Category: Petrified Forest

  • Paintings from Pine Creek: Finale

    In preparing for our extended visit to the old family home,  Cedar Pines, along Pine Creek in northern Pennsylvania, I realized that the lush green landscape required more than my usual travel supply of small boards. I needed ampler materials so I could stretch myself into the landscape. Lots of artists don’t work large, and…

  • Petrified Forest, Relationships Grouped: “Natural Monuments”

    As I have been stumbling to explain, my plein air experience is infinitely larger, more amazing and important, than my plein air paintings. It’s inevitable, the smells, the sights, the history, the culture, geology, geography, the wind and sun and sky — only tiny bits of this can be encompassed in any single painting. And…

  • PEFO Paintings, Mostly Finished.

    I promised to provide updates to this blog as I worked in my Portland, Oregon, studio on the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park Paintings. I am in the process of moving this WordPress.com blog, pages and posts, to my website, but until that process is completed and ready for public consumption, I thought I would…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day Whatever, Oct. 14, 2010

    I have lost track of time. A bit of disorientation in space as well, but  mostly of time. After returning from the Lightning Field, I had to sleep a lot, and I had to re-orient my head to painting. We found a hardworking crew, putting up a fence around our back “patio” space. They start…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…