Bryce Canyon Blizzard

This was an odd painting that sort of drifted all over the place until I figured out what I wanted to do with it. Painting canyons is very difficult since they are frighteningly complex structures, and the snow just made it even more challenging. After a lot of muddling around and wondering if the painting was going to turn out, I was able to get some meaningful structure and contrast into the scene. I think the result is acceptable, though somewhat more abstract than most of my paintings. 

Acrylic painting: 14" x 17"

Bryce Canyon - Stormy Day

This scene was another inspired by my trip out to the canyons of the West this year. When we visited Bryce Canyon, distant rain storms could be seen, casting a thin veil of rain over the far-away cliffs. This was another very challenging scene to paint. There is tremendous depth to the scene, and one can't simply hide the mid-ground behind trees since you're standing on the rim of a canyon, looking over the middle distance. Next, Bryce Canyon has distinctive colors and rock formations, but trying to paint the spires of countless hoodoos vanishing into the distance would be an exercise in futility; I was able suggest at the shapes of the rocks and trees, and I think that worked out pretty well. Finally, getting the foreground to look right wasn't easy until I settle on letting it mostly be in shadow so it stood out from the very bright rocks beyond. In all, this was not an easy painting, but I'm happy with the results - I think it captures the vast scale of the scene and looks like Bryce Canyon.

Acrylic Painting: 14" x 17"

Grand Canyon overlook pines

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”