Moab Weather: April Showers

April Showers

Painting No. 5-D-13

8"x 8" oil on canvas

 

Lately we have had a real mixed bag of weather, from snow to rain to shorts weather. Lately I just don't know what I'm gonna see when I head out the door to the gallery. Today for example, it was raining really hard until 11:30-ish. By 1 PM it cleared up enough that I drove out near the Moab airport and painted this little cloud study. I'm thinking of doing a large painting, possibly 36" x 36" of something along this line, and I need to decide quickly.

Don't let the weather get you down, head out just after the rain and capture it's beauty.

Saturday Night, Moab, Utah

Saturday Night

Painting No. 4-D-13

12"x 24" oil on canvas panel

Moab, Utah at night

Arches National Park: Balanced Rock

Balanced Rock

Painting No. 2-D-13

12"x 12" oil on canvas panel

 

Last Saturday morning I was in Arches National Park visiting Sarah Hamingson, the current Community Artist in the Parks pastel artist. I had intended to paint en plein air at the Balanced Rock parking lot but I forgot my mineral spirits and resorted to sketching several versions of Balanced Rock before deciding that I liked this angle the best. It's a tough subject to paint, the subject is awkward and impossibly balanced.

 

This is the usual view of the rock, which is kinda ugly to work with from an artistic perspective. The angle of my painting is at the far right side of the photo, and from the base looking up. Essentially my painting is a study of warm shadow contrasts in a typically cool environment.

 

Arches National Park; North Window

North Window

Painting No. 1-D-13

16" x 20" oil on canvas

 

About a week ago I drove into Arches National Park after a full day of rain storms and painted a small plein air sketch on location at the arch known as the North Window. Once back in the studio I reworked the composition of the Juniper trees, the small wash, and Sagebrush. At the suggestion of Tim Morse I added a couple distant clouds to draw the eye through the opening. The composition is the classic Edgar Payne "O" pattern, with the help of the Junipers for scale. 

Walking in Your Footsteps: Dinosaur Tracks in Moab

Jurassic Park in my back yard.

I read in the Moab Sun News about 2 sites just north of Moab, Utah that held some interesting foot prints of dinosaurs. Naturally this got my attention.

Back in 1993 when the movie Jurassic Park came out my daughter became interested in everything dinosaur related. So with the help of a geologist and the mineral records at a university we set out cross country through the Nevada desert in search of fossils. We actually found some great sites that held fossilized bone fragments, beaver teeth (beavers like 10 feet long) and fish fossils. But now I'm in Utah which is probably as close to Ground Zero for all thing paleontology related, so I set out to see the tracks. The first set are located about 20 miles north of Moab on Hwy 191. Take the North Klondike Road about 2 miles to a small dirt parking lot and hike 500 feet up the trail to the site. The tracks in this photo are made by a Sauropod; a large herbivore. What is really cool is that the tracks clearly show the dinosaur making a right turn in the mud which is rare as far as finding tracks go. There are also many 3 toed carnivorous along side the Sauropod's tracks suggesting possibly a hunting party.....cool stuff to imagine as your standing there.


The second site is located 10 miles north of Moab on Willow Springs Road. This road was the original entrance into Arches National Park and is described by Edward Abbey in his book Desert Solitaire". Go about 3.4 miles to a site on the slick rock that has a display sign posted and look for small clusters of rocks that people have placed next to the tracks.

 This site has many 3 toed carnivore tracks that are easy to see the direction of the footprints as the dinosaur moved along in the mud. Both of these locations are easy to reach with a vehicle that has reasonable ground clearance.