Creating the Painting

This Walking Wild version is a significant upgrade of the Autumn Trail painting, which came about after of a trip to Arches National Park near Moab, Utah in 2004.  My wife Jean and I were hiking around the area on a beautiful October morning.  I kept stopping and taking pictures of the landscape (hundreds of them as it turned out).  Everywhere I looked was magical. Just another day in red rock canyon country! 

When I returned to my studio I uploaded my photos onto my computer where they sat on my hard drive until mid January 2006 when I rediscovered them and began sketching and finally painting.  I worked on this painting for a few weeks along with two other pieces. I wasn't certain if I liked the piece enough to finish it so I stopped working on it in March. I was pretty sure I was going to abandon the piece altogether and use the canvas for another painting. It sat unfinished and unloved in a corner of my studio until November when a couple of visitors saw the piece and told me how much they liked it.  So, in light of this and some other favorable comments I had,  I reevaluated the work and resumed painting on it in December. I finally finished the Autumn Trail version on January 2007, a year almost to the day after I began. It took 232 hours 20 minutes to paint (a form of self-flagellation). However, I was never very happy with the results, but it looked good enough to hang in various galleries from Jackson Hole to Scottsdale.  When I pulled my art from all my galleries in 2009, the painting languished in my art storage room until early 2011 when I finally figured out what was bothering me about the piece: the red rock looked way too pink and the trail needed something more exciting than just a hidden fox and a lizard. What it needed was wild horses which are indigenous to the Moab area (think Dead Horse Point).  I realized that wild horses had probably trod the very "autumn trail" I had originally painted-perhaps many times over the decades!  So, after a significant investment of time and energy, I made the changes.  I like the result and hope you do too.  If you have not been to Moab, you have really missed something!

From this revised original oil painting, I have produced a limited edition giclée print on canvas and on paper. 

 R. Geoffrey Blackburn