Is this what inspiration feels like?

Sunny Afternoon at Horsethief Butte ©2023

I was looking through all my Gorge photos and found a pretty dull shot of a streak-clouded sun above the landscape that really grabbed me. Staring at it, something in my mind spent a few seconds pointing out what I could do with its obvious challenges, and briefly I magically visualized what I wanted it to look like. Putting aside the other candidates I had pulled out, I used iPhoto to get more detail in the foreground rocks, and went to work. I roughed in the sky and sun first, realized that it looked exactly like I wanted it to, then worked my way down, pretty evenly, till it was finished. I'm sure that having pre-visualized the whole thing resulted in a better outcome than I'm used to having.

Since that approach to choosing my next subject had worked so well, I decided to try it again. I went through the large collection of candidates but nothing would talk to me. I looked back at my old photo files to trips in California, and came across a pair of subjects I'd thought about doing for years. These were taken on US 395, a winter trip to Mammoth Mountain, on the dry side of the Sierras with the mountains on one side and the high desert of the Owens Valley on the other. I had the same experience with them, of quickly going through the way I wanted to paint each one, the major steps to make it interesting.

I'm glad that my mind is finally catching on to the idea that I don't want to just copy a photo, I want to use it as a reference for a more introspective painting, with some particular feel, or emotion to it. It's rare that I take a photo that would be perfect without any changes, so being skilled enough to handle adapting it to catch people's attention would be a big step up for me. And another issue--a trap I'd like to not fall into any more is literally copying a photo because I love the subject and then finding out it makes a confusing, unfocused painting. I've done that more times than I want to think about it.

So if I can add this mental process to help me screen my photos for winners, that will be great! No more boring paintings!

Back to Horsethief Butte

I still have at least 100 pictures of the Columbia Gorge that I want to paint, and this time I went back to Horsethief Butte for a south view showing late afternoon light on the western part of the butte, plus the vegetation farther from the walking trail near the massive outcropping. I went with friends just before sunset and I shot many images as the sun slowly dropped behind Mt Hood and the Columbia River. Most of the grass was long gone dry, just the tiny water-hoarding groundcovers still showing any green. Gray, Tan, Ochre, and Orange were the dominant colors. Horsethief sits in the rain shadow of the northern Cascade range so it dries out mid summer to glowing golden slopes between the blue sky and the river reflecting it. It was a beautiful evening and made a lot of memories for me.

The problem with night scenes

Night Watch

I've finished the larger painting of the night scene at Horsethief Butte in the Columbia Gorge. I followed the same process I used for the study, except I did use the projector for the drawing. I had already applied a textured gesso layer to the canvas before I glazed the study and decided it was too much, so I went over it with a second layer of gesso with a scraper, which covered up a lot of the texture, but there's still some of the effect, particularly on the bottom. I'll be playing with it more in the future, but maybe not on landscapes so much. I first painted this one in daylight colors, then turned the lights off with overpainting. That may be the slowest possible way to get a night scene but it really makes a realistic night effect.

It took me a long time to get the colors and values right. The problem with night scenes is, if it's too light, it doesn't look like night, and if it's too dark, then you can't see it when it's hung! I had thought the commission-er was going to be hanging it in a brightly-lit room, so when he told me it was going into their living room, I decided to take it over there and try it in their room light before I glazed it. After some last minute touchups the night before, I decided I was finally happy with it. Fortunately, he was very happy with how it looked in their living room, so I've got it back and am glazing it now.

I made a lot of use of thin color washes—phtalo blue, deep violet, and burnt orange, plus black where I needed it. Maybe someday I'll learn to mix every brushful the right color to begin with, but I do like how layering the washes creates a sort of ambiguous patina that looks like all those colors at the same time, with a kind of a elusive shimmer due to the variations of intensity of every brushstroke. It's easy to do if you give each wash sufficient time to dry (at least a few hours) so there's a minimum of lifting of the previous wash. I did do one wash way too dark, and ended up having to lift most of it off with water and paper towels. That was no fun, scolding myself while I dabbed with crossed fingers.

There are a lot of small textures in this one and I got more practice of working with the brush in one hand and a tissue in the other, ready to dab off any extra paint. I used the same technique as on the first Horsethief painting to get the effect of the sharp-edged basalt rocks—handling the different layers with different brushes and colors.

I've got too many good gorge photos to stop now, so I'm getting ready to start another one—this time of Wankers' Column in Catherine Creek State Park. Not going to do a study, just going to jump right into it.

Day, night, and textured gesso

This was a study for a larger painting of Horsethief Butte. I wanted to try painting on textured gesso so I first coated the canvas panel with a thick-enough layer of gesso and then used a stiff dish-scrubbing brush to create an uneven vertical texture on all of it. The side effect of that was getting tiny gesso splatters on everything on either side of the panel, including the shirt and vest I was wearing. The splatters came off pretty easily while they were still sort of soft.

I started out with a daylight painting, copying the colors and lighting from a photograph, and found a real problem with the texture—how hard it was to get color down in the cracks. I had imagined that I might get a watercolor-like effect with the white undercoat, but the only place I liked it was in the sky.

I stared at it for a couple days until I decided I really wanted to do a night scene like I'd been seeing in my mind. I was about to paint the whole thing over with near-black paint and start again, but at the last minute decided instead to just wash the land with black and deepen the blue of the sky. The dark wash had the instant effect of turning it into a night scene, dimming down all the values proportionately. Happily, it also filled in all the white cracks.

I needed, however, to lighten up the foreground hills and brush, and add some highlights on the high cliffs. I found that the heavy texture made any fine detail impossible, but helped create a suggestion of grasses in some places. I do plan to put on a gloss gel finish, and I have no idea if that's going to work. Even without the gloss, my mostly overhead lights reflect strongly off the texture.

While I was working on this study I was also preparing the canvas for the larger painting, and used the same texturing process on it. After struggling with the texture in the study, however, I went back with more gesso and all but obliterated the texture, leaving just a faint trace of it. I didn't really like working with it, or find it that interesting as a part of this painting. if you're not looking for that specific effect, it just adds difficulty. On the other hand, if you'd like to cut down the amount of detail you default to, this could help you in that direction.

Painting rocks and pushing colors beyond the "real"

Horsethief Butte

Hiking around Horsethief Butte last fall with friends, I got a great photo that I hoped to make into a painting. These massive basalt formations are on the Washington side of the Columbia River just northeast of The Dalles, next to the Columbia Hills Historical State Park, which is also a worthy destination for the collection of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs there.

The interesting thing about these formations—and all the other exposed basalt bluffs and cliffs around them—is that from a distance, like across the lake from them, they look BLACK. But the closer you get to them the more colors you see in the stone and the lichens that grow on them—reds, browns, ochre, yellow, even green. Before I started painting I studied every photo I'd taken that day, then googled for images of basalt, and finally decided I wanted to show both how black they can look, and how colorful. That meant I had to invent my own colors, which is always more complicated, but also more fun.

I really wanted to paint the formations as accurately as possible, so I used my digital projector to draw in the outlines, and the first painting I did was to establish the angular vertical shapes of the stone in both buttes with a color value underpainting. After the initial blocking in I ended up adding multiple layers of thin washes, including violet, gray, burnt orange, brown, and black, lightening and darkening alternately until it finally looked good to me. By far, the most difficult part was getting the highlights on the left butte to look right. It took me three days to finally hit on just the right hue and value of grayed red-ochre.

The bottom line is that I kept trying different things, and if I liked it, I left it, and if I didn't, I painted something else over it. I particularly appreciate how easy this is to do in acrylics. You don't have to use medium, although you can, and I used to—now I just thin the colors with water. It's taken me a couple years to learn (and remember) what you'll get with all different dilutions of washes, from barely visible to barely transparent. I do give them at least a full day, preferably more, to cure before I put on the gel medium isolation coat and protective layer, and when I brush that on, I do it with a very soft brush and very carefully.