Category: Plein air paintings

  • 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, 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 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…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day 10, Oct. 5, 2010

    After all that fussing about climbing down the wilderness trail, we woke up to rain. Not much, but a very cloudy sky and big fat drops. No wilderness trail hiking/painting for this cautious (or lazy) couple. We rescued paintings from the back patio, where we thought they were safe under shelter (not quite), did lots…

  • 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…

  • Petrified Forest, Day 8, October 3, 2010

    This was our day off, a day which I intended to be so lazy that I would awake at 10, take 3 naps, and be in bed before 8. Good luck! I woke up as the sky was lightening, but closed my eyes fiercely against the temptation. Then I opened them again as the sky…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day 7, October 2, 2010

    The good news is that I painted the rusting car, which sits at the Route 66 stopping point on the PF drive, and it was fun. The other good news is that we had a desert thunderstorm all around us tonight and saw gorgeous clouds, a tad of rain, and smelt the sage as it…

  • Petrified Forest Residency, Day 6, October 1, 2010

    Petrified Forest, October 1, 2010 Off we went, late this morning – 6:30 rather than 6 AM. The ranger had already opened the gates and moved on. Some mornings we have arrived before he did (we have a key to open the gates ourselves). Other mornings we arrived just as he did, and he got…