Monument Valley III

1.69 Monument Valley III

Double Arch II

1.68 Double Arch II

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.

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.

Cedar Breaks National Monument

1.49 Cedar Breaks NM. Painting progression. I can't decide if this looks like a canyon or just splotches of color. I know what it is supposed to look like so I see a canyon but I'm afraid that other people wouldn't. Maybe that is a good thing though. One good thing about not trying to accurately represent a subject is that you can focus more on making a pleasing composition of colored shapes in the painting. The problem here is that I'm not sure if this composition works as anything other than a depiction of a canyon.
I got a particularly watery bottle of brown acrylic paint recently. The brand that I use is usually a nice thick consistency but this particular bottle sometimes requires two applications to get a solid block of color. I had fun using this to give an uneven coloration to the shady portions of the painting. I painted the whole thing as if evenly sunlit first and then went back and painted the shadows over this. The thin brown paint allowed the lighter colors below to show through if I pushed hard with the brush.

Delicate Arch

1.47 Delicate Arch

Park Avenue at Sunset

Painting 1.18, Park Avenue in Arches NP. One thing that you see a lot of in the desert are horizons where the landscape blends into the sky as it stretches off into the distance. When I first discovered photoshop I thought that I could take a picture that was taken on a cloudy day, remove the blown-out white sky and replace it with a more interesting sky from some picture taken on a sunny day. This, of course, results in a picture that looks completely fabricated and ugly. One big reason is that the horizon line will be all screwed up, the sky is dark and contrasty while the land in the distance is gray, or the sky on the horizon will be hazy while the land is sharp and clear. I tried to consider that issue here, where I wanted to create the impression of a landscape that continued on to the horizon. Dividing the scene into fore, middle and background I added increasing amounts of gray to the colors I was using as I moved farther away from the observer. This may seem like the obvious thing to do, but I painted over the background a number of times trying to find the right amount of gray to distinguish it from the sky while making what I thought was a realistic horizon.

The last time that I visited Arches, I assembled a time lapse video of sunset at Park Avenue over the course of two hours which can be viewed here. It was my first attempt at time lapse during day light and I learned a lot which I will try to share in my posts on that page.

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Zion National Park

Painting 1.38 Zion National Park. When I thought I had finished this painting I stepped back to look at it and it just felt wrong. I spent the next couple of hours glancing over at it while I was watching a movie trying to put my finger on what had gone wrong. When I woke up the next morning I came out to look at it while I was brushing my teeth and it was so obvious: The little trees in the distance weren't casting shadows on the wall behind them! They appeared to be just floating in the air in front of the wall.

This kind of mistake is easy to make in a painting done from a photograph. Its easy to get caught up in recreating the basic form and location of blocks of color while ignoring the environmental source of those colors. Looking at the trees I saw green with some dark areas behind the green. I was more worried about not messing up the trees and I just added some dark spots in around the trunks to make it look like they were at least rooted somewhere. In the meantime I was carefully recreating the shadow of every other feature on that wall. Because I put so much focus on the shadows of everything else, the implication is that the trees were their own light source, unaffected by the shadows around them and creating none of their own.

This all underlines the importance of really studying a subject while painting it. If there is a shadow, figure out what is casting it. If there are overlapping features, try to imagine what is going on behind the overlap. Just copying shapes will leave things looking disjointed, especially in a medium like painting where features are often implied rather than laid out in explicit detail as they might be in an ink drawing.

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Glen Canyon

Painting 1.31 Glen Canyon. This is the first painting that I've done that has any kind of message beyond my attempts to express my fascination with the desert. Until 1966, Glen Canyon had been the tedious creation of millions of years of erosion by the Colorado River, the home of the Anasazi, the landscape rediscovered and described in beautiful detail by explorer John Wesley Powell, and the site of desperate archaeological study in 1956 as the Glen Canyon Dam was being built. After 1966 it was to be none of these things. The Glen Canyon Dam converted it to a holding tank for water that was to be used to make life livable in the surrounding desert. Now, life had always been livable in the desert as the Anasazi have left evidence of. However, life now means green suburbs, golf courses and water-skiing. How could people be expected to grow a modern economy in this hostile environment if they couldn't live a modern lifestyle? The other motivation for the dam was the idea that the energy accumulated by the water of the Colorado during its descent from the plain could be converted into a cash by a hydroelectric plant built into the dam.

And so a gate was slammed down in the path of the conduit for millions of years of erosion and deposition. The contents of lower glen canyon were drowned and the result couldn't have been given a more offensive name: Lake Powell. By the time people realized what they had lost, it was too late to go back. The surrounding area depended on the water to survive, and the emptying of Lake Powell would have catastrophic effects downstream.

However, even a lake in the desert might not be enough to quench the thirst of cities like Page, AZ. Precipitation rates show a downward trend in the west and the water levels in Lake Powell have dropped to record lows in the last 10 years. As the water drops, the sickly, bleached white sandstone of Glen Canyon is exposed once more. During one extended drought in 2003, the mechanisms of desert varnish creation were allowed to function once again on this exposed sandstone and its color began to return before it was submerged once again.

The truth is that Glen Canyon will outlast the dam. While a concrete dam embedded in stone may seem permanent on the human timescale, on a geological timescale its akin to trying stop the tide from destroying your sand castle by laying down in front of it. The Colorado River will sabotage the operation of the dam by piling sediment against it and cutting through the sandstone that anchors it. Once this happens, humans may be forced to accept the reality that they have to adapt to their environment rather than conquer it.

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Skull Arch

Painting 1.30 Skull Arch. This arch was an especially challenging subject. The two-arch formation seems so surreal and improbable that it might just look like I was painting a picture of a wall and decided to throw in two random blue blobs in the middle of it. In an attempt to make this scene believable I looked at all the pictures I had taken of this arch when I visited it and others that I found online for reference. Each picture showed the arch at a slightly different time of day, and each position of the sun cast vastly different shadows on the rock. Parts of the scene are depicted under mid-day light, while others are as they appear later in the afternoon. This allowed each piece of the scene to be shown in a way that was most easily imagined in three dimensions. I selected little bits of each picture to highlight different details of the arch, such as the background rocks seen through the arches which should look like they're being hit by more direct light. The foreground should appear to be lit by a combination of direct light and diffuse light, reflected from the opposing wall, behind the viewer. This meant that the shadows in the foreground needed to have a subtle glow to them.

One of the advantages of the plein air painter is that he is copying the original. If any detail is unclear, he can move around and look more closely to work it out. When painting from a photograph, one is making a copy of a copy and the scene has lost a lot already by being captured on film. This is why it helps to have multiple pictures of the same scene in different conditions. It will at least simulate the experience of sitting and watching a place for an extended period of time.

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