Reflections on Moab

Another season of plein air competitions has come and gone. Some sales and a few awards have come my way but the experiences, things learned and ties made might be more valuable. Each year and every painting builds upon previous ones. Painting for competitions brings a mind set and level of focus that is different from just going out to paint on my own. Many of the lessons learned can be applied to other kinds of painting and drawing I do.

Early Autumn Desert Asters

Sure, the competitions can be fun, but they aren't easy. Traveling long distances, not always knowing where I'm going to stay, dealing with all kinds of weather; every competition is an adventure.

As often as I can, I paint not only for the competition but also for my own portfolio. Here are a couple of small pictures I painted on the Moab trip. The first is actually the last one painted. It was done while visiting relatives in the four corners area.

Cottonwood Wash, 6" x 8" Oil on Canvas Panel

The next one was painted south of Moab:

Red Rock Juniper, 6" x 8" Oil on Canvas Panel

That was painted on a sandstone bluff looking across a canyon-creased valley toward foothills of the La Sal Mountains. While painting, a little reddish lizard came and climbed onto my foot. I stopped to watch what the lizard was doing. It crawled through a loop in my boot lace and poked it's nose under the cuff of my jeans. Worried about having a lizard up my pants I shifted my other foot. The lizard jumped off the boot and ran a couple feet where it stopped, turned and looked up at me. Again I stood still to see what the lizard would do. It crawled to the boot I had just moved and then went over to the painting equipment I had set on the ground nearby. The lizard crawled around, through and all over the leather bags. I returned to painting. Fifteen or twenty minutes later I took a few steps back from the painting to get a better look at it. When I did, the lizard leaped off my boot and scampered away across the slickrock, not to return this time! Absorbed in my work, I hadn't noticed the lizard was sunning itself on my foot!

There was another strange thing nearby on that same sandstone bluff:

This structure had a semicircle wall of stones about two feet high on one side. Stones, strips of juniper bark and sticks were arranged in curious fashion within an outline of rocks. An uneven pathway outlined with more small stones stretched for several yards from the main structure. Another small arrangement of stones was found close by.

Was this an ancient Anasazi structure? Or was it the site of some strange religious ceremony? After briefly considering these more exciting possibilities, I had to admit the structure was probably built by bored kids entertaining their imagination, possibly while their parents sat in camp chairs around a campfire just down below.

Exploring a dirt road several miles south of the slickrock bluff and the friendly lizard, I came across a somber scene:

This was the largest roadside memorial I've ever seen. It was covered with bouquets of artificial flowers. Here and there among the flowers were dolls and plush toys of all sizes. Toy soldiers were arranged in a couple areas of the memorial. There were a couple small American flags. A set of barbells were included in the mix as was what looked like some parts from a car. Other items were there, including a few pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters scattered around one end of the memorial. I walked around the memorial but out of respect touched nothing. I wish I knew the story behind it.

The days spent on this trip were perfect, all with early autumn blue skies! The cottonwoods in the canyon bottoms were just beginning to turn their brilliant yellow. Stands of scrub oak bore colors from golden ochre to russet. Here and there some reds peeked through all the other colors. Early childhood experience told me to stay away from some of the fall color though. In a side canyon along the Colorado I found this:

Poison Ivy

At a kiosk near Onion Creek, I saw this poster:

Stay off the biotic soil. It looks like it could bite!

Moab

Slickrock Formations, 16" x 20" Oil on Canvas Panel.

Stepping on the heels of Plein Air Provo is Plein Air Moab. The first day of painting for the Moab competition is the same day as the opening in Provo. There's still plenty of time for painting in the Moab event, though, so I didn't worry about arriving for that competition until Monday. Monday was spent traveling and scouting possible painting spots between Moab and Monticello. The next three days I painted three 16" x 20" paintings. For this event the weather has been great!

Today I painted at a campground near Fisher Towers, in the Colorado River Gorge. While painting I was visited by a fat little ground squirrel who kept checking out my painting equipment. A little red lizard also came to check me out and crawled right up to my feet before moving on. I can't imagine the lizards at this campground are starting to mooch too!

While at Fisher Towers, I also picked which painting to enter into the show and framed it on a picnic table in the campground. The painting shown above is probably the one I'll enter into the competition unless I change my mind in the morning. The deadline for turning in entries is tomorrow morning. 

The show opens Friday the 14th, at the MARC, 111 E. 100 N. in Moab, and runs from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM on Friday and 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM on Saturday. All works are for sale. The show is free and I understand there are already some (non-competition) paintings on exhibit!

Plein Air Moab, 2010

Last year was the first Plein Air Moab, and the photo above shows my entry in that year's show. The area surrounding Moab has probably some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. It's about time there was a plein air competition here!

Hopefully I'll get in a little more painting while I'm here, paintings that can go to shows or in galleries. Maybe I could have painted more than three pictures so far this week, but I thought I needed to get in a little exploring both on foot and in four wheel drive. This is wonderful country!

Plein Air Provo

Image courtesy of David Hawkinson.

Cold, wind, rain and snow. When you paint outdoors on a regular basis, sooner or later you're going to have to deal with it. Those of us participating in this years Plein Air Provo had our choice of three days of cold, wet weather to paint in. I chose all three. Other challenges I dealt with were when the river rose unexpectedly while painting there on Wednesday, and on Friday, at a ranch on the west side of town, finding myself and my paintbox invaded by baby spiders!

The show opens Friday, October 7 at Terra Nova Gallery, 41 West 300 North, in Provo, Utah and runs through the 28th. Hours for the opening are 6 - 9 PM. After tonight, the show will be open at regular hours. For more information, visit Terra Nova's website and click on "Exhibits." Then scroll down to "Plein Air Provo."

When I dropped off my final entry for the competition, I got a sneak peak at many of the entries from other participating painters. I'm looking forward to tonight's (Friday, Oct. 7, 2011) opening so I can see everyone's paintings up on the wall and visit with other painters. I also look forward to meeting many of the gallery goers who come out to see the exhibit.

The show is free, and while you're out enjoying the artwork, you can also enjoy Provo's First Friday Gallery Stroll. Come and enjoy the paintings!

The Rest of the Escalante Paintings

My poor little Nikon digital camera is still suffering from the effects of a sudden dust storm which struck while I was painting near Escalante. It remains to be seen if the camera is repairable. In the mean time, I found a relatively inexpensive little Casio to fill in for the Nikon. It's not as slick as the Nikon (was?), but if I'm going to be feeding cameras to the desert from time to time, I don't want to be paying very much for them!

This is a continuation of the post Escalante, Another Demo, and Alien Beings. Brought to you courtesy of the little Casio digital camera.

Here's the painting I did Wednesday at the paint out at the Slot Canyon Inn:

11" x 14" Oil on Canvas Panel

Another camper where I was staying in Escalante told me about a place nearby full of hoodoos. This little natural red rock alleyway ran by there. Here is where the sand ate my camera:

8" x 10" Oil on Canvas Panel

On a long drive up on the Aquarius Plateau, I found this dramatic view late in the day on Friday:

8" x 10" Oil on Canvas Panel

Saturday, I went back out to the hoodoos and painted this:

6" x 8" Oil on Panel

Hopefully I can keep the Casio out of the sand and the myriad other things that could destroy it! Wish me luck!

The BIG Box

When painting small, pochade boxes fit the bill for me very well. There have been a number of posts on this blog about those, in particular here and here. However, larger paintings such as 16" x 20" or 18" x 24" require more paint, bigger brushes, more solvent, etc, and that needs a larger, beefier means of carrying it all around. This post will be about the paintbox I use for bigger paintings.

I built this box nearly twenty years ago. Plans - or wishful thinking - were that I would begin serious oil painting soon after building the box. In reality, it was used mostly for storage of neglected painting supplies until just around a year or so ago. The design idea came from smaller paint boxes I've seen for sale in art supply stores. Not knowing much about oil painting, nor really knowing what I needed in a paint box, I just took the design ideas I saw in the stores and beefed them up considerably to what I thought would work for my purposes - whatever those were! This box was built almost entirely out of pine. Not the most durable of wood, but it was what was available then and it works well enough.

After years of pastel painting, and then lots of oil painting in pochade boxes, it was time to begin learning to paint bigger. Something was needed that would hold bigger brushes and large tubes of paint. Commercially made boxes of the scale I needed aren't readily available, so I needed to figure out what to do. Suitably sized plastic storage bins or even a cardboard box came to mind. Finally I remembered the lonely pine paintbox full of 37 ml paint tubes with stuck caps. It was promoted from storage box to working paintbox - what it was originally intended to be.

With the experience I've gained in painting larger pictures, if given the chance I would build this box entirely different. It's smaller than I would like, and the compartments could be better designed, but it works and will make do. This paintbox has everything needed to paint except easel and large painting panel, although I usually take the usual painting supply bag with it. Here's a photo and bullet points explaining what's inside the big paintbox:

Click Picture for Larger Image

1. 11" x 14" canvas panels in swing out panel holder.
2. Wooden palette. Fits in same holder.
3. 150 ml size tubes of oil paint.
4. In this compartment  I keep a tube or two of white paint, a small (37 ml) tube of ivory black, vine charcoal which I may someday use, along with an eraser, and whatnot. Whatnot gets into a lot of my stuff.
5. Here I keep a few plastic bags for oily rags, plus a couple bottles of almost-never-used medium; one of linseed oil and one of liquin.
6. Tube wringer. Domestically made - not imported. The imports break as soon as you try to use them.
7. Brush washer filled with odorless mineral spirits. Bigger than the one I use with the pochade boxes, but I wish it was bigger still.
8. This little compartment holds a small container of brush cleaning soap, if ever it's needed, a neglected medium cup, a wire hook for hanging the brush washer from my easel, and a thumbscrew for fastening the support that holds the paintbox lid open.
9. Bamboo brush holder with brushes ranging in size from a little rigger to size 14 or 16 flats.
10. Also in this compartment are paper towels in a plastic bag and a couple palette knives. The hardwood lid support fits into this compartment for transport. There's a collapsible mahl stick in there, too.

Back when I built the box, I thought it needed to hold a couple paint panels. They might come in handy someday, but that's not so important to me now. Access to the panel holder is made by turning a little wooden latch at the top of the lid, then the panel holder tilts out. Moving the palette out of the way allows the paintbox to be used like a pochade box. The paintbox is too big and bulky to be carried very far and being a pochade box is not its primary purpose. My feeling is, if I have to lug around such a big paintbox, it will be for big paintings.

The brush holder is a necessary evil. It's there to keep brushes in place. Otherwise when the box is closed and being transported the design of the box could allow brushes to fall into other compartments  - and into the panel holder, where there might be wet paint. I don't want the brushes painting unsupervised!

Escalante, Another Demo, and Alien Beings

Last week was Everett Ruess Days and the annual plein air painting competition in Escalante, Utah. After attending the opening of the show at Fremont Indian State Park, I drove to Torrey and camped for a couple nights in a tent at an RV park. Like last year, the picture I entered into the show was painted in the Capitol Reef area. On Monday I set up in the parking area for the Chimney Rock hiking trail. Here are some photos of that painting in-process.

Canvas toned and initial drawing.

Messing with lights and darks.

Adding Color

Finished painting. Chimney Rock, 16" x 20" Oil on Canvas Panel.

Just as last year, I handed out business cards and talked to people from all over the world. I enjoy talking to people who stop for a short visit while I'm painting. Some painters don't. If you see a painter and they're wearing earphones, they probably don't want to be bothered.

The next day, I painted near Torrey. This is the painting I entered into the main show:

Torrey Breaks, 16" x 20" Oil on Canvas Panel.

Monday night I camped at a spot north of town near the Great Western Trail. After driving a couple miles up an ATV trail, through a couple mud holes and across a stream, I came to a washout that even the ATVs wouldn't tackle. Their go-around looked too adventurous for my 4Runner, so I pulled off the trail and camped there. Walking over for a closer look at the washout, I thought, "This will take a piece of heavy equipment to fix." I had no idea how soon that would happen.

This kind of camp has advantages and disadvantages. On the minus side, there's no wi-fi or showers. On the plus side, it's free and it's wild. This spot came with an additional challenge, though. I thought since it was late Monday, and there was a washout making the trail difficult, no one would likely come by. So I began to settle down for a peaceful night in the pinion pines beneath red rock formations. 

But shortly after sunset, an ATV came by and stopped at the washout. Then along came a backhoe followed by a pickup pulling a flatbed trailer. The backhoe commenced scooping dirt out of a bank not far from my camp and filling in the washout. That accomplished, they parked the backhoe not 50 feet from my camp and both the ATV and the pickup headed up the freshly repaired trail. They had to see that I was camped close by, but they never seemed to acknowledge I was there. A while later, the ATV and the pickup returned, followed by another ATV. They didn't stop at the backhoe, but continued on past. Later, an ATV with two people came back up the trail and stopped at the backhoe. One of them got in the backhoe and fired it up while the other person continued on up the trail on the ATV. The backhoe operator drove the piece of heavy equipment back down the trail. Later that night the ATV came tooling back down the trail. 

So much for a peaceful night. There was no more traffic for the rest of the evening, but I lay awake awhile wondering if anything else was going to come motoring by and maybe even start digging again.

The next night I camped further up into the trees, and nobody came by the entire night. Except for the construction crew and all the unexpected traffic on the first night, it was a nice place to camp. Two old campfire rings nearby indicated other people thought the spot was a good one, too. There was other evidence this was a choice spot for camping, even to ancient people. Wandering around my camp one morning, I discovered a lot of lithic flakes. These were shards of sharp obsidian and flint knapped off of stone tools or weapons by Indians long ago. I examined a few of the lithic flakes, putting them back when I was done with them.

Lithic Flakes

Closeup of Lithic Flakes

I'll bet ancient Indians didn't have to worry about backhoes in the middle of the night!

Wednesday I went to Escalante and participated in the paint out at Slot Canyon Inn. For the rest of the week my camp was at Escalante Outfitters. I did a few more small paintings that week, at Devil's Garden and Hell's Backbone, then attended a small town church service on Sunday.

Thursday at Devil's Garden, an F-16 fighter jet came roaring by, just a couple hundred feet or so off the ground. A while later a C-130 flew overhead just as low. I set my camera aside while I painted to be ready to snap a picture should another war bird fly by. No other war planes came by. Instead, a sudden dust storm blew down the little canyon I was in and my camera was caked with desert sand! After blowing and dusting the camera off as best I could, I turned it on. I got a "Lens Error" message and the camera wouldn't work. If I can get photos of the other paintings I did I'll show them in a later post.

Now for the alien beings! The first night at Escalante Outfitters I was out under the pavilion in the campground working on my computer when this little guy came wandering by:

Only it wasn't so little. The thing was at least two inches long and it's ugliness made it look even bigger! It trundled back and forth across the concrete floor of the pavilion the whole time I was there. Or there were several of them taking turns crossing the pavilion floor - I don't know. This is one of the most bizarre looking creatures I have ever seen and it looked like it was from another planet! 

 

Turns out, it's not an alien creature from outer space after all, but a Jerusalem cricket (Stenopelmatus spp.) It (or they - I don't know) seemed to behave itself, so I decided not to call out the army on this one!

Grace and Beauty in Unexpected Things

Bugs!

Sumer is winding down. Here and there Autumn is beginning to peak through the tree leaves. She stirs the weather patterns changing not only the appearance of the sky but the way the air smells, too. The wild roses have long dropped their petals and now have big hips. Raptors will soon migrate, and insects will hibernate or complete their warm weather life cycles. This time my post isn't about painting or drawing. It's about something I've noticed in nature. Sometimes I'm surprised to find beauty in otherwise unpleasant creatures.

Vultures have often visited me when I’ve been landscape painting in the mountains. They're more interested in me, I'm sure, than in what I'm painting. Since I’m focused on what I'm doing, I usually don’t know they’re there until one of the vultures strikes me with it’s shadow. That’s when I look up, startled, to see them swooping and gliding, obviously enjoying their ride. Sometimes one or another of them will fly close enough that I can see them cock their red head to observe me. They’ll do this for a little while, then slowly move off, regaining altitude. I have to admit, I enjoy watching them fly. They seem to take such pleasure in their gliding flight, especially on windy days. I’ll also admit I hope vultures never get TOO close!

During the height of summer, huge swarms of pale midges appear near Utah Lake. Their masses form clouds and wispy columns that look like smoke from small, scattered campfires. These insects are about the size of mosquitoes, maybe a little bigger. They don’t bite, however, and cause no problems, unless you happen to blunder into one of their low swarms. Then you run the risk of accidentally inhaling one or two of them. *cough*yuck*

One evening in June I was walking along the bank of the Provo River near the lake. Earlier in the day the weather had been unsettled, but now the clouds were clearing out. The air was quite pleasant, though the breezes were still gusty. The sun had set, and an orange glow on the western horizon offset the deepening blue of the coming night. I stopped to watch one of these swarms of midges as it hovered above the trees by the river. The gusty breezes forced the swarm into fascinating shapes and patterns. The swarm would stretch and collapse, divide and rejoin, swirl and form graceful arabesques. Rarely do I think of insects as graceful, but this swarm of midges seemed to be. I watched the midges for several minutes.

Suddenly, three ospreys came wheeling overhead, circling and calling a few times before heading off northward. There might be grace and beauty in vultures and midges, but ospreys still trump them!

A few stars began to appear in the eastern sky, and I headed home.