Desert Landscape Painting and Photography

Sunday, June 13, 2010

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.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

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.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

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.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

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.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

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.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

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.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

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.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Landscape Arch

Painting 1.17, Landscape Arch, Utah. Thanks to being snowed in for the weekend I finished this on a huge 24x48" canvas. This painting was based on a picture that I had taken while visiting Arches National Park the previous year. What I noticed while looking at the picture was that it was taken from a position much closer to the arch than all of the other pictures that I had painted to that point. This meant that I could see very well the texture in the sandstone. So, as I started to paint in much the same way as I had been before, I felt the need to express some of that texture in the color of the sandstone. The other contributing factor was that I had just bought a new tube of red paint and its color was a bit off so I was continuously adding hints of yellow and brown after it was already on the canvas. The result was a much more "informative" surface to the sandstone. By informative I mean that the three dimensional qualities of the scene are not only conveyed by the location of shadows but also hopefully by the variation in tone of the light areas.

I was pleased with the result and felt that it looked less "cartoon-y", but this particular scene has raised a new issue. The actual "landscape arch" stretches over a hill covered in lush (for the desert) vegetation. I made the choice to eliminate the vegetation to preserve the simple shapes and not distract from the shadow of the arch span. A twisted juniper is the epitome of desert life, supplying nutrients to only its most sun-bathed branches and killing off the branches that are a waste of resources. I would love to depict these along side these arches, but that will have to wait for another painting.

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.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

The Maze 3

Painting 1.11, Fin arch in the maze. First, a quick lesson in how arches like this are formed. Once an area of stone has been reduced to tall fin-like pillars of sandstone there are a couple of ways that arches may be formed from these fins. One way is the seepage of water from precipitation into small cracks in the rock. When temperatures are cold enough, this water will freeze, expanding and putting pressure on the surrounding rock until pieces break off. If a fin is strong or weak in all the right places we might be able to temporarily see an arch form shortly (geologically) before the fin collapses entirely. Because arches form as a result of large chunks of rock breaking off rather that being worn down by wind, the features of an arch are usually jagged. In the case of this arch, most of the features have been smoothed by the passage of time. This makes it hard to pick an absolute point where shadows fade into light. As a result, looking at this now, I feel like some of the locations of dark shadows seem a bit arbitrary and do not lend the painting any depth. I plan to revisit this subject again to see if I can approach it in a different way.

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.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Maze

Painting 1.9, unnamed. This pothole arch is located in the remote maze district of Canyonlands NP. This is the painting that I most often look back on when I'm stuck trying to figure out how to translate what I see into a painting. The texture in the rocks in this painting came out just like I was hoping it would and the dark shadows really express the contrast that I think makes desert landscapes so interesting. There's something special about "The Maze". Its an extremely remote and difficult to reach area of Utah. When I try to paint scenes from this area I'm always inspired imagining the solitude in which these formations exist.

Arches National Park 2

Painting 1.8, Arches NP. One of the reasons that I am so fascinated by desert landscapes is the visible stratification. In a place like Arches, the rock that you are standing on is generally the oldest, while what you see when you look up is the newest. This seems counter-intuitive in a very compelling way and I'm always trying to express that fascination by exaggerating the divisions in the rock. What I realized one day was that aside from the basics, I had no idea how these rocks were formed. After checking out some books on the geology of Utah I learned a number of things that have begun to change the way that I approach painting landscapes like the one above. If I were to redo this painting now, the color differences would be much less pronounced. The main types of sandstone that you see in Arches are Navajo Sandstone, which has a light buff color and Entrada Sandstone, which has a rusty red color. Also, unlike what you'll notice when gazing at the famous views in the grand canyon, the lines of stratification do not all run parallel to one another in Arches. The process of bulging salt domes and eventual collapse have left the rocks in arches oriented in every which way. This same process is responsible for the very presence of conditions suitable for the formation of the arches. To ignore these facts is to miss the essence of Arches NP and the surrounding area.

Arches National Park

Painting 1.7, Sandstone Fins in Arches NP. I think one of the things that attracts photographers to Arches is the way that the sandstone formations cast such absolute shadows. When looking at a landscape from this area you expect to see stark contrast between light and dark. So often shadows are seen as a problem in photos, so much so that people are always working on ways to create HDR (high dynamic range) photos by combining multiple bracketed exposures. No such trickery is required in the desert though. The shadows become points of interest, where what you can't see is almost more fascinating than what you can. When I'm looking though pictures that I've taken trying to find something to paint, I'll often try to find the pictures with the most interesting shadows because that's the most fun part of the picture to paint!

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.

The White House Ruins

Painting 1.3, The white house ruins, an ancestral puebloan cliff dwelling in Canyon de Chelly National Monument. I really loved how there appeared to be a seam in the rock wall leading down to where these structures were built. Unfortunately I didn't have time to hike all the way down to the base of the cliff. These cliffs are excellent displays of streaky coating on sandstone known as desert varnish. I'm still trying to figure out a way to depict it in a painting, because it is truly one of the defining features of the landscape.

The Great Gallery

Painting 1.2, this painting depicts a portion of the "Great Gallery" in Horseshoe Canyon. The Great Gallery is a wall covered in pictographs painted by ancestral Puebloan people sometime between 2000BCE and 500CE. I saw this wall depicted in a movie and it really stuck with me. I hadn't painted anything in a long time but once I started to paint this I finished it in one sitting. The way that the figures are depicted like shadows on the canyon wall reminded me of Plato's allegory of the cave where people who know no difference believe the shadows on a wall to be reality rather than a reflection of reality.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

North Window Arch

Painting 1.4 The North Window, Arches National Park. This is another of the very first paintings that I completed. I'd left it out until this point because I had always felt that it didn't fit well with what I made before or after it. I was trying to build off of 1.3 (white house ruins) where I had liked the dark encroaching from the sides and the fractured look of the rock. I took this and went overboard with it in this painting. I think that I used too many colors trying to depict different strata in the rock. Its true that there are many layers visible in a fin of sandstone, but I feel like these are too exaggerated. Because I'm interested in the geology of the southwest, it has become important to me to depict rock strata with some amount of realism. Its easy to treat strata as an excuse to throw every earthy color you can mix up onto the canvas, but I feel like this might convey a misunderstanding and underappreciation of the landscape and the mechanisms that drive its creation.

One other aspect that I wasn't so fond of was the shadows. With the sun rising behind the arch, there was really almost no light reflecting from the side of the arch facing me. I exaggerated the surface to look like crumpled paper with stark shadows. I always believe that the way that these places look in reality is far better than what I can conjure with my imagination. If I work to find a way to depict a place based on how it really appears, I am almost always happy with the result.

However, these issues don't bother me as much now as they used to. When I remembered walking up to the north window as the sun rose, I saw it as it is shown in this painting. Only when I looked back at a picture that I had taken did I realize that the arch was only a silhouette. The benefit of painting a scene is that you can make it appear as it does in a faint and romanticized memory. I'd like to do more of this in future paintings.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Delicate Arch

Painting 1.1 Delicate Arch, Utah. This was the very first painting I ever completed. The university was having a spring art sale and I thought it would be fun to try to make something to submit. When was finished, I really liked it and didn't want to sell it. I wanted to build off of it and wanted to keep it around to look at and figure out what I had done wrong and what I had done well. Looking at it now, there are a lot of things that could have made it turn out a little better.

The first problem is the order in which I chose to paint the layers of the scene. I did it completely backwards: first the arch, then the wall behind the arch, then the field and mountains and finally the sky. I've since realized that it works best to paint the bottom layer first and to paint more of each layer than you expect to be visible when it is covered by the subsequent layer. The result in this painting is bits of white around the arch where I tried to carefully add in sky or background without painting over my arch. Bits of white canvas peeking through are very distracting in my opinion. Like a boom mic showing in a movie, it shatters the illusion that you are viewing reality. Every painting that I do now has a first layer of sky and a black shadow of what is going to be in the foreground. This ensures that there will be no white canvas peeking through at the end.

The second problem was that I went way overboard trying to get defined boundaries between the rock layers. I used painter's tape to make sure that one layer didn't bleed into another, but this restricted my ability to depict the actual shape of the rocks. Currently, I've gone to the other extreme and completely dropped noticeable stratification in favor of trying to show the shape of the stone. In reality the divisions between layers can be very noticeable, abruptly going from white to red and back. I'd like to get back to showing this, but find a more subtle way to do it.

The third problem is that I didn't do my research. At the time, I had never been to delicate arch and had no idea what the surroundings looked like. I found a few pictures of the arch and guessed on most of the rest. As a result I've added a strangely sloped wall behind the arch which slopes the other way in reality. I've flattened the field behind that and moved the La Sal mountain range at least 100 miles westward. Currently, if I'm trying to paint a scene that I haven't yet visited, I'll find as many photos as I can. Not just of the subject, but of the surrounding area. I'll look at satellite images of the area to figure out where that mountain range in the background really is and find out what kind of stone the formation is made from. When I do visit an area, I'll take lots of pictures of the surroundings just so that I can recall the scene more accurately later. The lack of a third dimension in a photo forces you to fake depth perception and can fool you into thinking foreground objects are part of the background. This makes pictures taken from different angles important to getting the scene right.