

Monument Valley

1.53 Monument Valley. I was really pleased with this because I didn't feel the need to add too many details. My opinion on any kind of representational creative pursuit is that every detail that must be added to successfully convey the subject is a failure on the part of the artist. The most striking art is that which can convey a place, person or feeling with only a few sparse details. That experience of seeing a fish created with just four brushstrokes in a sumi-e painting affirms our humanity as it reminds us that we absorb more through our subconscious than any machine. Because of this, I cringe with every little bit of texture and finely detailed shadow that I have to add in order to give a recognizable shape to the subject that I'm painting. In this painting more than almost any other I was able to relax and trust the overall forms to convey the scene rather than the details. I also engaged in a little more manipulation of the scene than normal, stacking multiple layers of background up into the sky. I wanted the sense of the expanse of space in monument valley that you see in an aerial photograph but I still wanted to be up close to the mitten to feel like we were sitting with it, watching the sun set.

Shiprock

1.52 Shiprock, NM. Not my favorite painting... but I was happy with how the horizon turned out. When you have access to a high vantage point you see that haze and distance combine on an immense flat area to create a horizon that fades from red to brown to grey to blue. This effect has always been really difficult for me to recreate because I always try to do it as a perfect gradient. What I realized here is that the transition is not a perfect gradient but instead transitions abruptly or gradually depending on the rise and fall of the landscape. If there is even a small swell in the distance then the transition to blue will progress abruptly just over the top of the hill. Flat areas will have a more gradual transition. The problem with a perfect gradient across the horizon is that it implies that the land is perfectly flat, which it almost never is.

  The problem that I ran into here was that I couldn't get a good grasp on the three dimensional form of Shiprock. No matter how I tried to suggest a real three dimensional object with the addition of shadows and color variations, I just couldn't get it to come off of the canvas. At best it now looks like a few pieces of paper cut into jagged shapes and held up in front of a desk lamp. This is probably what causes the long shadow to look so false to the people to whom I have shown the painting. One person said "The shadow looks way too tall". This must be because there's no way to tell if the Shiprock in this painting is a massive, jagged protuberance or a pebble in the sand. For a pebble in the sand to have a shadow reaching out to the mountains on the horizon is ridiculous.

Goosenecks of the San Juan

1.51 Goosenecks of the San Juan. Painting progression. After finishing the last painting, I decided that I'd like to do more paintings that did not show the sky. The landscape of the southwest does not offer many clues to the scale of what you are looking at. All the normal objects that one would use for size comparison are few and far between: trees, animals, houses. One way that you do realize the size of what you're looking at is the way that distant objects seem to fade into the haze. Their colors become less vibrant and their shadows lose contrast. Sometimes things seem to be so far away that the sun has already set on them while you're still watching the sunset at your current location. That was the look that I was trying to convey in this painting.
For some reason I didn't use any solid colors in this painting and instead found that I liked the look of wavering streaks of color. This was due to the appearance of the cliffs that I was trying to depict. They weren't clean hewn walls of stone but rather slowly crumbled slopes. All sizes and colors of rock were mixed in along these slopes with hints of the underlying stratification peeking through. I tried to counter the messy look of the rock with clean and definite shadows.

Canyon de Chelly

1.50 Canyon de Chelly. This one is interesting to me. I often find that paintings that I really like don't look as interesting when I view them on the computer screen after photographing them. Conversely I find that paintings I dislike often look better on the screen than they do in person. This one falls into the latter category. Its still by no means one of my favorites but there are certain failed effects that I was trying to create that look a little more believable now. The first (and the whole reason that I attempted this painting in the first place) is the look of the dry riverbed. Its should appear to be streaked with ruts from where the last trickles of water ran before the flow ceased altogether. I was also trying to give a hint of this texture even in the area that is in shadow. I used a couple different shades of brown with a retardant to slow the drying of the paint. I kept laying each shade on top of the other, drawing the brush through the whole course of the riverbed each time. I tried to change the path slightly each time so that the ruts would cross over one another.
One particular detail that I'm very disappointed in are the low shrubs in front of the canyon wall in the right middle of the painting. In a book the reader's interest is held by the author's skill in picking out important details and calling attention to things that the reader may not have noticed if he or she were observing the same event. This doesn't mean giving every detail right down to the amount of rust on the nails in the floorboards; it means picking out the details that provide some insight into the essence of the scene and then finding a way to concisely describe them. These shrubs to me were a key to this scene. The shadows that they cast on the canyon wall gives the viewer a strong sense of where the sun is: just over their left shoulder. It also shows that the horizon is clear and subtly reminds the viewer that the canyon walls are really huge. I failed to depict these shadows. I painted them onto the wall before painting the shrubs but then covered them up when I painted the shrubs.
Seeing an object cast an accurate shadow in a painting is something that is very important to me and it is not so difficult when that object is a large boulder. I must get better at depicting more delicate objects like shrubs though...