Autumn Glory

Autumn Glory is my newest painting. This is one of the peaks in the Elk Range in Colorado -- near Aspen, and the same mountain range that includes the fabled Maroon Bells. I think this mountain is Pyramid Peak, although I'm not sure about that. The size is 11" x 14" / 28cm x 36cm. I may do a reshoot of the painting, since this one didn't come out that great.

I had considered adding some wildlife to the scene -- some mallard ducks or maybe some deer (I DID see a buck and doe together when I was there), but then I decided -- naaahhh. I didn't feel like it!

Enjoy!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

A Winter Painting and a Christmas Painting!

 A couple of paintings appropriate for the season!

Mojave Snow                   8" x 10" / 20cm x 25cm

A Colorado Christmas    8" x 10" / 20cm x 25cm

One shows the aftereffects of a rare snowstorm in the Mojave desert of Joshua Tree National Park; the other is a Christmas scene in a home somewhere in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. (The mountain outside the window and in the painting over the fireplace are the same mountain: Mt. Sneffels, my favorite Colorado Mountain to paint!)

I hope you enjoy these images and that you have a wonderful holiday season!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

 

Halloween Art

 Halloween has come and gone -- too quickly, in my opinion.

Now my thoughts have turned to Thanksgiving, another point in the season that I need to prepare me for Christmas.

But first, here are some Halloween-themed paintings that I finished recently. (One CAN be a Halloween image, but it's really a nocturne that could be thought of as creepy and Halloween-ish). 😃

Hi, Bunny! Hi, Pumpkin       8"x10" / 20cm x 25cm

A Walk in the Moonlight       8"x10" / 20cm x 25cm

The Morning After               8"x10" / 20cm x 25cm

And finally, one painting that is just about autumn, Colorado style near Cripple Creek:

Untitled (so far)                 8"x10" / 20cm x 25cm

Finally, I started on some Thanksgiving paintings that I hope to post here soon.

Enjoy the season! It's moving through fast!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

For a Future Painting of Glen Eyrie, Colorado

 I saw the following painting by my art hero, Thomas Moran, when we lived in Colorado Springs, CO during the '90s:

The title is Glen Eyrie, Garden of the Gods. These are two separate and adjacent properties in Colorado Springs, and I always wanted to do a painting like this.

Trouble is: Glen Eyrie is privately owned by the Navigators, a Christian parachurch organization and book publisher. I never had a chance to go there looking for the site that Moran painted.

Over the years, I've been looking online for photos that might help me make a similar painting to Moran's. And I FINALLY found it on Google Maps!!

Here is the pic:

As you can see, it appears to be close to the spot where Moran made his sketches and watercolor drawings. The spire is called Echo Rock and is actually a short fin of sandstone that we're seeing on edge. Moran's painting has a few changes from reality, but that gives ME a chance to paint a scene similar to his while making it truly my own.

Looks like Moran had to do some significant climbing to get to this spot -- I never could have done that!!

Hope to start on it soon! Wish me luck/pray for me!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

Duck Pond

 Well, what th...

I finished a painting a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't written about it yet!! Until now!

Duck Pond (note the two duckies!) is a scene featuring Mount Sneffels in Colorado. It measures 18" x 24" / 45.7cm x 61cm. The mountains are close to what they actually look like; the foreground is a mix of reality and imagination.

The autumn colors tell us this must be mid-late September. The Colorado high country is spectacular at that time, and I miss seeing it.

Enjoy!!

Mark Junge

www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com

The Beauty of Autumn Colors

Sometimes I think I must be part duck. When autumn hits, I get this excitement that I can't explain. If I were a duck, maybe I'd want to migrate! (But I don't feel like going anywhere). 😀

But autumn is the start of an entire holiday season, each with its own look and feel. Autumn itself is kind of a holiday to me -- cooler temperatures (except here in the desert!) and the harmonious color combination of reds, oranges and yellows -- again, not as much in the desert.

Autumn never used to be a big deal to me until I discovered duck prints -- images of different species of ducks (with mallards being my favorites) set against fall landscapes and marshes, typically as hunters might like to see them.

I'm not a hunter, but I happen to love mallard ducks -- alive, not to eat!

So I painted a Colorado autumn scene with a small group of mallard ducks swimming peacefully in a pond. Somewhat imaginary, but it wouldn't be unheard of to stumble across a scene like this:

Aspen Pond            10" x 08" / 25cm x 20cm

I also finished a painting of a rufous hummingbird. I don't associate them with fall, but ya gotta admit: they ARE fall-colored!

 

Rufous Hummingbird          08" x 10" / 20cm x 25cm

I already have someone who is interested in this piece; Aspen Pond may appear on my website, or I may just keep it. I have to decide.

My website URLs, by the way, are www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com.

Enjoy the colors of the season!

Mark Junge

 

The Colorado High Country in the Fall

August was a month devoted to moving. I HATE moving -- but in the long run, it will be worthwhile.

I haven't been able to paint for over a month. So for now, here is a painting that reminds me of how beautiful the Colorado mountains can be in autumn. (This is a piece from 2005 -- an oldie but not a moldie!)

Elk Meadow               36" x 48" / 91cm x 122cm

I expect the Colorado high country will be looking like this very soon -- any time within the next couple of weeks. Wish I could be there to see it.

Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.FineArtAmerica.com (for prints)

Maroon Bells -- An Oldie but Goodie Painting

Maroon Bells (my first of several paintings I've made featuring this famous mountain in Colorado) is something I started in the late 1990s and reworked several times since then. The date on it is 2004, which was the year of my last update. And now, I've developed so much more as an artist that it's tempting to tweak it some more. We'll see if I do that or not.

Maroon Bells

The size is 30" x 40" / 76cm x 102cm and was an early exercise in using the transparent glazing techniques I learned while living in Colorado. I had yet to learn some of the finer points of working in a classical - traditional style such as the Golden Mean and other stuff.

Most images of these wonderful mountains feature a lake in the foreground. As it was, I had to hike to this spot from the entry gate where I parked, and the lake is another two miles (3.2km) toward the mountains from this spot. I had already walked 6 miles / 9.7km from the gate -- 6 miles is where the Bells first come into view -- and I was pretty tired by then, especially after carrying my camera bag and tripod the whole time. And it was mostly clear when I started out, but then began clouding up -- typical for Colorado weather! So this is as far as I went, and after walking back to my truck -- 12 miles / 19.3km round trip, I felt miserable and called in sick to work the next day!

I did see deer during the hike, but they weren't where I showed them in the painting. OK -- so I cheated! ☺

Thankfully, I have photos of Maroon Bells and the lake from a previous year in June when the road was open and I could drive to the parking lot where the lake is. In autumn, so many people want to go there, they close the road to all vehicles except for tour buses that haul people back and forth from nearby Aspen. I didn't have time to find out where in town the buses stopped, hence the hike.

SO -- if you ever get a chance to go up there, I highly recommend it. Late September - early October are the peak times for fall color, which doesn't last long. Find out in advance how and where to catch the buses, unless you REALLY like walking!

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com or www.MarkJunge.com
www.FineArtAmerica (for prints)

The Garden of the Gods

The Garden of the Gods is one of a number of paintings I made years ago of a magical city park in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The red sandstone fins and spires create an almost unearthly, awe-inspiring region.

The Garden of the Gods

Here we're looking south with Cheyenne Mountain in the distance. In early summer, yucca plants send up their bouquets of creamy-white flowers in miniature versions of the spires.

When we lived in Colorado Springs during the 1990s, I made many visits to this park. No admission fee, and it was a place to escape and, sometimes, to alleviate the homesickness I often had for the places I loved and missed in California.

It's unlikely we'll ever make the trip back to CO Spgs, but thankfully, I took many photos of the place from many different viewpoints. I expect I'll have lots of additional images in mind of Garden of the Gods should I decide to paint them.

Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.FineArtAmerica.com (for prints)

Desert Snow

One normally does not put "desert" and "snow" in the same sentence. Deserts are thought of as hot, dry places...snow is the last thing you'd expect to find out there.

But it does happen -- in the true deserts, and in places that are not deserts but that look desert-y.

The Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs, CO is a place that looks desert-y. And it typically snows there in greater or lesser amounts.

I posted on Facebook the following image of a painting I did years ago showing the Garden of the Gods in the snow:

A Snowy Thanksgiving                             22" x 28"

(I should mention the image was scanned from a 35mm slide. Sorry about the huge copyright symbol!)

Meanwhile, an artist friend from Oregon -- one of the artists I met years ago at an art show -- is now teaching painting classes in Wickenburg, AZ. He has included gallery space, mostly for his own artwork, but then he saw A Snowy Thanksgiving. He loves it and asked me to exhibit it, along with 5-6 others (all with snow) in his gallery. The gallery would have just his and my art.

I have seen other red rock areas with snow (i.e., Bryce Canyon National Park) in addition to Garden of the Gods. And the Mojave desert sometimes gets snow, and -- more rarely -- even the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona gets snow on occasion (which disappears quickly afterwards).

So -- we'll see what I come up with in the months ahead. The gallery opens in October, and the grand opening is in November. I'll let you know exactly where and when things will be happening.

I'll continue to be in touch, and thank you for your support!

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com
www.FineArtAmerica (for prints) 

The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory is my latest painting. (I prefer making autumn paintings when it's actually autumn, but...oh, well -- what are you gonna do with an artist like me?)

The Power and the Glory                              18" x 24" / 46cm x 61cm

It's a scene of my favorite mountain to paint -- Mt. Sneffels in the San Juan mountains of southwestern Colorado. I did make a few minor changes to the view -- I painted Sneffels to be a little taller and steeper than it actually is. However, the mountain is still a "14er" -- 14,157 feet / 4.3km -- pretty tall!

So the mountain is where the "power" comes from, and the "glory" is in the fluorescent golden leaves of the aspen grove.

The work is somewhat idealized, but I think it makes the point I wanted to make -- a painting of a mountain with the jagged, sawtooth edges that I love. Mt. Sneffels is the perfect example of that type of rock!

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com
 

The Dallas Divide

The Dallas Divide (which is in Colorado, not Texas) is the title and subject of my latest painting. It features Mt. Sneffels and the Sneffels Range of the San Juan mountains and seems to be my favorite mountains to paint.

The Dallas Divide           11" x 14" / 28cm x 36cm

It's fall, and the cottonwoods have put on a coat of bright yellow leaves as a woman rides her horse in the morning light.

The Dallas Divide is the name of an area that includes this scene (actually, it overlooks part of Ralph Lauren's Double RL Ranch). Behind where you would be standing is the Dallas Creek, and a smaller wash runs in front of you which -- according to the maps -- is called the Dallas ditch. Typical of areas that receive extra water, the ditch is lined with trees and shrubs.

Autumn in Colorado was always my favorite time of year -- the weather tends to be pleasant, and the colors are phenomenal. In addition, the jagged, sawtooth peaks of the San Juans are what I love to see in mountains.

Fall is yet a ways off, as is the heavy snow fall that is bound to come. For now, I'll simply enjoy the peace and beauty of this special place.

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com

Pastoral Landscape

I've sure gotten behind in my blogging!! Between being sick in March, finishing a painting, putting my 3" x 5" note cards together (see the previous post) and now preparing for a show next weekend, it's been a little crazy!

Well, here is the latest painting:

Pastoral Landscape                                18" x 24" / 46cm x 61cm

As you can see, I've depicted a small herd of mixed breeds of cows. One managed to cross the shallow river and is hoping others will follow her to the other side. The scene could be a pasture in the high country of Colorado; in fact, the painting was loosely inspired by the way the Double RL Ranch (Ralph Lauren's spread) looks near Ridgeway, CO.

I couldn't resist including some cow parsnip with the cows. This is the plant with the clusters of tiny white flowers. Apparently, some people are sensitive to this plant which can cause a severe poison ivy-type rash if one brushes up against it. (Apparently browsing herbivores can eat the stuff without toxic effects). Also, insects tend to avoid munching on cow parsnip, too.

I've been wanting to do a classically-styled landscape like this for a long time, and I've finally done it!

Enjoy!

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com

Deserts and Everything Else

As a landscape painter, I have many, many options to choose from when deciding what to paint. Desert scenes tend to be my favorite, but there sure are a lot of other places that deserve to be captured, too.

This painting shows the Sneffels Range in Colorado, an especially beautiful region in the fall. Here, we are looking across a pasture of the Double RL Ranch -- designer Ralph Lauren's spread.

I love painting the desert, but views like Mount Sneffels cry out to be captured as well. I often feel like I don't do as well in catching the magic of these places as I do with the desert. BUT: what's an artist to do?

The desert has a mood to it like nothing else.  But sometimes I need COLOR, or the grandeur of mighty mountains or other features that the desert just doesn't have.

That's when I start thinking about Colorado, or the California redwoods, or even the ocean shores. And paint it all!

It's a big world, but somebody's gotta paint it!

Things I've Learned at the Art Show

The art show last weekend came and went ... and NO SALES AT ALL!!! Grr-r-r-r...

I wasn't the only one. Other artists had no sales, or they sold only small, inexpensive sculptures or prints of paintings.

In spite my initial frustration and anger about how it all turned out, I think I picked up on a few things that may help me move ahead.

-- There is no "economic recovery." It's a lie the politicians -- especially the US president -- keep telling us. People liked my work, but I have to offer it more inexpensively.

-- All of the artwork at the show was realism -- no abstract, impressionism or other styles that seem to be more popular in southern California. (However, I was the only "pure" landscape painter -- everybody else had wildlife prominently featured in their works). So there may be hope in continuing to work in my favored style. 
Art shows just don't seem to work for me anymore. They haven't for a long time. And another artist told me many of the galleries in Scottsdale, AZ are closed up -- couldn't make it. This tells me to skip the art shows and to be REALLY careful with galleries -- they will not be my savior. I'll have to decide if I want to approach them at all at this time.

-- All of the paintings I showed received a positive response. I'll continue with desert paintings, but I'll definitely add more other kinds of western landscapes, especially Colorado mountain scenes, with or without ruins of 19th century mines. These two pieces seemed to be the crowds' favorites:




Badlands, 18" x 24" / 46cm x 61cm

Springtime Ocotillo, 8" x 10" / 20cm x 25cm










So I'll be painting more ocotillos, desert mountains and flowers! And for the local market, I'll be painting Joshua trees with those fantastic monzogranite rock formations, too.


To make these paintings more affordable, I'll have to pass on doing the time-consuming, transparent glazing that I love. It gives the works a stained-glass luminence, but it does take more time to do. So the glazed paintings will be for galleries, a few rare selected shows or for me to keep! I'll offer the "art-on-a-budget" paintings on my website (SouthwestSpaces.com or MarkJunge.com) and to local merchants/galleries who may get tourists.customers who want memories of our beautiful Joshua Tree National Park.

Does this sound like a sound plan? I hope so!! At this point and in this economy, art is all I have. Maybe with the things I learned at the art show, I can still make it!

 

A Season of Gold

A Season of Gold -- that's an apt description of the Colorado mountains when autumn hits! It's also the title of my latest painting, which I started months ago but had to set aside because of my summer teaching schedule.

A Season of Gold, 16" x 20"

The view is of Mt. Sneffels as seen from the Dallas Divide. This region lies between Ridgeway and Telluride, Colorado. (Ralph Lauren has a place somewhere out here -- the Double RL Ranch).

Those reddish shrubs out there could be a bright red, but for whatever reason, whenever I paint them that way, the red seems to kill the paintings. I'm gonna have to play with that some day so that I can put in all the fall color that this magical place produces.

I wanna go back there again. And stay there throughout the peak color time -- from mid-late September. (It doesn't last long in Colorado, but often, more color can be found simply by going lower in elevation).

Some day!

Pikes Peak

Pikes Peak                                                           18" x 24"

Pikes Peak is a painting I made back in 2006. I always liked the piece, but I felt it needed just a little more...perhaps a little tweaking.

So I tweaked it, and I (personally) think it looks better now.

Pikes Peak is the mountain west of Colorado Springs, CO. This view shows the mountain in early September after a storm covered the hill with snow. It's early morning, and this is how it appears if you visit the Garden of the Gods Club, named after the Garden of the Gods -- a series of red sandstone rocks and spires in the middle distance. Pikes Peak is one of Colorado's "14ers" -- the elevation at the top is at or over 14,000 feet above sea level.

Colorado has some spectacular scenery, and this area is certainly no exception

New Painting: "Silver Ledge"

I FINALLY finished a new painting that I was frantically working on to enter in an exhibit. I still gave the piece all of the TLC it deserved, but I think I've been painting more than I've been sleeping!

Silver Ledge, 18" x 24"

Silver Ledge is the name of the mine -- or what's left of it -- that sits a little south of Silverton, Colorado along the Million Dollar Highway (aka Hwy. 550). Behind the structures lies the sprawling Chattanooga Valley which used to hold the small town of Chattanooga (not to be confused with the one in Tennessee!). The town was destroyed in the late 19th century, but I haven't found a definitive reason for how that happened: it was either by avalanche, flood or fire. In any case, the town was never rebuilt and only a few buildings remain there today -- none visible from this vantage point.

Far in the distance sits Bear Mountain. Much of the region displayed the glorious golden yellows of fall aspen, but this view seemed to show few aspen and lots of Colorado blue spruce.

The Silverton area was known for producing lots of mines, many of them silver. But the Silver Ledge's primary commodity was tungsten. It also extracted smaller amounts of gold, silver, lead and zinc.

The painting shows how the mine looked the last time I was there -- September, 1997. I understand efforts were being made in 2010 by a preservation group to prevent further deterioration of the minehead and also to cleanup the tailings which were leaching lead, zinc and copper into Mineral Creek (which runs below the embankment on the left and off into the Valley).

I've been wanting to paint this image for almost seventeen years -- and I've finally done it! It isn't the desert, but the site is in southwestern Colorado and we can see lots of distance from this spot. So it fits my tagline which you would find on my website and on my business cards: The Vast Spaces of the Southwest!

More Inspiration!

As a landscape painter, I love it when I stumble across artworks that I've never seen before that manage to take my breath away once I "discover" them.

Curescanti Needle, Colorado
George Frederick Bensell, ca. 1875

This is one such painting. I had Googled images of Colorado paintings, and this is one of the items that came up. Curescanti Needle is located in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (one of the country's National Parks) near Montrose, Colorado. I suspect the artist took some liberties with how the place actually looked, but some 19th century painters did that -- they were more interested in capturing the mood of a place than re-creating every rock and tree that exists.

OK, it isn't a desert painting, but I still love it, and I DO paint Colorado scenes on occasion (in fact, I'm working on a Colorado painting now). The size is 66" x 48"/168cm x 122cm and is in a private collection. Lucky peeps!!

Very inspiring!!

In the Colorado Wilds

In the Colorado Wilds is the title of my newest painting -- 18" x 24" acrylic on panel.

This is looking toward the Needle Mountains south of Silverton, with some liberties taken on the Animas River (as far as I know, there are no waterfalls on this river). Pigeon Peak is to the distant right, just 28 feet short of being a fourteener (and therefore isn't climbed as much as 14ers are). I was going to put a deer on the outcropping on the lower left, but The Wiffee talked me out of it!

This is one of the few non-desert paintings that I'll be taking with me to the Cattlemen's Western Art Show in Paso Robles, CA next weekend. Even though I still feel my desert art is my strongest, I also know some people -- for some strange reason -- are not into Southwestern desert scenes. Hard to believe, but it seems to be true!

It's obviously autumn in the Colorado mountains, although the yellows never look as bright as they should in my digital images of paintings -- I need to find out how to fix that without altering the overall color of the image to yellow. For now, trust me: the aspens are golden-yellow!

And, of course, don't forget to visit my Website once in a while: http://www.SouthwestSpaces.com or http://www.MarkJunge.com.