The Hoodoo Watch

The weather was good enough today to spend a bit of time painting properly in the garden.  The subject matter is a set of hoodoos.  These are weird geological formations.  I don’t know where the ones I based the painting on are but I strongly suspect they may be somewhere in Utah.

I wanted to project a bit of heat so had already decided to use my two warm reds; rose dore and Winsor red.  I wanted to use a warm yellow too, so was thinking of Indian yellow but was open to the idea of raw sienna for its earthiness  For the blue, I wasn’t fussed but was tempted by cerulean blue for its granulation properties.  But after sifting through the postcard swatches I did back on 30 January, I decided to go with raw sienna as my yellow (even if it’s a cool yellow) and French ultramarine as my blue.  These seemed to give the most appropriate neutral mixes for this subject matter.  So this painting is in the key of triadic right.

After the initial sketch, I painted in the sky.  There’s quite a large sky expanse so keeping it simple wasn’t an option.  I used raw sienna and burnt sienna in the clouds to get some interesting colours in there.  There’s an interesting bit of colour low down on the right where the burnt sienna shows through unmixed.

And then we get to the desert and the rocks.  I was well disciplined today, working in glazes and not being impatient.  I started with an all over glaze of an orange made from rose dore and raw sienna.  When this was dry, I went for a coolish neutral mix over the far mountains,  and when this was dry I started on the hoodoos.  The right hand sides were a bright orange made from raw sienna and rose dore.  Then to the left of that was an orange with more Winsor red in it.  And on the left in the shadows were neutral mixes of three primaries, with lots of variation – the bits where the Winsor red shows through look great.

As for the desert and the shadows behind the hoodoos, I had a great time.  As well as my four primaries I used viridian in places in an attempt to get a dark shadowy colour.  Normally, with so much messing around, I’d have ended up with mud but these coloured really behaved well together.  Late on, I ended up glazing over everything except the sky and hoodoos with a watery neutral mix veering towards raw sienna, which helped bring everything together.

And I added cracks and extra shadows to the rocks with various different neutral mixes.  When I first set out, I was expecting cracks wet into wet using sepia (which doesn’t spread out of control) but this turned out not to be necessary, with me being patient enough to let earlier coats dry.

And I do like the final result.  The colours might not match the raw material and the rock shapes may have changed a bit but who cares?  The bright orange on the sunny sides is exactly what I wanted and the way it complements the blue in the sky is something I’d not thought about but that works well.  The largest of the hoodoos has ended up looking like the sort of alien that kept invading Earth in films and comics of the 1950s but here all it’s doing is standing there, watching.  What’s it watching?  Who knows?  Or is it just a crazy rock formation?  This painting raises questions and that’s why I like it.  It’s up for sale.