Art Journal

Once again we went to the south end of the park where most of the petrified wood is located. My plan was to do a painting of petrified wood, not because I really wanted to, but because I thought I ought to since that is what the PFNP is really all about.  Petrified wood is beautiful up close - almost every color is represented.  Overall it looks dark reddish-brown. The logs break off in neat log chunks over time, caused by the freeze/thaw cycle and look almost like they have been chain-sawed. Since the logs are 225 million years old it is amazing that there are still large chunks around. Some are 10 feet in diameter. We paced out several that were over 200 feet long, admittedly now broken into 3-4 ft sections over time but you can see the whole tree is lined up there on the ground. There really are "long logs" there.

I hiked out the Long Logs trail with my gear and set about painting petrified wood.  Below are also some photos of the wood close up. All those rocks in the distance of the bottom photos are petrified wood.

Petrified, 9 x 12

Not too many days left on this residency so we decided to take a few of the hikes to get to know this park a little better. First on the list - the Blue Forest Trail, an Off-The-Beaten-Path trail  from the park booklet of the same name containing some of the the more remote trails. The trail goes from the Tepees to Blue Mesa and is actually quite frightening (at least to me) at the very end.  The possibility of slipping off a cliff is quite believable since the path is sometimes only a foot wide, sloping downward sideways, and often covered with ball-bearing sized gravel everywhere.  No guardrails here, you are on your own. After finishing this trail up and back we went off to the Billings Gap Trail that goes around the top of Blue Mesa. Much tamer.  Both these trails are extremely scenic. No painting on these hikes...

Later that evening I went to Chinde Point to work on painting a sunset. Since the park closes for the evening at 5:00 PM and opens at 8 AM  there are not a lot of options for evening or morning paintings. This is a problem for painting plein air because the light is always best in the early morning or evening. One option I did have was to go to the overlooks near the casita which were outside the park gates. Chinde Overlook is being worked on and a campground added, so it's filled with construction equipment but in the evening no one was there and it is a fairly good place to catch a sunset.

Chinde Sunset, 9 x 12

After painting at Nizhoni Point we drove on to Puerco Pueblo, the ruins of a pueblo from around 1300 that was once the home of a small village of about 200 people. There are many petroglyphs on the rocks of the nearby cliffs that were carved by the native people. The village is near the Puerco River and in this part of the park vegetation is very scarce except for the few beat-up cottonwoods and brush growing next to the river. One particular old half-dead cottonwood looked interesting so I set up near the river to paint the tree.

I found a spot in some willow brush near the rocky cliffs which gave me a little shade and set up my easel there. Later we walked along the cliffs looking for petroglyphs and found several places with the carvings. I imagined Puebloans from hundreds of year ago wandering this same path along the river, perhaps gathering water or tending to their farm patches, hopefully watching out for the rattlesnakes that I am sure were nearby. Saw no snakes today though though we did find a dead one on the road. There was still a bit of water left in the river from the rainy day earlier in the week.

A hard Life, 10 x 8.

Some petroglyphs

The Puerco River, mostly mud at this point.  The rain from a few days before brought out some flowers.

Nizhoni Point was one of my favorite places in the park. It's got a beautiful rock formation out front that I planned to paint and is up on the high lava mesa near the north entrance. I went there as soon as the park opened on day 7 and planned to do a morning painting of the valley and rock outcrop.  But after getting there I ended up looking at the gully going down into the valley and painted the shadows in the gully instead of the rocks out front. I set up a little ways down the hill in some high brush, hoping for a little wind cover. The wind was ferocious so it was quite a challenge and I had to hang onto my tripod, even though it was weighted down. The umbrella was unusable. I decided to do a small painting due to conditions.

Nizhoni Hillside, 8 x 10.

After yesterday's midday painting session I decided I wanted to go out really early and thus got up at 5:45 and headed over to Tiponi Point. Tiponi Point is the first pullout at the north end of the park and fairly close to the casita. The sun was coming up around 6:12 so I wanted to get there early to see the light on the valley below. No one was around and I finished my painting as the park was starting to open up for the day. It's a great view at dawn from that overlook.

Tiponi Morning, 11 x 14

Later in the day I painted along the Rim Trail again, near the Painted Desert Inn, trying to get the colors of the late afternoon light on the hills in the valley. This was a row of mesas way off in the distance.

Rim trail View, 9 x 12

The storm moved on and Tuesday broke with sunshine and some overcast clouds. This day I decided to paint at the Tepees, a badlands formation near the middle of the park. The colors of the rock layers there are quite varied, as you can see if you go to the link. I didn't paint the actual "teepees"  but went out on the plain and painted a hillside nearby. Already most of the water had been sucked down into the sand and although one had to avoid walking in certain places to avoid muddy feet,  there were already plenty of dry areas. The water disappears so fast.

The wind was up so I sat down near a wash and painted on the ground.

This particular geologic layer is called the Chinle layer.

Chinle Color, 11 x 14.

The fourth day was an interesting day. A new weather system came in over night and we awoke to heavy clouds on the horizon. Soon it began to rain and it rained all day. In fact it rained so hard a ranger told us it was the biggest rain at the park in at least 3 years. It was too wet to paint outside so we drove all over the park looking at the amazing sights of dry stream beds filled with turbulent muddy water. The intense colors of the wet rock and vegetation were amazing. Dry washes became torrential rivers. We had to go round and look at everything all over again, getting a chance to see it with new eyes in the new weather, and getting thoroughly soaked in the process.

To get out of the rain and dry off a bit we checked out the Rainbow Forest Museum with its fossils and park movie at the south end of the park, well worth seeing. Later on in the afternoon, I set up my easel inside our casita and painted a view out the back window of the water-soaked yellow buckwheat shrubs  and flowers in the rain. The adobe casita is the park housing that the artists-in-residence live in during their stay, a charming little house.

Monsoon Day, 8 x 10

Casita and buckwheat on a sunny day. 

Monsoon!

We got back fairly early from Blue Mesa where I had painted in the morning so later in the afternoon I worked on another painting . This is a view of  the hillside at Tawa Point. Tawa Point is just down the road from where we were staying. The mesa is topped by 8 million year old lava rock which slopes off down to the 220 million year old red-colored badlands of the Chinle Formation below. Interestingly, the lava layer supports vegetation and trees, and the red badlands below are relatively bare. This is what interested me about the view - going from green to red, vegetation to bare.

Tawa Point, 9 x 12

September 22, Sunday. After viewing parts of the park on earlier days I decided to go back and paint one of the spectacular views from Blue Mesa. It's called Blue Mesa because of the blue/purple cast to most of the badland formations in the area, which really do look quite blue in some places. Badlands are made up of mudstone or clay or soft crumbly rock, and have almost no vegetation. These are mostly eroded by wind here since it rarely rains, but when it does it erodes quite heavily.

The view off the back of the mesa shows all the alluvial dry stream beds coming down off the mesa. It was tricky being on the edge of a cliff with ferocious gusts of wind, some pretty strong, maybe up to 50 mph to withstand. Luckily most days were not this windy.

Blue Mesa Vista, 11 x 14.

Day two of Petrified Forest I was busy in the morning doing the community service activity required of my residency. This was giving a class for a group of girl scouts in the park's community center where we painted from photos of desert scenes. The plan was to then go outside and paint some more from life but we ran out of time and ended painting in the visitor center. Chalk this up to my inexperience in teaching kids in that age group - they needed more time than I expected. Later that afternoon I worked on a painting at Kachina Point, a painting of the red mesas in the valley below the Painted Desert Inn which I finished at sunset.  It was red all right, but not the sky - the rocks below me.

Red Sunset, 11 x 14.

On September 19th I started my Petrified Forest residency. We drove down to AZ and stayed at a little adobe casita inside the park, courtesy of PFNP. I managed to paint 13 plein air paintings over the next 10 days, and we took many, many photos. We also got a chance to experience all the sights of the park and many of the out-of-the-way hikes, finally packing up and departing on September 30th. It was a great experience.

The first full day of our stay, September 20th, I got up at 5:45 am slightly before the sunrise and made it over to the Rim Trail across the road from where we were staying to paint the early morning sun on the cliff sides. It was not hard to get up that early because our bedroom windows faced east and the time zone was an hour later than at home, making dawn feel like a reasonable hour.  Here is that painting, Kachina Dawn. That's Kachina Point on the left, where the Painted Desert Inn sits, a little farther back out of the picture. The inn is a national landmark and sits high on a lava topped mesa (Bidahochi Formation) above the valley floor of the eroded badlands of the Chinle Formation. 

Kachina Dawn, 11 x 14.

Here's a studio painting I recently finished . This one was from reference photos I took while on a trip to western Colorado last April. We traveled the road from Monarch Pass to Gunnison late in the afternoon on a wintry sort of day and I took many photos along the way. I've worked on sketches for this painting many times since then and finally got around to working on the painting.

Closing Down, 16 x 20.

I took a morning trip to Pella Crossing to paint in early September. I decided to paint with sunglasses on  for a change and see how it affected the painting. I think the colors came out a little different, not sure whether it's such a good idea to paint with sunglasses.  Unless you are only going to look at the painting while wearing sunglasses. Which of course isn't going to happen.

Slow Turning, 8 x 10.

The Estes Park Plein Air Event show is over now and I picked up my paintings. I never had a chance to photograph them before the event but just finished completing that. Here are some of the paintings I entered in the show.

Breathless Ending, 6 x 12, done on a narrow pull-out along Trail Ridge Road overlooking the Alluvial Fan area.

Leftover, 8 x 10, painted along a narrow pullout on Fall River Road, in pretty treacherous windy conditions, but I painted out the car door using the car to block the wind.

And here's a third, Rainy Day Memories, 11 x 14. This one I painted on the first day of the event on a rainy drizzly afternoon in an aspen grove near Lumpy Ridge.