Art Journal

Anyone selected to be an artist-in-residence at Petrified Forest is required as part of their project to give back one piece of art to the park. Selected artists may be dancers, photographers, composers, poets, writers, or be visual artists of many different kinds. The project they end up sending back to the park could be any number of different things - a poem, a weaving, a sculpture for instance.  But in my case it meant  sending a piece of visual art, namely a painting. My idea was to work on a painting based on the rainy monsoon morning we experienced at the park. It is so rare to have a day in the park with an all day rainstorm that I felt I had to memorialize that somehow. The  vision of all that water coursing across the desert floor, leaving streams of muddy red water in formerly dry sandy beds was something I just had to paint.

The painting has been shipped off the Petrified Forest.  Here's a photo of it.

Monsoon Morning, 24 x 20.