Yakima Canyon meets Mark Rothko

This painting was inspired a few years ago by a post entitled Art is Everywhere from my fly fishing photographer friend Louis Cahill.  He noticed that the landscape along the Henry’s Fork actually looked a lot like a painting from his favorite painter, Mark Rothko.   While I was in the Yakima Canyon a few weeks ago I too noticed the similarity.   A few nights ago, thinking about this whole painting thing I realized I had planned to do a lot of pretty typical landscapes and wondered what would happen if I tried to take a traditional landscape and turn it into a Rothko all in one canvas.  That turned into today’s experiment.

I used oils today, I knew I had enough time left for them to try.  I used a pretty limited palette of water soluble oils – yellow ochre, burnt umber, aliziran crimson, ultramarine & phthalo blue, sap green and lemon yellow.  I used quite a bit of medium to keep the paint very transparent on the majority of the canvas adding layer after layer of transparent color. After I had the basic colors on very thin I began adding fuller paint to the left side of the canvas turning it into more of a traditional landscape while leaving the right side very Rothko-like.   I added titanium white to the palette at this point.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out and maybe I’ll try to do a few more abstracted landscapes over the course of the month.  I was also very happy to be using oils again, they just ‘feel’ so much better than acrylics do.