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This piece is the result of a love affair I have with the red earth found in Northern Arizona, as well as the wide open spaces. I moved through several stages of sketching, color studies and finally, growing this up into a larger size. I've been intimidated to work much larger than 12x16 so this felt like a very big step for me. I chose to write out a little of my own desire to move beyond fear and the things that intimidate me about working this freely and this large underneath the painting. While this is certainly about the shapes and colors of the Vermillion Cliffs landscape, it's also very much about my own journey to set myself free from any need to make my paintings fit in with the larger majority of what I seen in landscape painting. As I painted this, I embraced both my love of the desert and my passion for color and line as a primary vehicle for communicating about place. I am releasing my colorist self to play on the open field of the canvas and with the express invitation for others to see the way I see.
