50.Original Plein Air Watercolor Painting, “Plein Air, Just Before Sunset, Hart Prairie Road near Camp Colton, Looking South, Aspens, Flagstaff, 7-7:30pm, 5.11.24”, watercolor, 22 x 30”, 2024

Location: Flagstaff, AZ

Event: ArtX Flagstaff

The first airbnb I stayed at in Flagstaff was high up on Humphrey’s Peak, about a thirty or forty minute drive from Flagstaff over extremely bumpy, frozen, snowy unpaved roads. Really, I should have had a higher-clearance vehicle. Each trip made me paranoid for ripping out my oil pan and being stranded in the wilderness of the high-desert forest service roads. I loved it. Often I’d take my mountain bike into town instead, which limited me to sketching only. Thank goodness for this evening I had my car, and my art supplies within. With no clear plan to paint, this work was made by simply pulling over to the side of the road, looking south as the sun lit up the sky and aspens in fascinating gradations of middle-light colors, neither dark nor light, a delicacy about their optics. While not a precise work, the interplay of the aspens and the sky behind in the lower left corner of the painting is what drew me to paint. I used the back of my brush (the pointed handle tip) to scratch / scrape away still-wet paint to delineate the white trunks.As these aspens are still bare, without the new growth spring leaves to come (although lower-elevation aspens in town were already green), their thin branches optically obscure the light sky, while their thicker lower branches and trunks stand out white against it. Such paintings for me are reminders that as brilliant as these colors look and as much as you may wonder what was embellished - this work is a shadow compared to what the scene really looked like - it was an impossibly beautiful night, painting alone on a dirt road on a mountain in the high desert.