Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Four Corners & Colorado Plateau series - #17, 18 & 19

The latest three completed on Tuesday.   These also mark the end of the Hwy 160 journey to the west; I am thinking I'm going to do this as a round-trip series, so there will be more, but not for a while.

In Profile
6x8 inches
oil on canvas paper

Interestingly, this sloped mesa, or hogback, is rising in the opposite direction to the rest of the Organ rock monocline.  I'm not sure what the deal is, but I loved its strong profile.  The foreground hill is covered with pinyon and juniper, and one of my goals here was to treat them as a broken-up mass, vs. lots of individual trees.  You can see I didn't care to spend that much time making them into perfect shapes.  The cloud?  It was actually in the photo; I rather liked it, so I moved its position to a better location.

The Corral
6x8 inches

On Navajo Nation land, just about everything is rangeland.  So, corrals for gathering cattle can be seen in random places.  I don't know if this one is still in use, but I felt it adds an interesting element to the land.

Winding Down
6x8 inches

As we head west, the monocline recedes to a well-worn gentle slope of slickrock, eventually disappearing for good.  A windmill and water tank are a reminder that water is a scarce and precious commodity.



2 comments:

  1. These are nice pieces. I just finished reading a book about the nine western states and their wild history. Your work reminds me of how things were and still are in some places which have not been developed but have been preserved.

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  2. Hi Helen - thank you for stopping by again and commenting! I really appreciate your thoughts, as one of my goals in doing this series is to depict the beauty of this country that thankfully *is* largely undeveloped and hopefully will remain so.

    I've purposely left out examples of modern society's impact on the land, save for the highway that leads us along the journey. Any evidence of man's presence included is always subordinate to the landscape itself.

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Your thoughtful comments add value to this blog - thank you so much for taking the time to leave them!

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