Blog

As promised (or threatened) in my most recent blog post, our recent vacation to the American Southwest has prompted new subject matter for paintings. For this snippet of views available in the Grand Canyon, I went entirely with palette knife. Not a single brush stroke. When we were there, we very much enjoyed the exhibition of paintings of the canyon in the Kolb Studio. Most of them were quite realistic in approach, but one was all palette knife - almost to the point of abstract. Seemed like a solid approach for painting huge hard rocky things.

You know the deal about no photograph can really capture the scale of the Grand Canyon? Same with paintings. Look at that shape mostly in the shadows visible behind the left-most column of rock. It's easily four miles away, probably about two miles long and 2500 feet tall. The horizon is maybe nine or ten miles away. You'll just have to take my word for it.

For any geology nerds out there, the Bright Angel fault is the prominent feature in the top third of the painting. Not often one sees such an obvious surface expression of structure.