Distant Storm and a Lesson in Not Over Doing It

This one started with the sky. We took a trip out west to the Grand Canyon earlier this year, and the thing that stuck with me wasn't the canyon itself. It was the sky above it.

The Grand Canyon, AZ

Massive cumulus formations stacking up over the desert, bright white tops catching sun while the bottoms went steel blue and dumped rain on the plateau below. I wanted to paint that feeling of scale.

Distant Storm - full view

At 36 by 48 inches, this is the largest oil painting I've ever taken on. That was intentional. A big sky needs a big canvas. I wanted enough surface area to really work the clouds with thick, textured brushwork up top and let that transition into the soft, hazy rain falling over the distant mesa forms at the bottom. The top half of this painting is all texture. You can see the palette knife work and the brush strokes building up the cloud mass in layers. The lower third softens out almost completely, with the buildings and landscape dissolving into atmosphere.

detail of the clouds

detail of the falling rain

Getting the color right in the sky was the main challenge I set for myself, and I think that's where this piece succeeds. The blue shifts from a warm cerulean at the top to a cooler tone where it meets the cloud edges, and the clouds themselves carry purples, warm grays, and hints of ochre in the shadows. That color work, I'm proud of.

Re-framing certain sections of the larger piece made the composition play better.

Compositionally, I'm less satisfied. The full painting feels like it wants to be bigger than even 36 by 48 allows. But something interesting happened when I started isolating sections. The third image, a tighter crop of the lower right, works as a complete composition on its own. Sometimes a painting teaches you something about itself after you finish it. This one taught me that the best parts were hiding inside the whole.