Wild Wild West-Painted Hills

It is time to compose my counter-melody, i.e. the bottom half of the wild wild west.  This is the part where the desert scene of Painted Hills in central Oregon would fit in.  

There really is a place called the Painted Hills in central Oregon.  The spot is actually not a desert so to speak, but a gathering of dunes of claystones that display stratified layers of different colors, from rust to gold to black.  I picked this theme as my counter-melody because I think the stripes are very different from the clouds.  The exception is that they are both layered.  Yes clouds are amorphous but a sea of clouds certainly has structure.  In my painting they are layered.  Thus I believe it would be visually stimulating to compare and contrast the clouds with striped dunes.  

I started out with a small dune.  I needed this to be a reference point for my darkest tone for this half of the painting.

I then painted in the foreground.  A nondescript stretch of real-estate.

Chuen are brushstrokes used to describe the texture of the soil or rocks.  I've touched upon techniques like the axe-chuen, hemp chuen in my past blogs, and I had also alluded to the dot-chuen.  This is done by writing dots in strategic areas; either to help with shading, or to hide mistakes.  In my case, I used this technique to texturized the entire foreground.  Sort of like pixels from yesteryears newspaper print.  Or perhaps what the western world called pointillism.  Isn't it interesting that the East and the West are really not that different.

 

My next chore was to construct the main theme of this counter-melody; the main dune that occupied the greater portion of the lower half of the painting.

I had written in the shape of the dune, and the contour lines of the lopes of the dune.  Thrusting my brush backwards such that the brush tip lined up with the contour line was my way to achieve the proper shading.  This was done in lieu of the traditional chuen technique because I found shading to be more effective in describing the lobes.  A void in the middle of the lobe suggested a bulging structure.  My goal was to create these fingers running down the slopes of the dunes.  

Stripes were written to illustrate the striated features of these painted hills.

The lower left portion of the landscape was left open on purpose.  This is what we Chinese brush painters called "breathing".  It helped to open up the scene.  Had that void been filled in, the painting might look somewhat claustrophobic.   

How Red Are The Red Cliffs

With the blue section done on the painting, it is time to paint the red cliffs

So how red should the cliffs be?  I had not intended for the painting to be a faithful representation of any facts, other than my nostalgic feelings about Su Dongpo's verses.  Do these cliffs resemble the red landscape one finds along the highways of Utah?  I researched online trying find pictures that show what the Red Cliffs look like today but I failed.  It turns out that the exact location of the Battle of Chibi (Red Cliffs) is still a highly debated topic.  There is a city called Chibi in China's Hubei province but the photos online does not give any indication about cliffs that are red, other than the huge carvings of the words Chibi in the rocks.  I suppose this supports the debate that the term Chibi (Red Cliffs) perhaps got its name from the flames illuminating the cliffs in a reddish color during the naval battle.  

I happen to have a photo from the central Oregon desert where the Painted Hills are located and with the help of photoshop I cut and paste my own Red Cliffs composite.  Just to get the feel of it, that is.  

I am assuming the red color comes from the high concentration of hematite in the rocks.  The ferric oxide turns to rust and gives off the red color.  

So my red shall be a rusty red.  Perhaps I could scrape off some rust somewhere and use that as my organic pigment!  A future project perhaps. 

I apply my rust color from the back of the Xuan paper, as I did with the blue hues.

I wait for the color from the back of the paper to dry first before working on the front of the paper, reinforcing the namesake of my painting.

In the end the newly finished painting looks like this

I love the feel of the painting. It has an understated elegance to it.  I am glad I did not paint everything a solid red color as in my composite.  I am absolutely convinced that my current representation is infinitely more poetic, more evocative of "nostalgia".

There is one item that I have a problem.  I do not like the shape of the reddish rock on the right.  There is a landmark within the Columbia River Gorge area that resembles the painting, and it is located within the Rooster Rock State Park.  Unfortunately I find it too much of a monolith in this setting, and seems to have detracted from the description of cliffs; especially when it receives the most "red" in the coloring scheme.

By extending the red rock formation to the right to render it as a continuation of the red landscape that was carved away by glaciers eons ago, the painting seems more fluent and with less hiccups now.