Painting – Grand Canyon Tourist Couple Photographing Themselves

Grand Canyon Tourist Couple Photographing Themselves
Digital painting (with photo by artist for reference)
25 by 16 in.
2007

Lightbox enlargement

Detail.

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From the The Grand Canyon and its Tourists series.

Doing the painting, I wanted to isolate the couple, make their camera stand out, put them in a great bowl of canyon and separate them somewhat from a semi-realistic sky. Though I wasn’t quite able to get the feel of all the S clouds (really striking that day), I’m satisfied. But I’ve been meditating on the placement of the lower clouds. When I first finished the painting, the far right one was further over to the left, and after some thought I moved it so it would sit just behind the camera, pinpointing it. Which I think is better.

The feeling I had, observing the couple, was that they were freshly married, and perhaps on a honeymoon trip? This was special occasion in a way that it wasn’t to many of the other tourists who were there with family or groups of friends or one other friend. The woman was eager for that photo, setting up the camera for it, posing for it. Taking that photo for not just now or the immediate future, but a distant world composed of all the coming moments she would make with her husband and eventual family. “And here we are at the Grand Canyon”. They will be different in a week. In a year. In five years. And that photo will be a sort of testimony. They wanted themselves and that canyon, so I painted them and the canyon without surrounding people or the fence. I worked on the painting for quite a while, painting in the canyon and clouds. And all the while looking at them, wondering about them.

They will never see the painting.

I develop a certain affection for people, working on paintings of them, and I hope that things are all right in their lives and will be all right. You think about the tilt of their noses and how their features shape shadows and you think about what they’re wearing and when they purchased what and how they felt about their clothes. I think about all kinds of things and those thoughts become part of the painting which those people will never see. They’ve no idea I deliberated on their features for so long and wished them a happy good life all the while.

Based it on the below photo: