Somebody looked at a magnet based on this painting from my Zazzle shop this morning. It’s a coincidence because just before I woke up I had a strange dream. I was arranging a number of very saleable small paintings and rock crystals in a handsome room in a mansion. There was a large art sale going on and many others were selling there. The work I was selling was not my own. Another woman and I selected some works from a back room to display. There wasn’t space for everything. We left some large heavy pieces in the back. One of them was a tourmaline Buddha. We didn’t have a pedestal (platform–hmm) for it. Later, a man came in, very upset, demanding to know where the rest of the tourmaline pieces were. He said the one of the missing works was worth at least a quarter of a million dollars. We took him into the back and showed him the rest of the pieces and he was relieved, but he insisted that we find a pedestal to display the large work.

I have to explain that this piece, Walnut Canyon #2, is actually “rock art.” It is based on some terrible, and I do mean terrible, drugstore prints of photos I took in Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff, Arizona in 1988, soon after a bad case of writer’s block had led me to turn to painting. (It’s a long sad story–my poor family–but I digress.) Anyway, I went to some galleries in Scottsdale to see what they carried and on the way back, I stopped in Flagstaff. I visited Walnut Canyon late in the afternoon, and it was as if I had lived there once. I climbed down the hundreds of stairs to the rock peninsula jutting into the white sandstone and sat in one of the shelters cut into the rock by people, long vanished, the Spanish called Sinequa (without water) because there was no water in the stream. I watched two large birds, which I looked up later and found to be vultures, swing back and forth down the canyon with the light shining golden through their almost motionless wings. Then, I stood up and took some Kodacolor shots.

When I got home and had them printed, I was very disappointed. The photos were overexposed and blue. I couldn’t forget the experience, though, and did three large acrylics on canvas (about 3′ x 3′) based on the pictures. When we moved to Colorado, I took the paintings off their bars and rolled them up. For a while, I taught classes at the local art center here. There was a show for staff, and I pulled them out. They still were not quite right. I restretched them and reworked them with transparent acrylic glazes. This work is not worth a quarter of a million dollars, LOL, but it is probably worth a lot more than the cards and other small things I have been spending my time on lately, to say nothing of the novel I should be working on right now. Still, for all the artists out there with many interests, I thought it would be fun to share this little story. If you are interested, you can see the Walnut Canyon Series on Saachi.com, Absolutearts.com (the three original paintings are available only through this site), Redbubble.com, and, of course, at Zazzle. I have set up prints, cards, and other items there. If somebody ever buys the originals, I will take all the prints and products down. (Wishes and horses and all of that).

After I finish my novel, I plan to do another series of “rock art” works. I have some large blank canvases that would work well for paintings of the White Rocks area near South Broadway here in Grand Junction and the Saddlehorn area in the Colorado National Monument. Watch for the first ones here