Tag Archives: Moran Point

Grand Canyon Plein Air 2013

20130917_183536_HDRThis year’s Grand Canyon Celebration of Art, Plein Air on the Rim was somehow even more amazing than last years!! The organizers seem to have the midas touch on this show. It never seizes to amaze me how much support the GCA is able to create for this noblest of causes. Every year, this is the fifth, the Grand Canyon Association holds this show as a fundraiser in order to build a permanent venue for the Grand Canyon’s amazing art collection. They have accumulated a collection that can rival some of the best museums in the world of Grand Canyon art through donations, artists in residences, and acquisitions made by congress in the formation of the National Parks. They have Bierstadts, Thomas Morans, Edgar Payne, and countless others. This permanent venue will be a public museum for guests of the canyon to enjoy

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forever. Plein Air working for the public interest in the largest and most popular of all of the national parks. I just love being part of this “GRAND” idea and vision put together by the Grand Canyon Association. Plus the skies parted and the rain stopped for us the entire week!

20130915_164138This year the GCA had me and Robert Dalegowski go down to Phantom Ranch for a couple of days of the event. I hired the Mule cowboys to take a camping duffle down for me so I wouldn’t have to carry all of my painting and camping gear. Well, I had never been down to the Colorado River before then and was spellbound by its eternal beauty. I painted four paintings on the way down. ‘Zoroaster from the South

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 Kaibab,’ ‘Yaki From Skeleton Point,’ ‘The Bright Angel From Skeleton Point,’ and ‘Phantom Ranch’ can all be found in the body  of work gallery below. The other paintings where you can see the river closely were also done from the adventure down there. I had a blast getting to know the very talented and scrappy 68 years young, Robert. This guy had stories from the canyon and beyond that could captivate a room of A.D.D. teenagers, and has explored every nook and cranny of the canyon in his 50+ years of Grand Canyon exploration. He was painting in watercolors and I highly recommend checking out 20130914_171434some of his work by clicking HERE! I ran out of panels

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after two full days of painting around Phantom and hiked and painted on the way out too. The hike out was spectacular because just as I emerged from the basement rock and through the tapeats formation, the sun was setting on Zoroaster, my favorite monument out there (you’ll see painting after painting of it in my body of work). Then the moon rose and I continued up from skeleton point by the moonlight. Stellar. 

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For the rest of the week I spent my time on the rim painting into the blue abyss. As you will see with my body of work, I am continually captivated by the interesting interplay of light and dark shapes (click HERE to read my updated artist’s statement). The Grand Canyon creates the most stimulating light and dark shapes of any place I’ve ever been to. One of the days up on the Rim, Dave Santillanes (click HERE) was pointing to the stands in

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 expectation of cranking that painting out of the park!! Bill Cramer (click HERE) was doing his usual shenanigans, and we all wore ourselves out with our heavy intake of alcohol at night, and early rising to capture the sunrises each morning….artists are a different breed!! 

I’ve never witnessed a quickdraw that draws more attention or support than the one at El Tovar during this event. There were hundreds of people and the auctioneer did a phenomenal job of keeping people’s interest and getting those prices up. The GCA broke the previous year’s record with this quickdraw and the totals for 25 artists was 38,000 in sales!! The show opening of all of the work we’d done hadn’t even happened yet. The opening gala reception was another record breaker. I ended up selling 13 paintings including the quickdraw and got voted for the event’s top award, Artist’s Choice “Best Body of Work!!” I was very surprised because of the quality of work and artists in this show it could have gone to anyone. I am so honored by this and I will cherish this award for my life!! James McGrew (click HERE) also did very well in the awards department. He took the people’s choice at the quickdraw and the Plein Air magazine award also.

Enjoy the award winning body of work below (Artist’s Choice; Body of Work). And for availability use the navigation bar above and browse to my available paintings.


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Grand Canyon Plein Air On The Rim 2011

This year at the Grand Canyon Celebration of Art, Plein Air on the Rim was one of rain and challenging plein air painting. Ironically, the day we arrived, a wet cold front moved in and stuck to the Canyon like glue until the allotted one week of painting was over, then it moved on. I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon in such beautiful light though. With the rain came fog lifting out of the depth shrouding some features while defining others. All of the sudden the sun would find its way through the clouds and illuminate parts of the canyon with diaphanous rays of light. Then just as you got in to the bulk of the painting, lightning and rain would humble you and chase you back to the vehicle. Somehow or another, I managed to get a huge amount of work done though. I painted 21 paintings, and 20 made the cut and went in to the show for sale. The one that didn’t was a forced cloud painting that I learned from, but wasn’t composed well enough to be part of the body of work, so you’ll never see it!!

My method of staying dry and productive was to start a LOT of paintings one day and come back the next to work on or finish them. The picture you see above was one of the chilly mornings at Moran Point. This is a 20×24 and no small task! The Light would come and go so I had to stick with one or the other, I chose light. When it would come out I would furiously paint everything illuminated and study the color in the shadows, and take some “mental snap shots.” This was the first day of this painting and I was just about to wrap it up for the morning and come back the next day to finish. Marie Charvet was wandering the various points on this day and took this focused shot of me. We were talking about her travels to the United States from France, and she explained how it had been a great trip hence far when her rental car got Struck by Lightning and wouldn’t work any more the night before. She had to sleep inside waiting for the company to bring her another!

For all you plein air painters out there, I highly recommend getting in to this show. It is one of the best ones that I do in the year. The staff at the Grand Canyon Association is second to none and they are soooo organized. Opening night SOLD 15 of those 20 paintings and the quickdraw earlier that day had one of the best auctioneers and was attended by some Heavy Hittin’ Grand Canyon Art Collectors. The painting I did got bid up in a war to a whopping $2000.00. It helped that I got the People’s Choice award for that painting, of course!! The judges of the show picked the painting, Clinging Clouds, below to win the 2nd place overall prize too!! All in all it was the most successful show that I’ve done to date, and I thank everyone at the GCA, the sponsors of the show, the judges, and the Grand Canyon enthusiasts and collectors.

The complete body of work is below. For availability, go to the navigation bar above, roll over paintings, then Landscapes. Thanks for checking out the post!!

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Grand Canyon, Moran Point Demonstration

STEP 1. I decided to photograph this demonstration right after I started it, so I lost what I would consider the actual first step. Before this, would be just a quick line drawing like what you see at the bottom of this step. I loosely outline the integral shapes and think about how those shapes interact with each other. Also at this step I think it’s equally important to think about the “unseen” lines that tie parts of the composition together.

STEP 2. I start filling in the shapes. I first think in terms of 2 values: the light family and the shadow family. When handling dark valued entities like the junipers and pinyons, their light and shadow families are less discernible than the values in the rocks, so I just connect them with the shadow family. Then I work in the middle values like the background that is heavily influenced by the atmospheric perspective.

STEP 3. Almost immediately I go in with some notification of temperature relationships within the shapes. Reflected light is responsible for more saturation in the color within the shadows than local color. I have left the light family of the rocks mostly just the white of the canvas for contrast and will keep it that way for a few more steps.

STEP 4. This is where I will place most of the accents. I consider both hi-lights and darkest darks accents, but in this case, I’m talking about the dark accents (the cracks and crevices in the rocks, the trunks of the trees, etc.). This begins to really define the structure of the rocks and whatnot.

STEP 5. I redrew the bottom left portion of the rocky ledge for accuracy. For this prominent point, I really am after a sort of portrait of this formation. It is Moran Point at the Grand Canyon, a point where Thomas Moran was said to have painted the area in the late 1800s. This ultimately helped name the canyon a national park, thus preserving it for our and future generations. I’ve also started mixing and painting the dirty areas on the rocks surface as seen in the lower right.

STEP 6. I have started painting the lit areas of the rock formation. I am careful here to define the side plane of the rocks as the planes receiving most of the light. By controlling this aspect I can effectively change the time of day to earlier morning, making the sun seem lower in the sky.

STEP 7. More refinement of planes and their respective reflective light. Some more definitive treatment of the trees.

STEP 8. Further refinement of the side plane of the lit rocks. Also refining the background atmosphere. I am trying to define some the distant formations without losing the focus on the foreground. I have also started spending more time on the trees and am defining their plane changes and describing the form of their dark canopies.

STEP 9. I realized that the trees on the right were clumsy and made entering the painting somewhat cumbersome. The solution for me was to eliminate some of them in order to organize the foreground a bit further. Before finishing, I wanted to describe some more of the distant walls and formations, while again, not taking away from the foreground. I also drug some darker value through the shadowed side planes of the rock to create the effect of desert varnish.

“Historical Inspiration”  18X24 Oil

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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