Monument Valley V

1.101 Monument Valley V

Storm

1.100 Storm

The Maze VI

1.99 The Maze VI

Surprise Arch III

1.98 Surprise Arch III

Death Valley

1.97 Death Valley. 

Maze V

1.96 The Maze V. I really struggled trying to create depth in this painting. I left the dark of the central arch for last and had been pleased with the progress until I finished that last section and stepped back to look at the painting. Instead of a pocket dug into the sandstone with an oculus high over the rim in the shadow of the alcove, it looked like a wall, flat to the viewer, that had been painted brown. I realized that I had let shapes and colors from different planes mingle together as I had layered them. This pulled the background up and stuffed the foreground down into one flatish plane. 

I went back to try to segregate the planes again. The orange-y highlights had all been the same shade because I had imagined them to all be part of one continuous wall that wrapped around from behind the arch. I decided instead to use different shades with defined borders to emphasize the distance and position of the features. I thickened the rim of the alcove and blended a few shades of brown into the ceiling in an attempt to suggest the form of the arch. 

I've always been intrigued by the idea of suggesting a form only using the shadows that it casts. Here the shadows below the alcove suggest that it reaches out over the rim of the wall it is dug into. I thought about including a highlight where the sun would be shining through the oculus from behind the alcove but worried that it would look unnatural as it had when I had done it in a previous painting. I'm still not satisfied with the result of these efforts but I think that I will need to start over again fresh rather than continue to muddle this painting. 

Ibex Dunes

1.94 Ibex Dunes. The sand in this painting required a lot more subtle color differences and blending than I typically use. This meant that I had to paint all of the color exactly as I wanted it to be before I could lay on the shadows. If I discovered that a bluish area needed to move over slightly, it would be too late to correct it after I had added the shadows which would preclude the use of the big brush I needed to do the blending. I typically try to paint with this in mind but usually find myself making corrections for reasons of composition at the end. What I discovered here though was that all the blending allowed me to move elements of the scene around while the paint was still wet and I made a lot of adjustments before I let that layer of paint dry. I'm going to have to come back to this one over the next couple of days to decide if it is interesting or not.

Park Avenue III

1.93 Park Avenue III. I wonder if I use too much color in these night scenes. I always set out thinking that I'm going to create a monochromatic blue painting when I start a night scene. In the end, I can't resist mixing in dull sunset colors on the stone. This is how I remember these scenes for some reason. I remember sitting, watching the sun set and the stars appear; remembering the colors of the sunset while the rising full moon relieves the shadows that the scene disappeared into as the sun set. I guess this is the reason I paint pictures instead of just recording them with a camera; I can show what I remember when a photograph doesn't.

Shiprock II

1.92 Shiprock II. This is the sight that started my fascination with the southwest when I was a kid. This massive jagged stone pushed up through the center of an otherwise flat, featureless field with sawtoothed walls of stone running up to it. The walls look too tall and thin to be formed by natural weathering, almost like a massive volcano began to erupt through cracks in the the earth before the magma was frozen mid air. This turns out to be partially true, as the formation is the neck of an ancient volcano that has been unearthed by erosion over 20 million years. Shiprock was like nothing I had ever seen, and that photograph captured my imagination.

Many years later I finally found my way to that field in New Mexico. Along the way I had met a Navajo man in Page, Arizona who had told me a story about a giant bird that nested atop the rock. A young Navajo man had bravely climbed to the top and taken a feather from the bird which he used to make the first fletching, which allowed him to turn the tide in a war. This was a sacred site, and there were many different stories about it.

Hearing all of these stories had transmitted a sense of reverence to me and I was hesitant to approach the central rock. The wind blew so hard across the field that it was difficult to walk. I climbed the hill to the stone wall leading to the rock. Out of breath from fighting the wind as I climbed I opened my mouth to take a breath but my lungs were filled by the wind without my having to inhale. I gasped and choked as I leaned with my hand resting on the wall. I had touched the place that I had dreamed about for so long and it had touched me. I couldn't bring myself to go any further so I left, and shiprock is still in the distance for me.

Monument Valley IV

1.91 Monument Valley IV. This was an extremely quick painting. I wanted to focus on emphasizing the distance as the buttes receded on the horizon. As usual, I did this by adding increasing amounts of grey to the colors that I mixed for highlights and shadows. In this instance, I think that the difference between each level in the painting was too much and that the buttes appear to be of different colors rather than farther away. The ground is all the same shade because it was supposed to be a hill in the foreground. Perhaps this is not obvious and that is what makes the colors in the distance seem so false.

Monitor and Merrimack

1.89 Monitor and Merrimack. After finishing the painting of Antelope Canyon on a huge canvas, I decided to do one more on a tiny 12x16 canvas. I used the same wet on wet style here that I used previously, but tried to learn how to control it a little better and create the contrast the I want to convey in my paintings. 

I'm trying to be less careful with my paintings; to work quickly and see what results rather than carefully planning each step, practicing each stroke with my brush hovering over the canvas. I've treated every painting as an important work; thinking about how it fits in with my previous work and how it will look when I post it on this blog. I decided a long time ago that I would post any painting that I finished even if I hated it because I felt that it might be helpful to other aspiring painters who happened upon this blog to see the up and down process that one goes through in creating art. The problem is that I always play it safe when working on a painting; I don't want to create something so horrible that I'll be ashamed to see it on my website. Going forward I'm going to try to ignore my instinct to cling to the familiar, safe choices and paint exactly as I feel.

Antelope Canyon

1.88 Antelope Canyon. I'm usually very stingy with my paint. I always wait for a previous layer of paint to dry before I apply the next layer so that I can use the least amount of paint to render the color difference. One consequence of this approach is that I rarely finish a painting in one day, let alone one sitting. I've often wondered if this has an effect on my style of painting and whether or not finishing a painting in one continuous sitting would result in a different type of work.

I've wanted to paint antelope canyon since I visited it years ago, but I never have because of perceived limitations in my style of painting. First, the shadows on the smooth, curving canyon wall slowly blend into the light which is the antithesis of the stark shadows that I usually like to paint. Second, a painting of antelope canyon would require so many layers of paint and waiting for said paint to dry that I never thought I'd have the patience. 

Today I decided that I'd paint all the layers at once, while the paint was wet. Starting from the most distant layer I laid on thick sheets of paint, adding more and more to overwhelm the colors from the layers below as I went from highlight to shadow. One of the major challenges that I discovered with this style of painting was attempting to disguise my brushstrokes. With colors from underneath blending with the paint on my brush as I dragged it across the canvas, it was impossible to hide the beginning and end of each stroke. I had to make each stroke begin and end at the edge of the canvas or else blend the colors from the layers below. This was difficult for me as I like to create sharp contrast between the elements of a scene in my paintings.

The benefit of this style of painting is the frequent encounters with the unexpected. Colors that were buried deep below would appear seredipitously to create interesting effects that I had not planned. I tried to train myself to look for these elements as they came into existence because it was all too easy to wipe them away with the next stroke of the brush and never even notice.

Smith Fork Canyon

1.87 Smith Fork Canyon. I'm trying to plan a cross country trip to live in the Utah desert for 6 months. In order to carry enough supplies for 6 months of painting in my jeep I'll have to live without my 1" deep canvases. I bought this gessoboard to try out as an alternative, and got some interesting results. The smooth surface and lack of absorbency allowed me to smear on multiple layers of color and to determine the blend of these colors by varying the pressure on my brush as I scrubbed it up and down the board. I even got out the palette knife that I haven't used in years to tidy up the little blotches that are so visible when a brush is lifted from such a smooth, saturated surface at the end of a stroke. 

I didn't set out to create a painting so different in style than what I usually create; the style was driven by the properties of the surface.

Paul Bunyan Arch II

1.86 Paul Bunyan Arch II. The first painting that I did of this arch is one of my favorites. The noon lighting and sharp edged shapes lend themselves to the kind of depiction I was striving for. It was one of the first times where I was consciously trying to treat the shadows as an arrangement of shapes and altering my depiction to create shapes that I thought were pleasing.
I wanted to revisit this arch to try a different approach. The original painting used a lot of blending to hint at what was foreground and background and to depict the glow of reflected light on the underside of the arch. Here, I'm trying to create that same depth using only blocks of solid color. Looking back at the original, I think I've fallen short in this regard. However, I think that the colors in this version are more pleasant. The challenge is to approach as nearly as possible the understanding of the scene that one would receive from standing in front of the actual arch. I think that depth is crucial to this and I will have to continue to work to find a way to depict depth in this style.

Bowtie Arch II

1.85 Bowtie Arch II. This is actually a painting of a painting. It is a crop of the first painting I did of Bowtie Arch back in 2010. I repeated the method of successive sketches that I used for my last painting. This time I also included the relative tone of each section in my sketching. 

Spiderweb Arch III

1.84 Spiderweb Arch III. Lately I've been experimenting with more in depth planning of the composition of my paintings. I used to rant and rave in art class when my teacher asked me to draw a series of thumbnail sketches of the planned work before starting. I always changed things around as I worked and felt that the thumbnail sketches would ruin the possibility of my work surprising me. Until recently I've always compiled a bunch of photographs from different angles at different times of day of each subject and merged them into a composition in my head as I worked. This resulted in a lot of paintings where I discovered a connection between the shapes half way through, and a painting the hadn't felt promising would become one of my favorites. More often I would discover that what had seemed so interesting in my head appeared flat and contrived on the canvas. 

After a run of frustrating unfinished paintings I recently started making sketches of what I thought a painting was going to look like to screen for ideas that were absolutely not going to work. I'd then discard the sketches and start the painting. I was still processing the realistic photo image into simpler shapes in my head as I went. 

For this painting, I made a sketch of the scene, trying to reproduce only the elements that I wanted for my painting. Then I made a sketch of the sketch; followed by another sketch and another. After four generations of sketches I felt that I had wiped away all of the unnecessary details and had begun to focus on the arch as a jigsaw puzzle of flowing shapes rather than a sandstone wall with a hole worn through. 

I discarded the original picture this time and used only the sketch to complete the painting. I struggled with the lack of a guide for color choice. I repainted the scene 3 times trying to get the differences in the shades of the shadow right. If even one of the shades was off, I would repaint them all because I needed the layering to be in the right order to avoid having to use a small brush to make lazy looking strokes in the corners of shapes. 

I have a few issues with this painting. The effort that I put into getting each piece just right in shape and color doesn't show and the bottom portion of the painting looks especially lazy. I think that the colors are a little warm, especially the highlights, and they don't quite suggest moonlight like they're supposed to. 

Double Arch III

1.83 Double Arch III. I took a really long time deciding how many stars to show in this painting. I had spent a really long time creating the gradient sky on the 30x40 canvas and didn't want the stars to dominate and obscure the effect. So I pulled out my star chart and searched for a good section of the sky to place behind the arch. This view would be looking west so I had to choose constellations that would realistically appear in this part of the sky. Seeing that the geminid meteor shower was coming up I chose to put Gemini in the largest portion of the sky. 

With my constellation subjects chosen, I now had to decide how which stars to paint. It would be easy to pick and choose the stars with the best placement for balance and accent however one problem arises. I will illustrate this problem with a critique of the book "The Stars" by H. A. Rey, author of the Curious George books. It is a charmingly written and illustrated guide to learning the constellations for children. What he did was to re-draw the stick figures that the constellations were supposed to form, connecting different stars to form new pictures. The goal of these "new style"constellations was to present a figure that more accurately represented what the constellation was supposed to be. Ursa Major was rendered as a seated bear with a saddle on her back rather than the trotting bear with the ridiculously long tail that we all know. 

At first glance this seems brilliant, these figures are much more easily recognizable than the ones that we're usually taught. The problem is that these new figures make use of stars of apparent magnitudes up to 6 (with lower numbers being brighter). This means that someone would only see these stars in the darkest of skies, far from city lights. Furthermore if you were under a sky clear enough and dark enough to see these stars you would also be able to see the thousands more of that same magnitude that would be peppered throughout the constellation making it almost impossible to pick out the stars that make up the constellation stick figure.

This second issue is what troubled me as I was deciding what to paint. Realistically, if I were to choose a star with an apparent magnitude of 5, the viewer should also be able to see every other magnitude 5 star in the field of view of the painting. So I decided to limit the visible magnitude for the sake of relieving clutter in the painting. The sky you see here would be what you'd expect in Downtown Raleigh, not the Utah desert. 

This whole conversation is really pointless and persnickety but the sky is my favorite part of this painting. The actual arch did not live up to my excited expectations after my work on the sky. The arch is moonlit and I painted it twice, changing where the light was coming from. I enjoy these night scenes though, so I'll have to try again.

White House Ruins VII

1.82 White House Ruins VII. By now these mysterious ruins are so familiar to me that I always choose to paint them if I want to just let my imagination run away with me and not even think about the subject. There is something about this place that inherently lends itself to abstraction. Photographs of the varnished, checkerboard cliff bulging above the Anasazi houses appear as a surreal representation of a cliff. The houses, made of the same stone appear to blend into ledge on which they were built. Here I decided to emphasize this by attempting no differentiation between the houses and the cliff aside from the shapes left where they disappear into the shadows.

Camel Butte

1.73 Camel Butte. I started this painting over 6 months ago. I was never really enthralled with the subject and I kept changing my mind about the colors. I started with a much darker rust color for the foreground stone. However, when I started to thin it out and add grey for the background I found that the background looked so bright that the foreground seemed to be entirely in the shade. So I redid all of the colors and started to work on the shadows. Unsure of what to do with the shadows in the foreground I tried to use intricate patterns of shadows to create the look of an alluvial fan spreading out from the butte. This made the thing almost painful to look at and, frustrated, I tossed it into a heap of unfinished canvases that seemed to always growing during that frustrating time. 

I returned to this painting on a day that I had off from work to see if I couldn't salvage what I had put so much work into. I redid the colors again and merged the venous shadows into one large area, imagining that there were some cliff behind the viewer casting a shadow on Camel Butte in the setting sun. I think that the background here is a lot more interesting than the foreground and I'll try to carry that over to a future painting. 

Ear of the Wind

1.81 Ear of the Wind. This is the reason that I'm always timid to block out a large area of a painting in one color. Here I bit off a huge chunk of the bottom of the canvas, imagining that the featureless sand could be a dramatic contrast to the arch above. I'm not sure if it would have been better if I revealed more of the arch, or just moved the whole scene down in the frame or scrapped the concept altogether. 

Sometimes what makes a photo of a feature like this so visually arresting is the placement of a person in the scene to suggest scale and to give a clue of which direction the light is coming from. I avoid placing people in my pictures because I think it grounds the scene in representational reality. As I've said before, my goal is to create landscapes that are pleasing not just as a scene, but as an arrangement of colored shapes. A human would be a distracting detail. However, I stopped just short of a human here, including these posts that have been driven into the sand around the arch. I thought that they would look interesting in contrast to the expanse of sand. I violated another one of my rules by using a small brush to paint the posts. Lately I've come to the conclusion that if a feature is going to require the use of a small brush then it is too finely detailed and fiddly to include and will only be distracting. I'm afraid that has proved true here. 

I always add grey to my foreground colors to use them for a background layer to suggest that the viewer is looking at these distant objects through a large volume of air. Lately I've begun to include purple in this mix and I like the result.

Melody Arch

1.80 Melody Arch. One of the things that I enjoy about painting as compared to photography is that in creating a painting you have absolute control over how to depict lighting. Shooting a photograph into the sun as in this view would result in all sorts of blown out highlights or details lost in shadows, you'd have to choose one or the other. Here I was able to show a slight contrast between the colors of the shadow on the sand in the foreground and the stone while also keeping the background dark enough to show the fainter shadows on the cliffs in the distance. Neither a painting nor a photo will show you exactly what you would have seen standing there that day, but at least in a painting you know that each color and shade is the conscious decision of a person who experienced it. 

Skull Arch II

1.79 Skull Arch II. Skull Arch is a perfect example of the kind of subject that suffered from too much detail in my earlier attempt to paint it. Last time, I was preoccupied with creating some kind of starburst in the sky behind the arch, replicating desert varnish and texturing the stone. What I missed was the powerful shape of the pothole arch. I made the rim too thin, sapping its strength. I included so many little crumbly shadows in an attempt to make it look "real" but they only made it look flatter. This time I chose to focus on the shape of the arch, forming the small scattered shadows into bigger chunks of shade. I made sure that the rim appeared thick and strong. I'm trying to not be afraid of painting large areas of the canvas black-brown. I used to always worry that it appeared lazy to just block out a large section of the canvas with what was essentially devoid of visual information. If there is noting to see here, why is it in the painting? But I realize that the context of the lighted subject is important and by including these large areas of shade, the context is somewhat built into the painting. 

Surprise Arch II

1.78 Surprise Arch II. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been revisiting a lot of painting subjects lately. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. First, these recent paintings are an interpretation of another painting rather than a fresh interpretation of a landscape. This has allowed me eliminate superfluous details and refine the scenes further than I could when I was struggling to pick out the important visual information during my first attempt. Having all of my paintings hanging around my house gives me years to casually look at them and subconsciously work out the problems that I had with them. The second reason that I'm recreating old paintings is to take stock of where I am currently. My output dropped off to almost nothing for the majority of the past year as I struggled through a period of crippling ennui at my day job that spread to my work at home.

I consider each painting to be a step in a journey towards what I imagine as my ideal style. After finally getting back to work, I needed to discover where I had left off. Looking back, I'll share what I discovered.
My first paintings focused on exaggerated color differences between sandstone layers. I imagined by exaggerating this striking feature of the desert landscape I could evoke the awe that one feels when they see this otherworldly landscape.

Because I was so interested in the stone formations, I began to read books on the geology of the area so that I could learn how they were created. I hoped that my knowledge of the genesis of these formations would inform my depiction of them. However, what I learned about the deposition of the sandstone members of the Moab area made my wildly varying colors look ridiculous to me. I had been shoehorning the extra color into my paintings.

I took some time off and when I came back, I began to focus on texture instead of color. The variations in color of the sandstone were limited to no more than three varieties in a painting and the formerly smooth blocks of color were scrubbed with brown and red paint to simulate the granular texture of the sandstone. With this change, I felt compelled to include more details so that the added texture wouldn't look out of place. Soon clouds began to appear in the skies and eventually trees and scrub in the canyons. The absolute contrast of the older paintings was replaced by blending and what I consider sleight of hand techniques, representing leaves on a tree as twisting thrusts of a ragged brush.

When I was in high school art class, I used to draw photo-realistic recreations of portraits from magazines. A friend of mine in the class one day quoted me a passage from an art book to the effect of "with the advent of photography there is no more value in realistically recreating a scene by other means." I was offended at the time, and while I still don't agree entirely (photographs are not an absolute record of a scene as the medium has its own unique and surreal qualities such as depth of field and dynamic range) I now see that detailed recreation of a subject is not always the truest way to represent the subject. Often, refining the depiction to just a few details can align better with one's experience of a person or place.

Interestingly, the majority of the paintings that I have sold are from this set; which is my least favorite. This style stuck with me up to the summer of 2011 after I had started work and begun to first feel the damaging effect of strictly scheduled days on my will to create. After not painting for months, I had two weeks off in the summer. I woke and slept when I wished and went out walking all day. One day I came home and started a large painting of a river winding through a canyon. It was an aerial view and as such did not provide a lot of opportunities for cues to the viewer about the three dimensional shape of the canyon. As I painted and re-painted and covered over layer after layer, I finally realized that my best tool for conveying shape to the viewer were the shadows that the canyon walls cast on the river and the opposite rim.

Slowly shadow became a stronger theme in my paintings and texture became less and less prominent. I did paintings with just three colors: sky, shadow and stone. I tried painting a canvas the color of sandstone and creating the feeling of depth entirely through the addition of shadow. I felt that the effect of the landscape should be produced by representing only what was actually there, often less, and never more.

The restriction of detail that came with such a limited palette made me less intimidated by large canvases that would have taken weeks to complete in my older style. With the use of large canvases came larger brushes and with the use of larger brushes came more flowing shapes. I began to see my paintings as an arrangement of shapes that didn't necessarily have to be viewed as a landscape. I wanted the colors and shapes to be pleasing in a way that was completely separate from recognition and understanding of the subject.

At the cresting of this wave of rapid output I created one of my favorite paintings: 1.70 Canyon de Chelly. Then, as if I had simply exhausted the last of my creative energy I could not create another painting that I was proud of.

During this slump I tried to simplify again by creating line drawings. I made them looser and looser until the subject was unrecognizable sometimes. When this failed to jump-start my painting again I gave up for many months and didn't paint at all.

I was recently asked by a local art magazine to submit a bio for a possible article in their upcoming issue. I decided to write something new and in doing so had to reconsider where my inspiration came from. Remembering those dark forms towering over me the first time that I went into Arches before the sunrise I realized that the shapes and the shadows where what stimulated my imagination years ago and I tried to paint again.

Factory Butte

1.74 Factory Butte. I don't think that this is finished yet, but I liked the way that it looked unfinished, and there's a good chance I'll mess it up when I try to finish it, so I wanted to post the unfinished version and later add the "finished" version.

Grand Canyon III

1.77 Grand Canyon III

Delicate Arch II

1.76 Delicate Arch II. I've painted over this canvas more times than any other. On three separate occasions, the first being immediately after completing my first painting, I've tried to paint this scene. So this has been sitting half finished for almost 4 years now. Watching the sun rise sitting on this cliff across from delicate arch is one of my favorite memories from my visits to Arches NP. I sat for 3 hours in the cold watching the shadows change and move across the cliffs and fins. However, this painting shows a sunset! I've been trying all this time to capture what I found so amazing about the sunrise but just couldn't find a way to translate it into a painting in the style that I wanted. Sunset casts a lot more of the canyon into shade and makes for a lot of interesting interaction between the large fins in the foreground. I may try again to depict this scene at sunrise, but for now it feels good to no longer have this half finished canvas propped up in my hallway.

Unnamed Maze Arch IV

1.75 Unnamed Maze Arch IV. It has been a very long time since I've completed a painting. After I completed the painting of Canyon de Chelly (1.70) I thought that I had reached the next step towards that style that I'm striving towards. However, subsequent efforts were all disappointing, to the extent that 1.73 and 1.74 are both sitting unfinished on the floor. I started the line drawings in an attempt to refocus on simple, effective depictions of the landscape. Even after some enjoyable results from that I still could not get started.
I decided to take a trip to Utah to see if I couldn't rediscover what had motivated me to start all of this 4 years ago. This time, instead of going alone, my best friend came with me. She had never seen Utah except in photographs and paintings. Showing Arches NP to her and watching her discover the feeling of awe and calm while sitting under Sand Dune Arch reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw all of these things. We got up early to hike out to Mesa Arch for sunrise and saw the sky so dark that you could see the Andromeda Galaxy.
After I came back, I decided that I would revisit some of the first paintings that I completed to see how 3 years of experience and change would impact their style. This painting is a recreation of 1.11 . I like the choice of colors in the earlier version best, especially the grey. But I like that the shadows are simplified in the newer version. Also I fibbed a bit in the earlier version, removing a bit of canyon wall seen through the arch. In this version I put it back in and I think that it helps the arch not look like it is floating in the sky, disconnected from any surrounding rock.
I'm going to try to revisit some more earlier paintings to see if I can't find the style I want without the added pressure of interpreting a whole new scene at the same time.

2.5 White House Ruins

2.4

Skyline Arch

Monument Valley

Landscape Arch

2.1 Landscape Arch. Trying something a little different. I can't decide if I want to keep adding color or try to focus on the shapes and keep it simple. Maybe adding just one color to the mix would be best.

Artsplosure 2012

Once again, I will have a chance to set up my booth near Moore Square in downtown Raleigh for Artsplosure. I am really looking forward to meeting all the people who stop by. Last year, I was amazed at the number of people who shared my sense of connection to the southwest landscape. I hope to hear lots of stories of hiking in Zion and camping in the backcountry.

Courthouse Towers

1.72 Courthouse Towers

White House Ruins V

1.71 White House Ruins V

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.