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Painting
"Castle Tower 2.0"
This
painting is actually the altered version of the
"Castle
Tower" oil painting originally completed in 2006. It
is the “right half” of an almost diptych (painting in two-parts)
of a vista of Castle Valley, Utah (east of Moab) . It
is an almost-diptych because both “halves” are viewed from
slightly different elevations and the right half slightly overlaps
the left. It was revised because a 5/8” x 5/8” divot was made in
the sky of "Round Mountain" by a careless gallery worker scraping off the paint (many
glazed layers) all the way down to the raw canvas! So, to rehab the
painting, I had to build up the hole to the level of the surrounding
paint and then re-paint the entire sky. Since this is an
almost-diptych I also had to repaint the sky of the “right-half”
"Castle Tower" painting as well!! The reason I couldn’t just
patch the hole was because it was down to raw canvas and because
the glazes couldn’t be exactly duplicated so would never quite
match—unacceptable. an opaque painted surface looks quite different
than a glazed surface. Unfortunately or fortunately as it turned
out, an opaque paint was what was needed to fix the hole and re-do
the skies for the two paintings. So I mixed up a large batch of
thick paint and redid both skies in a 90 minute session. The new
skies were much brighter and of course, opaque, so that necessitated
certain changes in the back and mid-ground as well. Studying the problem I
decided to punch-up the drama. I broke up the skyline with
clouds and added low clouds-ground mists to the mid-ground. So, now
the original paintings of "Round Mountain" and "Castle
Tower" no longer
exist. They have morphed into "Round Mountain 2.0" and
"Castle Tower
2.0". The original images exist only as pigment prints
(giclées). And, I am very happy with the new versions!! It changed
the mood of the paintings and reminds me of a time living in a
trailer on the top of the cliff overlooking Castle Valley (and Castle Tower and Round
Mountain) drilling for uranium. I was perched on our 25’ high drill
rig looking out into Castle Valley watching a thunderstorm approach.
What a fantastic scene! One of many I saw from our claims on
Wilson Mesa east of Moab, Utah. |
