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.