It's Too Big

Hat-munching in front of the temple of Isis

The current visual Grand Canyon Association Artist in Residence, Melinda Esparza (who has just been outdoing herself in all manner of things lately), let me tag along for the ride for a couple of days, and I cracked open the old guerrilla painter's pochade full of wonders and soaked an otherwise unassuming page of my watercolor journal.

The Canyon is just too damn big to paint small, and of course someone who rarely touches bristles to paper isn't going to 'capture' it. But drawing and painting makes you look carefully, in a way that staring and shading your eyes for five minutes isn't going to do.

Here's another joy: in school we were restricted in our palette to primaries and neutrals by our instructors and our budgets. But now I have more latitude. I snagged a grab-bag full of winsor and newtons from Ebay, and discovered the joys of saturated tertiaries.