January Sky, the Painting

My most recently completed studio painting:

January Sky, approximately 30 x 36″ (I haven’t measured it yet), acrylic on canvas, 2011.

This is not a plein air painting. It was inspired by a walk up SE Salmon Street, late one afternoon a few weeks ago. The clouds were gray, but somehow a light was pouring through them, straight down the street in front of me. It was, as Jan puts it, an ethereal moment. I had to paint it, back in the studio, with only my visual memory as reference.

I was also inspired by the pentatonic flute, which requires repetition to be really effective. The almost monochromatic palette echoes the six notes of the flute, and the houses, lined up along the geometries of linear perspective, make me think of the notes of the flute, carefully calibrated to make pleasing sounds, repeating the sounds with variations, and then swelling with under and overtones.

Well, the conceit sounded good in my head <snort>

I have switched to my winter, stuck-in-the-studio acrylic-painting mode, trying to keep the worst of oil toxicity out of the space. Acrylics blend differently, pigment somewhat differently, and are just plain ornery in my hands. But they dry fast and don’t cause my body to protest. So I keep working, hoping to learn to use them well.

–June

Petrified Forest Residency: A concluding remark or two, in Context

I have been shilly-shallying about writing this conclusion for close to a month now. And it’s not because I don’t know what I want to say. I think it’s because I can summarize or I can expostulate, and while the first is almost too brief, the latter is too turgid.

So here are some silly opening thoughts:

1. I could never live for long in the desert. Hat- qua- Desert Hair is a serious problem.

June, in desert hat, in Portland Oregon. Note she is not displaying what happens to her hair after she wears the hat.

2. The artist-in-the-park is considered picturesque and scenic, even while grimacing over her inability to get the reds just right. Tourists will take photos, openly and surreptitiously. Some pretend they are photographing elsewhere, but the artist knows. Many will ask permission, and then the standard answer is  “my best side is from behind.” Which is merely the truth.

3. The Petrified Forest views, indeed most “landscape” views, are not what they appear, even when one reads the Park Service signs. The unconformities, depriving one of easy impressions, are everywhere.

(Note the now-closed outhouse at the left end of the old Puebloan walls: the Park Service changed its mind about this building’s use. This is a painting that will be revised slightly but the outhouse will remain. This view is Draft 1 of the Puerco Pueblo Ruins, Oil on masonite, 12 x 16, 2010

3. Places are seldom without human presence, although that presence may have gone away long ago:

Route 66 and Interstate 40, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010. The Park Service pull-over where this car is located is just over the hill from the Puerco Puebloan ruins. They date to about 1100 AD.

4. Parks are full of people who want something, but it’s a bit unclear what they want — mostly to get back into their cars and see if what they want is over the hill.

The last remark is unfair to most of the folks I met in the park. Mostly they seem to want to know and to see, and they do their best, given the limits that time, energy, life, and travel by motor vehicle provide.

But it’s that thought, that people want more but don’t know what “more” might consist of, that leads me to what I came to realize about my own approach to land-and-urban-scapes.  To summarize: what excites me most about the painting I do is knowing — physically and mentally — the context of what I’m painting. And then trying to find ways to incorporate that “context” into the painting — or, barring that, into the presentation of the painting.

This isn’t a new approach for me — it’s just a new recognition of my own desires (like the tourist who wants more, I want more than just an oil rendition of an astonishing geological/geographical/city scene spectacle). To prove that I have been working on what I will call “context” for some years, here are a few old paintings from the files:

Mine Shaft, Basin, Montana, 7 x 9″, oil on masonite, 2007

Circling, SE Alder and 6th, 30 x 40″, Oil on canvas, 2008

Bloomtime, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2008

Gold Point Playa, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2009

But most of Context, even the immediate sort, is impossible in the strictly visual arts. Even more so in a single painting. I can’t figure out how to get the smell of dusty sagebrush and blooming rabbitbush into my paintings no matter how often the wind blows bits into the oils. The sounds might be recovered by a tape recorder — and I’m seriously thinking about investigating digital tape recorders for my future efforts. Taping the sounds of a seemingly pure landscape might be one context worth considering — truck traffic,  valley-girl gossip of the nearby viewers, the ravens scolding and begging, the crunch of gravelled paths.

So that’s one context consideration — perhaps a tape of the entire painting time — boring but only needing to be encountered in segments by the viewer might add the context and enrich the experience of the viewer.

But the larger context — historical, geological — unconformities, pit houses, the Colorado Plateau Uplift — these are somewhat larger and harder to convey. And yet, and yet, I want to convey them.

So that’s what I learned at the Petrified Forest — that while I am painting, I am considering not just the scene in front of me but all the context around it that I can take in: that the area is at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, features three basic areas (low grass prairie, Painted Desert badlands, and petrified wood), has had the feet of humans crossing it and possibly living in it since 2000 years before Christ (BCE), has public displays of ruins of structures that date from 1100 AD, has a wash that was used as a trail by surveyors in 1853 and acted as a trail for many thereafter, features Route 66 memorabilia, has Interstate 40 running through it, has two petrified wood structures (one built by Puebloan Peoples in 1100, one built by a local hotelier in the 1920′s), both modified in the 1930′s by CCC guys who were from Philadelphia which is in my home state), and so on and on.

The Painted Desert from Pintado Point, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

The difference between walking through a gorgeous landscape, sitting and looking at a marvelous view, and applying paint to canvas to simulate the gorgeous, marvelous landscape in order to make a plein air “landscape” is monumental. Sitting and walking have certain similarities. Sitting and painting have other similarities. But actually, each is a different experience. And then one adds in all the hours and years and millenia that that landscape has experienced, and one might very well simply throw in the towel.

But egoist that I am, I believe that my art is worth doing only if I try to incorporate even the teeniest bit of my experience and knowledge into it, giving it a different context from what the tourist next to me experienced. I do this for myself, and then I hope that it becomes part of others’ “landscape” and allows them to linger a bit longer than they might otherwise.

Pintado Point, above, is not only the landscape I saw often, driving north along the Petrified Forest’s highway, where you come around a corner and over a bit of a hill and Bam! there it is. It is also the tail end of a large set of badlands called The Painted Desert in this area of Arizona, most of which is outside the park. It also contains fossils that are 225 million years old — “Triassic Park” as Jer and others like to call it because an early dinosaur fossil  has been found in these formations. The badlands are also the last remains of geological features,  about 215 million years of them, which have disappeared. This is the Park’s great unconformity, where the dark basaltic area in the forefront is about 10 million years old and the drop-off goes immediately to the 225 million-year-old territory.

I could go on and on about the Painted Desert, and this painting (as yet I haven’t mentioned the raven, nor the Park Service employees, nor the way the wind blew nor the cold that was starting to creep into these early morning escapades). Most of what I could go on about, as well as what I just mentioned, can’t be seen in the painting.

But I’m hoping that when taken together with other paintings from the Petrified Forest, if presented carefully and with nuances made available, that this single painting will take on something other than mere bright oil on canvas.

This is perhaps heretical and certainly hubristic — that a small bit of painted masonite could ever be other than just that. It’s only something I want, not something I think other painters should want to do or try to do or even be interested in doing. Yet I continue to want to share what I know of the place and the space and the time, insofar as it is possible, however limited that possibility might be.

That’s what I learned at the Petrified Forest (as well as the history of Route 66, the 1930′s CCC rules, and the ravens’ disgust when the artist has no treats for them.) And that’s why I am playing around with ways to present the paintings that I did there, so as to expand and enrich the way each means and is seen.

[A possible plan for presentation of PEFO paintings, Oct 3, 2010. Laid on the back patio of our apartment because there was no way to check it out in an upright position.] As I continue to work on the paintings I did at the Petrified Forest in my Portland studio, I will update this blog, both with finished and decently photographed work and with the presentation(s) that I am ruminating on. So this conclusion is only the idea of a conclusion: the real conclusion, in Context, is yet to come.

Petrified Forest Residency, Almost Finished: Oct. 16, 2010

October 16, 2010: Last painting finished in the Petrified Forest.

Yesterday we toured Holbrook, where we “did” Jim Gray’s Rock Shop, a serious classic of its kind, checked out the Museum Courthouse, walked through and photographed the Centennial Historic Register District, and got home by 1 PM. Oh and we had a Dairy Queen.

Then I laid out my paintings to see if the scheme I had come up with earlier had been fulfilled:

These are by no means all the paintings, nor is this the final arrangement. I was just checking to see if I had filled in the gaps. Which I had.

A bit closer look at the top and bottom of the set. There are some paintings that I’m fond of that aren’t here, so the final grouping will probably be different. And I might just decide to frame and exhibit them in a nice measured row so that the 30-second lookers can have a bit of time with each painting.

Anyway, this putative presentation is something about context, and something about time, both of which have occupied me (along with the dratted question of perception) for some years. More about that in my final summary, which I haven’t tackled yet.

However, this morning I went out to do one last painting, in order to make  21 pieces for the 21 days we have had access to the Park. I didn’t paint on some of those days, but on some I painted twice. And I’m not counting the three bad paintings that have been discarded, turned back to the wall until they can be sanded to oblivion.

I thought for the last painting I would do the Neutra Plaza (in the Visitor’s Center), but when I woke up I knew I wanted to do the Painted Desert, the best view of it, from Pintado Point. It wasn’t the right time of day, but I had a choice between painting in the AM and having dinner with friends in the PM, or skipping dinner. I have my priorities, so at 7:30 AM there I was.

The colors of the area are much different in the morning.  When we would drive home from the south part of the Park, just before dusk, sun in the west, we would come over a little rise and there it would be — the desert blazing with color. In the morning, the colors are cooler and drabber. So I painted the shapes and forms I saw, but ignored the color, put every red I had on my palette, and used most of them on the board. The smooth, less colorful areas of the painting are the “washes” (which might be big muddy rivers sometimes.) The big one is Lithodendron Wash, which was the way most surveyors, trackers, Native Americans, and early pioneers came through.

The colors appear all wrong on this monitor, but hopefully, back in  Portland, I can control the light and check the colors against the painting, which is now packed away in the Honda, waiting transport. The next blog will be the last, and may have some conclusions.

Which will undoubtedly be revised as I consider this experience over the next few months. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day15, Oct. 10, 2010

A raven flies across the rock face at Canyon de Chelly.

My residency contract ended yesterday, but we talked the Petrified Forest into giving me another week. However, we had already made arrangement to go to Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field Land Art, in west-central New Mexico, so we are on the road for a couple of days.

Various changes of plans happen once one is engaged in a project. We had not expected that the PF internet service would be readily available, so I set up motel reservations in Gallup, New Mexico for the night before we were due at the Lightning Field and the night after. It’s  70 miles from the Petrified Forest to Gallup, but we figured we would need as much time on a proper high-speed server as possible.

This morning, we realized that was an unnecessary precaution, so we decided to become tourists ourselves, heading north from Interstate 40 to the little town of Ganado, where the Hubble Trading Post is located.

The Trading Post is a National Historical Site and has a Visitor’s Center (in Park Service Rustic style), where I bought a book about  Maynard Dixon, a painter of the area who also painted in the Amargosa Valley in Nevada. We also saw a video that had some things about the Hubble Trading Post, but contained a great deal of gorgeous footage of Canyon de Chelly.

So we checked out the Trading Post, composed of a combination of old and newer buildings, many lived in by those who work the cash registers and farm the gardens.

The Hubble Visitor’s Center.

The side entrance to the Trading Post.

The Post has a host of Indian tourist goods — rugs, jewelry, baskets, pots — but is also the local grocer to area residents. Its floors creak like a host of squeaky violins and the collection of goods for sale is mingled with the collections of beautiful items collected by the Hubble family over the years. It’s charming and eccentric and well worth the stop.

But, having seen the video with the Canyon de Chelly photos, and being very close to the Park (albeit getting further and further from Gallop), we decided we had to visit Canyon de Chelly.

I won’t do a travelogue — there far better photos online than any I got  on –  the Park Service’s  gallery of photos is a good place to begin .  But walking on the rim overlooking the canyon was weird, because the surface is a flat scored hard rock, which suddenly ends and the canyon is upon one. Luckily the Park Service has put up stone walls and iron railings for the knock-kneed among us.

The canyon bottom is farmed by Navajo, and the Park is unique in that it is owned entirely by the Navajo Nation, which lives, farms, grazes various animals including goats, both on the mesas above the Canyon and within the Canyon itself. So it’s a living landscape, mingling tourists and residents. Very unlike the usual vacant spaces within National Parks where human are seen only on the prescribed walkways.

That said, the Park and the Navajo Nation carefully control where and how the tourists have access to the Canyon bottom, particularly as it contains priceless ruins and petroglyphs, both from the Anasazi, who were there close  to 1000 years, until around 1400 and the Navajo, who appeared about 1700. The two groups are not related; the Anasazi were Puebloan, like the Hopi, and lived in communal villages. The Navajo live in independent quarters and were more nomadic in the earlier years.

I decided to include this Park excursion in the Residency Journal because of the curious mingling in this park of habitants and tourists. It’s a continuation of my thinking about what “landscape’ is and what landscape painting might be. All fodder.

There will be no Journal tomorrow, because the Lightning Field does not allow electronics or photos. And the next day is a blank in our schedule. So perhaps something, perhaps nothing. Regardless, I’ll be back Wednesday, when I can return renewed for the last days of painting at the Petrified. Forest.

Writing from a motel room in Gallup, New Mexico –-June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 14, Oct 9, 2010

Blue Mesa Badlands, Petrified National Forest, 2010.

Having survived the demos, I am taking the day off from painting. Which didn’t exactly mean sleeping in. We got up at our usual time, but this morning, instead of pulling myself up and pulling things together and pulling myself to the car to get to the painting place before the light changed, I made a cup of coffee and meandered around the deserted, cool complex of Visitor Center, Science Center, visiting VIP apartments and some real living quarters.

The tourists who climbed out of their cars all looked a bit grim at 7:43. I sympathized, silently. No one wanted a cheery greeting.

The birds were noisy enough to drown out the noise of the freeway, and far more pleasant too. I stood on a human-made hillock  hill that separates the Visitor’s Plaza from the living quarters until my ankles started to itch (ants? desert stick-to-ums?) and then meandered through the Plaza, around the parking lot (eyeing the few cars that grumpily were entering) and back to the back of the maintenance area, where the birds were carrying on and no one at all was in sight.

I am fascinated by human activity within spaces, although I know nothing about the science or research of such. But artists are observers, and I find myself observing what happens when humans are observing or partaking  in “nature” — although what we think of as natural is often just over grown human artifacts. I think I may have to start painting “real” landscapes, not just wacky cityscapes, where people are impossible to avoid, but landscapes that include people and their artifacts.

It would be easy to be caustic about the tourists (I have been so, even as I am one myself). But that’s not what I want. What I want is to examine, with paint, what people do faced with the Painted Desert or Petrified Wood. Or Mt Tabor or Colonel Summers Park. How they use the natural stuff around them, what they avoid, where they make paths, when they flee it and when they embrace it. “Landscapes” that include telephone poles and signs and humans as well as the natural elements that normally define the genre.

[Deserted Park building, possibly an old outhouse.]

All this maundering has been engendered by a thoroughly academic article that I only understand about a quarter of that I am reading on my Kindle,  a panel discussion, led by James Elkins, that included a host of folks from all kinds of disciplines. I shall include the name of it later (Jer wants to go get some ice cream right now).

This photo, taken from the Blue Mesa Trail, includes, if you look closely, a train crossing the short prairie grass of the upper Bidahochi mesa as well as a couple of trucks (sorry, you can’t see them at this resolution) beyond the trains, traveling down I-40. We were standing on a steep asphalt trail (obviously made in part by machine) in the midst of wicked badlands (see the first photo). Below us were braided dry washes and conglomerate stuck in bentonite clay as well as steep washes filled with petrified wood. In the far distance is my own personal landmark, painted as an icon of natural landscape, Pilot Rock. But it too takes on human meaning, as a way of defining where the surveyor/explorer/pioneer/gold seeker was in the undifferentiated Colorado Plateau area.

So following are a number of human/natural interface photos, ones I took this morning, while thinking about what we landscape painters ignore as we imitate the Impressionists. My memory of the Impressionists is, of course, that they included the human as well as the natural, but to us, now, those scenes seem fairly romantic, a time passed for which we can wax nostalgic. They are “landscape” to us, as telephone poles are not.

[The Puerco Kiva with sign and folks]

This last photo reminds me of scenes from western movies, all fake, of course, of horsemen riding across ridges (sitting ducks for attacking Native Americans, methinks). These folks are more benign and in little danger of anything but sunburn. You might also notice that everyone has cameras.

Tomorrow we are on the road, to Gallup, on the way to de Maria’s Lightning Field. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 13, October 8, 2010

Another day, another demo. Weather favorable. Painted the Bidahochi outcrop on the rim behind the Painted Desert Inn. The vertical, devoid of human artifacts, has now been completed. This afternoon, I did the demo, also behind the PDI, trying to improve my skill at painting adobe. It hasn’t improved.

Bidahochi Rim from Painted Desert Inn, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

Painted Desert Inn, Rim Side (draft 1), 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

I also had my paintings set up in a small porch-like alcove where I could see them from my painting spot for the painting above:

Perhaps tomorrow, when I am compos mentis, I will have a thought. But for the nonce, I have recorded this day. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 12, Oct 7, 2010

I painted, (on masonite, not on stuccoed walls) the Painted Desert Inn this morning, and I demoed painting at the Painted Desert Inn this afternoon. Turns out demoing is a bit easier than painting, although in both cases the wind played havoc with the work at hand.

No boards danced off into the badlands, but this morning, my heavy bottle of medium was no match for the wind — the bottle was pushed nose down into the palette at least four times, smearing me, my clean-up rags, and my normally good temper — I can attest that the wind pays no attention to words from the artist.

Painting the adobe building proved to be an eye opener, particularly as I’ve been reading about Richard Neutra’s ideas for the main compound and visitor’s center. Although Neutra was into the hard-edged, steel and undecorated design of Modernism, he also was fascinated by the non-box like structures of Japanese architecture, asymmetry that balances.

Well, the Painted Desert Inn, designed by Lyle Bennett in the Spanish Pueblo Revival style and constructed over an older, petrified wood hotel and café by CCC guys in the 1930′s, is a marvel of asymmetrical but balanced lines. It maintains a horizontal feel, but its flat roofs have levels upon levels of edges, all in soft shades of pink and iron oxide, shades that the eye can discern but the painter is doomed to merely attempt to recreate. The inn’s  rounded edges (which are definitely not Neutrian) capture the sunlight so the eye understands the different levels. The hand-troweling of the cement stucco also makes for subtle shadings within the “flats” of the walls, so the whole undulates softly as the sun plays across it.

The Painted Desert Inn looks and feels solid, unlike my painting board, which chattered wildly at times, trying to fly away. Once I found that the wind was so strong it was blowing my brush sideways, so that a line I was attempting to draw kept moving sideways with the wind.

I couldn’t finish this painting, but in keeping with the good/bad/ugly spirit of this journal, I present Draft 1. The forefront, in front of the wall, will have the typical desert foliage, sage and rabbitbrush and a couple of junipers. The colors need more work, with the distinct levels made more distinct. But the basic lines are there. This is one of those drafts which require me to go back to the site and paint — I could not do it in the studio, without being on site.

The Painted Desert Inn (Draft 1), 12″ x 12″, oil on masonite, 2010

Then I took a short lunch break and went back to the PDI (as everyone around here calls it), going inside where I thought the wind would be lessened. Alas, between the two open sides of the upper porch, where I was painting and the various interior doors that open to the outside, the wind played more havoc with my work.  I didn’t realize how strong it was at first, as I was sitting down at my easel. But when I stood up and could see more than sky out the open porch windows, there were dust clouds erasing all the views on the basin floor. Pilot Rock sort of stood above the dust roiling about, but the rest of the cones and mounds were quite lost.

However, I had started a painting yesterday, so I could continue with it, mostly working on the cement stucco of the left side, a stucco window that framed the scene.

From the Porch at the Painted Desert Inn (Draft 1), 12 x 16″, oil on masonite, 2010

You may note that this too is a draft — I want to make the space more strongly emphasized. But the wind and dust was making my eyes water, so I put this painting against the wall with others that I had brought along to exhibit and sat down, where I was a bit more protected from the wind. I picked up one of the earlier paintings I had done that needed tweaked. All this time, I was hearing slams and bangs from inside the building, with far fewer visitors coming through to spend time chatting. But I paid no attention until, blam, the painting above got caught in a wild draft from the interior and fell over on its nose. The porch has a dusty (duh) cement floor, a good bit of which (the dust, I mean) ending up on the front of the wet oil.

I cleaned it off as best I could, laid it flat, went back to my easel,  and Blam, another painting beside it got knocked over by another gust from some unseen but opened door inside. It blew a bunch more dust onto the wet oils of the painting I had just cleaned. I decided to lay all the paintings leaning against that inside wall flat on the floor, face up. That way, I assumed they wouldn’t suffer more damage. Then I once again cleaned the dust off the painting.

I also laid the painting I had worked on this morning flat on the floor and then went back to tweaking the one on the easel. About that time a visitor came along and mentioned that while she liked the painting, it was getting awfully dusty and maybe I should clean it off. She was looking at the one I had cleaned up twice. I tried to ignore the comment, but she persisted. When I resigned myself to  looking at the painting, it was once more covered with dust, this time dust that evidently came out of the air. Likewise, the PDI painting had grains embedded in its wet surface. And even the painting on the easel, while less effected, had dust grains on it. The others were less effected because the oil was dry.

One visitor remarked that I should just call them sand paintings and give up. Well, one of the two ideas seemed right.

It was 3:30, time to clean up each wet painting, insert them into the carrier out of the wind, and get out of Dodge. It took me until Jer got there to get them cleaned up and put away.

Tomorrow, I’m painting and demoing on the lower patio/porch, which seemed, at least late this afternoon, to be better protected from the wind. Tomorrow morning, I hope to do a 12 x 24″ vertical from that patio, rather than attempting to drag my gear down and  paint the vertical from the Wilderness trail. Weather permitting, Jer is going to hike down;  I’m going to stay up top. We hope to get there early, before the wind picks up.

Here’s a photo of the Wilderness Trail spot (center right, on the path) from which I thought I might try painting — before the wind persuaded me otherwise.

Oh and a bit of good news: the Park has consented to allow us to have an extra week in the lodgings. We both felt we needed some more time here, and now we have it. I can stop hyperventilating about getting the last few paintings finished for the putative presentation. We will be going off for a few days for a visit to the Lightning Field (Walter de Maria’s land art piece in New Mexico). But then we’ll return for another five days of painting and photographing and drinking in the landscape. And maybe I’ll just plaster a canvas with some medium and let the dust do the rest of the painting; that should please some critic or other.

Reported from Apt K, Petrified National Forest Park, October 7, 2010 –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 11, Oct 6, 2010

I have no painting to show today, what with rain, hail, and demos at the Painted Desert Inn. Not to mention tourists freaked out by flooding and wild weather at the Grand Canyon and tornadoes at Flagstaff.  All in all, I was grateful for my “studio” in the enclosed and roofed upper patio space at the adobe Painted Desert Inn, although I’m claiming the painting I did was plein air — after all, there was plenty of air in this space without windows:

The painting I did is stashed in the ladies room at PDI, which is without water at the moment and so unused. It will make a good storage space for the next few days.

The space shown above is open to the public, yet out of the main path of tourists wanting to know where the bathrooms are (porta-potties, outside) and where the petrified wood is (down the road apiece). So I got to chat up those interested in the landscape and or/the paintings. It was entirely pleasant.

This is how the landscape looked at 11, when Jer and I just narrowly missed a pouring hail and thunder-storm. We went to set up the “exhibit” a bit earlier than I had to be there, and the sight of the desert through the rain was startling. And beautiful.

I became very aware of the adobe surfaces of my space as I painted the view beyond them. In that painting , I incorporated a bit of the adobe to frame the view. Looking at the adobe walls to paint them I was suddenly struck by the realization that the adobe had been hand-troweled onto the walls, troweled by guys the age my father was when he broke rocks for the Pine Creek road with the CCC. The Civilian Conservation Corps (run by the military) was part of the Great Depression’s federal work corps, made up of more than 3 million young men who had to have at least 3 teeth, were provided with room and board, and were required to send home $20–$25 a month of the $30 they made — this money not only aided families but put more money into the economy to help slow its downward spin (The pay amounts apparently differed from place to place, or at least the stories of the pay differ; the requirement that most of the money get sent home is always included).

Dad didn’t trowel adobe, but the beauty of the building had to have come from boys like him who built roads and trails in parks, constructed conservation dams,  made campgrounds, planted trees, drained swamps, replanted grazing land, renovated historic buildings and strung telephone lines. Many of these things still exist and are part of the utility and beauty that we all still enjoy. I found touching the walls a moving experience.

But of course, mostly I chatted up the tourae, and painted a bit between times. Chatting up people is something I do pretty well, but I also find it totally exhausting. Jer practically had to carry me home. Once we got here, he went out to the gas station and brought back six variations of an ice cream sandwich (all they had), which tided me over until dinner. Well, I didn’t eat all six — after all, I have to go back and chat tomorrow, too.

Here’s the view, of Pilot Rock and the Bidahochi Formation, that I painted at while gabbing away:

The camera’s ratio didn’t allow for the adobe to show up in the photo, but  my handy-dandy plastic viewfinder, a tool I’ve become totally reliant upon, showed this view and the adobe wall to the left. The sun kept playing footsie with the clouds, so all day different bits of the landscape would shine into view and then be eclipsed by shadow again. Pilot Rock is lit by sun in this photo; the bit of rock face to the far left center is the Bidahochi. More about its interesting characteristics when my brain is functioning a bit better. I’m going to bed.

From Apt K at the Petrified Forest National Park, a grateful tired artist --June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 10, Oct. 5, 2010

After all that fussing about climbing down the wilderness trail, we woke up to rain. Not much, but a very cloudy sky and big fat drops. No wilderness trail hiking/painting for this cautious (or lazy) couple. We rescued paintings from the back patio, where we thought they were safe under shelter (not quite), did lots of computer catch-ups, and went a-touristing. We checked out several viewpoints we hadn’t seen before and took the “Triassic” tour at the south visitor’s center. We also bought a book or two, but we aren’t admitting that. We’ve already bought too many books from the two Visitors’ Centers.

Finally, at 2:30 it couldn’t be put off any longer. The wind was howling but the sky had sort of cleared and I needed to paint a biggish vertical. I had found my spot the day before, and it was on the way north to home. So Jer dropped me off and I painted, at a pull-in viewpoint called The Tepees.

The Tepees are  large cones of eroded Triassic clays and sandstones. They are vaguely shaped like classic tepees, and have fine colorful lines of different soils that run through them. The biggest one is luckily near the viewpoint. Jer  went home to lunch. I painted until 5:30.

The Tepees (Triassic age) and “The Triassic Tepee.”

I read somewhere that David Hockney (??) took photos like this after he finished a painting. I liked this one. The  masonite on which I painted is long and narrow, so only a bit of the fat Tepee cone would fit on it.  And of course, the real sky was much too bright for my camera to deal with, even though fifteen minutes later, when Jer showed up, it looked like quite wild and stormy.

The stretch of road along which I was painting was fairly deserted — this isn’t one of the favorite viewing spots for tourists. So about ten different sets of folks offered to take me “home.” One pair didn’t stay to look at the view — just pulled up alongside me and asked if I had plenty of water.

At some point, I realized that, given the wide vista and deserted nature of the spot, without a vehicle in sight, I must have been something of a strange vision — just me and the Tepees in a wide spot in the road. I was touched by the concern of those who inquired. I didn’t feel the least bit threatened by the seeming isolation — when no vehicles were around, it was gorgeously quiet except for a few birds and the wind.

Oh yes, the wind. It was quite a feat of engineering to get set up in the blowing gale, and a bigger feat to get the edge of my board and not its surface directly in the path of the wind. But, never fear, Fearless Underwood did not have a painting sail off into the forbidden desert soil; not even a bit of paper towel escaped, although it tried mightily. It helped that I set up in the corner of a low concrete wall, placing the most wind-happy items, like the big plastic box that I carry paintings in, in the corner with my foot planted against it. I felt thoroughly happy with my afternoon’s endeavors, and I now have one of two essential vertical 12 x 24″ paintings for my putative presentation.

A Triassic TePee, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

Tomorrow (and Thursday and Friday) I’m scheduled to “demonstrate” painting at the Painted Desert Inn from 1–4. This mostly means chatting up the tourists while I play with color. I’ll be either inside or in a nice enclosed outside porch-like place.  I can take my finished pieces to the PDI and exhibit them. I am tempted to put “exhibit” in quote marks in that last sentence because I think they will mostly be leaning against the wall of the upstairs patio. Or perhaps laid out on the floor there. We’ll see. This is definitely a casual arrangement.

However, I don’t think I should attempt to climb down the wilderness trail and do another vertical painting tomorrow. maybe I’ll figure out a way to do one of the small ones that I still need. The Wilderness Trail will have to wait. –June

Petrified Forest Residency, Day 9, October 4, 2010

October 4, 2010, Day 9 of the Petrified Forest Adventure.

I’m fairly brain-dead tonight. If I had any thoughts, they have fled to bed.

I painted at the Long Logs trail in the south end of the park. I needed a long horizontal landscape for the putative rectangular presentation and had already done one of the badlands in the northern end. So south we went at our usual ungodly hour (forgive me, those of you who find spiritual sustenance in dawn. I might, if I were awake enough to do so. But that would require getting up even earlier <snort>)

Anyway, we walked about a mile each way, trailing the painting cart behind. I did have the good fortune to have Jer with me, so when I scouted a site and found it, he returned to the fork in the trail where we had left the painting gear and brought it back up the hill to me. Even at that, I am tired tonight. But for someone who had a hip replacement in June, a 2-mile round trip on foot, part of it after painting four hours in the sun and wind — well, blessings on good Doctor Duwelius and all the healing energies that friends passed along.

I got to include some petrified wood in this painting — only the second time. After painting it, I thought I should work a lot on painting the stuff. It’s quite gorgeous, translucent and multi-colored, weirdly life-like in its unearthly (or 220 million years of earthly) way.

From Long Logs Trail, 12 x 24″, oil on masonite, 2010

The painting was made difficult by the glare of the sun on the board. I finally stood up and painted from an angle because that was the only way I could see what I was doing. And I discovered, again to my bemused (and somewhat irritated) amazement, that titanium white looks blue in the desert sun, as does raw umber. Go figure — I just blundered on!

The skies were incredible today — very stormy and moody. Not gray like Portland, but full of sturm und drang — big black low clouds, parting to show high rounded masses of thunderheads, behind which blue sky would appear. It wasn’t too hot and in fact, I came home and put on my long-sleeved turtleneck. But the clouds changed the appearance of the desert and threw various of the formations into interesting shapes and shadows.

On the way up Long Logs Trail, I saw the early sun hitting rabbitbrush in full bloom.

Then on the way home, we stopped at Chinde Point. The sky was doing its drama queen thing, and the view of Pilot Rock from the point, as well as the badlands in front of it were being tossed around by the light. And there was another rabbitbrush to photograph:

["Chinde", by the way, seems to mean "ghost" in Navajo; this I gleaned from the second Tony Hillerman novel I am reading. Jer has decided to read them all in sequence, and so I'm reading (and sometimes rereading) them after him.]

Because I was exhausted and the weather looked threatening through the afternoon, I decided not to return to paint a hoodoo at Crystal Forest (another overlook in the Park). It would have made a good midling-sized vertical, but seemed toooo hard. The Crystal Forest viewpoint is also in the south end of the Park, and a round trip down there generally runs close to 50 miles of driving. Jer had already made two trips today and was exceedingly content not to make another.

So instead, I went to the Neutra (Visitor’s Center) Plaza and painted the rocks that are placed nicely around it. I have grown to like that plaza very much, and at this time of the year it’s empty of other humans. I don’t know what it’s like in the high season of the park. But the surrounding buildings give some protection from the wind, yet the space is very open. A pool sits at one end, gurgling a bit, and there are trees in various strategic spots. So painting there was quite restful.

Many Logs, 12 x 16″, oil on masonite,  2010

It was almost dark (6 PM) by the time I packed up. I have an idea of some tweaks I want to make to this piece, but by and large, it’s OK.

This means that I’ve done 2 of the 6 that I need to do to finish out my putative rectangle. They were both ones that could have presented problems, since the first is large (12 x 24 inches) and the second is vertical — a difficult proposition in this park, where the verticals tend to be far away. So I’m pleased, if exhausted.

Tomorrow, I am going to hike partway down a steep trail into the wilderness area (Jer is going to hike much further down the trail) and do a vertical 12 x 24 inch painting of the Bidahochi Formation that sits on top of the Chinle Formation. This is the Parks’ big unconformity — the Bidahochi is about a million years old and the Chinle is about 220 million years old. And the younger one sits right on top of the older one, with nothing in-between.

Sometimes time gets lost, both for humans and for geologists.

For the painter, the unconformity means there is basalt on a steep slope, the basalt being the Bidahochi volcano remains, which has kept that part of the butte from eroding. It sticks out, dark and defiant (while being eaten out from underneath, where the sneaky Chinle mudstone and limestone slithers and slides away).  Below is an eroded, bumpy colorful plain of Chinle sandstone, making for nice contrasts of color.

The trail is a bit steep and settling in to paint on the slope will be a bit fraught. But we checked it out and think it can be done. It looks like I will be out of the sun for a good while, and surely the wind will be blocked by the Bidahochi, which after all, hasn’t a lot of other stuff to do.

Wish me luck. –June

By the way, Henri Art Magazine published an article I wrote about my studio and how I work in it. I’m pleased with how it came out; go take a look if you are interested.