Out West, part 2
Painting in 1979
This is me at the age of 18, traveling from Minneapolis to Los Angeles with my Aunt Anna and Aunt Claire, in Claire’s VW Westfalia. It was crazy times, and I did paint from the top of the van at times, but not while it was moving!
Craters of the Moon: A Natural Negative
Back to 2023. Times have changed! I usually painted inside our rented car while my husband Matt drove. Having left Glacier National Park (last post), we entered the spooky landscape of Craters of the Moon in southern Idaho. It was formed by immense volcanic eruptions about 2,000 years ago.
The lava flows of black rocks and earth created what appear to be a photographic negatives, with the plants much lighter than the background.
While passing through the duller landscapes of southern Idaho, I tried to capture that spooky negative effect. I worked on two versions at once so that, while one part dried, I could switch to the other painting. The light reddish brown under the trees is the needles that have dropped to the ground.
The Site:
This unfinished painting shows some of the strangeness of the landscape around Twin Falls, Idaho. Volcanoes poke up, the occasional cows graze, and weird looking buildings appear in the distance. That prompted us to do a little Googling. Turns out we were driving through ‘The Site’, the largest concentration of nuclear reactors and research in the world. There were no signs mentioning that!
During the last week of the trip in Idaho and Yellowstone, I continued making paintings of the mountains that were now crowding my inner landscape, feeling that I must capture the beauty of each one before returning to flat eastern Massachusetts! An impossible task, but I did manage to make 30 paintings.
Art for All at Old Faithful
By the time we got to Yellowstone National Park, the last leg of the trip, I was getting amazement fatigue, and only painting things I had already seen. But Yellowstone with all of its manifestations of the underlying hot magma boiling to the surface for eons really is amazing. The photos below are but a tiny sample.
Stay tuned for next week’s post: Art and travel in Seattle, with Makayla.
