Borrego Salton Sea Way
A pastel I drew on a road trip.
Luckily a kind driver stopped and helped pull my car out from the soft sand on the Borrego Salton Sea Way roadside, or I might never made it home alive.
East of where I live in Idyllwild are some damn spectacular high desert landscapes. I stopped to draw this. It needed a few at home studio edits, hence the picture of the masking tape I use to "erase." It is interesting that using the tape in the right way pulls off the last layer I drew, preserving the previous layers. Very cool.
Realism is art is a paradox: what is more real the dullish traditional detailed rendering or the brightness and energy of the landscape? Bierstadt managed to do both, super human feat. But my preference is the French Impressionists, notably Van Gogh, Monet, and Cezanne. They use a lot of color theory while simultaneously painting from life. Magnificent when the theory and the reality align.
The biggest problem for landscape painting is the light and color in real life are much brighter, by a thousand fold, than a painting can make. So a painter has to stretch the limits of color and light theory, to give the real feeling of the brightness, so that your eyes tingle in the same way as in reality. A fun and crazy problem.
Michael Newberry, Idyllwild, 0/23/2020