zion/bryce canyon: day 4

Day 4

A cold wind whips my hair across my face, into my eyes and mouth. Bundled in my gortex rain jacket, hood snugged tight, I clutch at the small paintbrushes on the picnic table in front of me before they roll away in a strong gust. A group of us are huddled in various nooks around the Kolob Canyon overlook, doing our best to capture the land’s reds and purples and the sky’s sterling gray in our little watercolor journals.

Not what we expected—at least I’m wearing jeans today. The weather is playing trickster, as it did in this part of Zion Park two days ago when I was trekking to log cabins. But those of us who are here for this art workshop love both art and nature, and we gamely dip and mix and blot and reflect, painting our thoughts in colors and writing the landscape in fine-point ink.

I’m surprised at how quickly one can conjure up a scene of rocks and sky, however impressionistic, and even more surprised at how free one can be with the colors before them. Of course, this is the art of art, seeing what one sees with their own unique vision, and interpreting that with pigments, lines and washes. And in this terrain, even with the somewhat ill-tempered weather, we are not lacking for inspiration.

I finish my don’t-lift-the-pen-from-the-paper exercise (one of my favorite results), and we all hike a short distance to another view from within the red canyon walls. We sit in the dirt along a narrow trail, gauging our perspectives on the scene. I am struck by the elegant simplicity of this cliff’s particular shade of deep russet jutting into the platinum sky, and this is what I paint. For me, it is all about these two planes of color meeting, dominating this moment of the world. The instructor comes by and furrows her brow at what I’m doing, eliciting me to use more color, to stop using “brown”. So I do, and because those colors are not in my heart, I ruin the painting. I reel in the lesson of giving over my voice to another like the expert I am.

Later, on the way back to Zion’s main entrance, I think about that painting. I’ve gotten a ride with Kim, who’s a landscape architect for the park, and a master at creating her own life. Sitting in Kim’s pickup truck in a grocery parking lot, waiting while she does a few errands, I repaint the entire picture. Exactly as I want it.