Tusayan Field

Tusayan Field

Oil on canvas, 6x12

After painting the amazing scenes of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, it was reassuring and comfortable and fun to paint a small field at the side of the road in Tusayan, Arizona. 

As you all know by now, I am a sucker for the pale yellow grass that grows around here at certain elevations. I captured the pale color of the grass in this painting, but can't quite make that pale nearly white yellow come through on the computer. But it's close. 

This scene was just one of the lovely, quiet, small scenes that I love. The field that someone drives through to get home. The piece of land that no one notices, but which informs and enriches their day and their environment. 

Sometimes I make these paintings large, but there's something in my heart that speaks to the small painting, that you can put on a small wall between two doors, in the sunny corner of a small bedroom, in the space below the cupboards. These are paintings that become part of the environment of your home, in the way that the landscapes are part of the environment of your life. 

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Grand Canyon Morning, 20x20

I did paint the Grand Canyon again, on a crisp and very cold morning. It was again daunting and challenging - and I loved it! My painting in the landscape is below. 

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I saw this twisted tree on the road from the Grand Canyon to the mountains. Its bark is really fascinating. 

Just outside of the Grand Canyon, and in many spots on the road from the canyon to Monument Valley, there are these sort of open air shacks where Native Americans sell stuff. Many of these look as though they've been abandoned for years, but this one, just outside the Grand Canyon, was open and busy.

My friend Heather, visiting California this past week, needs some help! It's January - but there's no snow! How can it be January? Heather and her husband Joe are now back in Maine, where there's plenty of snow.

Randy Clough, a Navajo I met in Monument Valley, really wants a dog. But he says his grandmother told him Navajos can't pay for dogs. So he is waiting for the right dog to show up. I suggested he go to Best Friends in Utah and barter some money for a dog.

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Dog of the Day

Here's Heather's husband Joe, in sunny California with a beautiful Dog of the Day!
The dog's owner thought the dog and Joe resembled each other...

A Journey into Joshua Tree

Red Rocks, Joshua Tree 

Oil on canvas, 10x10

After seeing the Pacific, I headed for Twentynine Palms, Calif., and the Joshua Tree National Park. 

I usually avoid places that are already protected, but one of my friends and sponsors asked me to paint Joshua trees, and so I went. It It was a marvelous, enriching, soul-filling experience. I loved it. 

Joshua Tree National Park, all 1,234 acres of it, has been protected since 1936. It's been a national park since 1994. It is filled with Joshua trees, and with amazing and extremely bizarre rocks. In places, it was like being on the moon, or underwater, or in someone else's dream. 

Joshua trees, according to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, grow pretty much only in California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada - the Mojave Desert. The trees like it best when they're at an elevation between 1,300 feet and 5,900 feet. Joshua Tree National Park is one of the trees' most favored environments. There's also a Joshua tree forest in the Mojave National Preserve.

 

The trees were named by Mormon settlers crossing the Mojave in the mid-19th century. The shape of the tree reminded them of a Biblical story in which Joshua reaches his hands up to the sky in prayer. 

 

And they do look like people, in a way. They have a single tall trunk, and their branches are gnarled, with no little twiggy branches, just the main ones, twisted and turned, graceful and grotesque at the same time. They do look as though they are imploring, praying, raising their arms to the heavens.

 

Maybe it's because of the name, or the people-like trees, or the strange and amazing rocks, or the gorgeous, breathtaking, open landscape, or maybe it just is the aura of the place, but it seemed like a spot in which God was very close. It felt like a place of the spirit, a place of the soul. 

I spent two days and a night there, painting and camping in the van. I wanted to hear the quiet and see the stars, and watch the sun come up, all of which I did, shivering through some of it. 

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I'd always imagined Twentynine Palms to be an exotic and graceful place. Haven't you? Doesn't it sound like an oasis, a place of light and elegance? 

It is anything but. It's a dusty, sort of scruffy place, rough around the edges, not very friendly. Someone was shot and killed there on the night I spent in the park. 

There are some fun murals there, though, on the sides of buildings and stores. 

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On the way to Joshua Tree, I passed through a gigantic windfarm. It went on like this, on both sides of the highway, and then continued on the road onto which I exited. It was pretty amazing. And some of the windmills were turning in the light breeze, but most weren't. 

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There's more to Joshua Tree National Park than trees. There are also fascinating rocks and rock formations. Some are made of thousands if not millions of small (probably not so small, really) sharp-looking rocks. Others are piles of oddly smooth and rounded rocks. I've not seen anything like either formation. Between the strange trees and odd rocks, it felt a little like being on another planet, or undersea, or in some other time. 

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I took these three pictures during the same sunset! 
It just got better and better and better. 

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The moon set, and the dawn was just beginning when I took the photo below.