In early June of this year, I
went on a fun, guided tour through gAdventures and National Geographic (their
"Discover American Canyonlands" tour), and we got to see: Zion, Bryce
Canyon, Antelope Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. Inevitably, this led me to try
to paint what I saw, which is no easy task. In the west, the landscapes are
beautiful, but unforgiving to paint.
This particularly painting started
out with a beautiful sky, but quickly turned to disaster. I had made the
cardinal error of trying to paint a scene with the light behind me, as was in
the reference photo I took. Normally, such a lighting choice is just a bad
idea, but when painting canyons, it turns the landscape into a maze of
impossible to define shapes – a tangle of light and shadow that easily turns
into gibberish when painted. Humbled by the created mess, I painted over nearly
the entire canyon with the purple-grey shadow color, and went off to the
internet to do some research. There, I found paintings from people with
impossible levels of skill who could actually paint the Grand Canyon with the
light over their shoulder and with every rock defined, but I needed some ideas
more to my skill level. Eventually, I turned to a classic technique and swung
the light around to the left and lower in the sky. This allowed me to define
each mesa and butte with simple light and shadow while at the same time
provided some more interesting colors to the scene.
In the end, I think this
painting turned out reasonably well, but it’s hard to say for sure. The Grand
Canyon is so large, complex, and challenging to paint – I came up with something
decent after plenty of mistakes, but I’ll have to revisit this place in a
future painting to see what I else I can do with it.
Acrylic painting: 14” x 17”
