Anatomy of a Painting: Turbulent Lands
Turbulent Lands, 15x25, oil Third Place, 2024 NM Masterworks Oil/acrylics Studio Painting I've been painting in the Los Alamos area for a few years. The cliffs leading up to this famous town are striking. I became obsessed with trying to capture their feeling - the shapes and texture and the light on them at different times of the day. One of the first paintings was Turbulent Lands I, a smaller painting that in fact was not done on site. It's difficult to paint on the edge of a cliff (and edge of a noisy road) so after taking many photographs and making value sketches as well as diagramming an appropriate armature, I did the following painting in my motel room during a Paint Out sponsored by the Plein Air Painters of New Mexico: Turbulent Lands I, 10x16, oil I wrote an extensive blog post on this painting: https://karenhalbert.blogspot.com/2023/06/anatomy-of-los-alamos-cliff-painting-in.html . I returned several times to the cliffs of Los Alamos and tried a larger painting: