2023
A trip to Cloudland Canyon is always well worth it, and after creating drawings and two waterfall paintings I felt like I'd covered everything but this cliff face. I worked on a large drawing of it and felt like I had gotten a good grip on the image, but I knew that the colors would be a nice challenge. I stretched a canvas the size I thought would be best and started in, creating a great sketch. But there it sat for weeks. I didn't dare take it further, knowing that so many steps were between this sketch and the finished state. Sometimes that can stop you. But I did eventually start laying in some base colors and drawing in some edited ideas. I made good progress with sections at a time, but never the whole image at once. It was a long process to get deep into this one, but once I really opened up and began to draw into it with conte and charcoal it began to take shape. I painted out a lot of the drawing and felt like I was losing the feel of this great rocky face and the cool darkness of its shade. And as I have been doing on other pieces lately, I drew back into it and emphasized that element, much more to my satisfaction.