For earlier paintings, click on these years: 2003 2004 2005-6 2007 2008.
Click on each small image to bring up a larger version.
I photographed these scenes on April 14, and did the two paintings soon afterward.
Lots of gorgeous rock and active water along this canyon. Often in places where you can't easily stop and paint!
On this trip -- i.e., the Arkansas River and Cottonwood Creek -- each painting was done fresh at riverside for two or three hours, with no thought of finishing. A few have been omitted from this display, some were left alone, and a few were further worked up at home.
All these views of the Arkansas River were available to me in the BV city park that stretches along the river near downtown. This stretch of river lies along a steep gorge. The first picture is from the top of the gorge, looking north. This painting done completely on-site. (See here and here for gorge views from the same spot in 2005.) Detail could be added to the side of the gorge on the right, but I think I will not bother with that for now.
Late-afternoon light from halfway down the gorge. Many earlier takes on this can be seen in 2005-6 and 2008. Although unfinished, these two begin to catch what I have been hoping to catch about this face of the Arkansas. (These paintings done completely on-site; I saw several fish jump.)
The next six were painted down near the water, which in all cases flows from left (north) to right (south). Three small-to-medium rapids (with two views of the first and three of the third). The first two paintings are small (quarter-sheet), quick, and rough, but they seem to have captured the wave. All six are plein-air works, of which the first four were left un-retouched. The last two were finished at home.
There are beaver dams all up and down Cottonwood Creek. Above each dam the creek becomes slower and broader; these wide spots in the creek are the so-called beaver ponds. In these paintings we are looking more or less downstream into the deep and quiet part of one beaver pond. I actually saw a beaver while working on it. (See this 2008 painting for an upstream view of the shallow part of the same pond.) The first two here were done on-site (and finished at home). The third is a studio painting. They of course recored various conditions of the water surface, due to wind, etc. (Apparently the species of tree also varied with the winds!)
After the first of these paintings, I decided I might learn something from a sort of blow-up, also plein-air, emphasizing a small region of the full picture. It's an interesting effect -- perhaps vaguely Japanese-wood-cut. See also Red Rock, below.
This beaver pond is now gone. The central portion of the dam has washed downstream (during spring 2010, according to one person I talked to). There is now just an ordinary fast-rushing mountain stream, beautiful in its own way, but not providing any reflections. The reflective pools are now high and dry: mud awaiting new grass. Sic transit gloria mundi.
For some other paintings from this locale, see 2004 and 2005-6. The last one here differs from the others in that I made more of an effort to replicate the configuration of the walls ... measuring all distances, and so on.
Here again, I thought it would be interesting and instructive to do individual blow-ups of the two main rocks that I have been working on since 2004. These were done from photos in September.
There was a light breeze, causing the surface to appear a uniform light blue-gray. Five minutes after I finished it, the wind dropped to nil, and there was a beautiful, deep, clear reflection of the mountains and the snowfields. I have a photo, so maybe I'll get around to making a painting of it.
The third painting is a close-up -- studio work from a photograph:
