Another California landscape image here, once again depicting a real place sketched in oil from a photograph. This has been a curious development in my art making that has only emerged in the last four years or so. I was once philosophically opposed to work drawn from photography, and inclined to draw upon my subconcious when rendering places, seeking the feel and spirit of my subject rather than the actual look of the place. You can refer to my previous post of "The Lake" to see what I mean here. Bodies of water perched at the edges of granite shelves are common in the glacial landscape of the High Sierra, but the regularity of the composition in the painting is nowhere to be seen in the actual place. I don't know if my philosophy is going soft or if it's just lazyness in my old age, but more and more now I'm tossing off the old prejudice's and using my photographs as a tool. In this case, I wanted to make a painting of a familiar landmark as a gift for somebody who had just built a house in the Ansa-Borrego Desert, situated to view this mountain through a large picture window.
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