Gathering Painting Inspiration While Traveling
Moab and Canyonlands, Utah | March 2023
Colorado in the winter and early spring can be a bit dreary. The colors are generally white, brown, and gray. Even as spring starts to show its face, the tentative greens of grass and spring flowers can easily be covered by a spring snowstorm. One destination that I have grown to really enjoy during the winter and spring months is heading west, over the mountains to Utah. The drive to Utah is like changing worlds. You drive through the summit of Vail pass, where the world is completely locked in winter with feet of snow piled up along the highway, and then a couple hours later, the color palette has completely changed to the bright oranges, reds, and browns of the desert.
Our recent trip to Moab at the end of March was a bit cooler than we expected, but both my husband Vasya and I just needed to get out of town and away from everything. I generally do not paint or draw on vacation. I wrote in a recent newsletter (are you subscribed?) about how I once had this vision of myself as a plein air painter with my travel paints and brushes painting in some idyllic surrounding. In reality, it didn’t work for me. I was too distracted. I wanted to sit and just enjoy the view, explore the flowers, watch the bugs, pick up rocks, search for lizards, essentially embrace my inner four year old. I still often bring a sketchbook and my pencils and pens, but they often stay in my bag. Instead, I have started to embrace traveling as a time to gather inspiration to fuel my painting practice once I am home.
There is so much that can capture my attention when I am traveling. Here are just a few.
Expansive Landscapes
Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
Sometimes I love to just sit and think about how truly huge the world is. This feels especially accurate when exploring somewhere like the Utah desert. Vasya and I went on a 11 mile hike in Canyonlands and we couldn’t have seen more than a dozen other people. Scrambling up and down rocks and through valleys you really feel how small you are comparatively.
Textures
Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
Texture is something I am working on in my paintings. Texture gives paintings dimension and makes the composition more interesting overall. There was so much texture in the desert: the different kinds of rocks, the way ice formed on the rocks, the way the leaves are shaped.
Plants
Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
I love desert plants. It takes another level of skill to survive in that environment and the shapes and textures of the plants reflect their adaptations to survive. Sometimes painfully so!
Animals
Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
We did not see a lot of wildlife on our recent visit to Moab, but we did see some lizards. I don’t know what it is about little lizards, but I think I will always find them fascinating no matter how old I get.
The Weird Stuff You Just Didn’t Expect
When we started our hike in Canyonlands it was cold enough that anywhere you found water there was also a thin layer of ice across the top. When we climbed to the top of the first rock hill, it was covered with huecos filled with water covered with paper thin ice. The ice caught our eye because it vibrated as you stepped close to it causing these really cool light reflections.
Peekaboo Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
During our hike a pile of what appeared to be strangely shaped rock caught my eye. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be mud, and as you got even closer, you could see that the mud seemed to be covered with different kinds of lichen. It almost made it appear fuzzy.
Peekabook Trail, Canyonlands National Park, Utah
What are your favorite things to do on vacation? Do you like to take photographs? What are your favorite things to photograph?
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