I really like this painting. The sky just came together so flawlessly that I actually prefer my painted clouds over the reference picture. It’s interesting to me how paint can elevate a scene in a way that’s so different from photography. The bottom half was a real struggle though. I just couldn’t figure out how to achieve the distant plateaus, the mountains were all wrong  and it was difficult to capture the vibrance of the fins. Finally I just had to call it done and be done with it. Sometimes it’s really for the best.

I’ve lived in two places now with really pretty landfills. The Moab landfill is just to the right and across the street from the end of this trail and just barely not in my picture. The setting sun lights up the fins every evening and you have this great view. If it wasn’t a landfill, it’d be prime real estate. I can’t imagine what people were thinking when they decided on that location. The other place was Kodiak, Alaska. You had great ocean views, more eagles that you could easily count and the occasional grizzly.

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Open Mind Exhibit & the Zone