What a combination -- paintings of Hawaii (with hula dancers) and the desert in Joshua Tree National Park!! Well -- somebody's gotta do it! 😃
I wish I was better at painting hooman beans than I am, but I guess I just need to paint them more often. But so far, this is what I'm able to do. Enjoy!!
Good grief -- I just realized I didn't post at all during March!!
But now it's April, I survived April Fool's Day, and I'm moving forward -- finally!
I finished two paintings last month. One is a somewhat surreal piece which, as usual, I can never really explain. The other is a scene from Joshua Tree National Park and is definitely a miniature painting -- 7" x 5" / 17.8cm x 12.7cm. My plan is to make several (or many) paintings this size and make them available as tabletop pieces to the many tourists who visit the National Park. They'll be offered with mini easels, or the collectors can have them framed if they prefer.
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| Memories of the Dark 11" x 14"/27.9cm x 35.6cm |
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| Hi Desert in Bloom 7" x 5"/17.8cm x 12.7cm |
Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com
Yet another painting of Joshua Tree National Park!!
Rocks 'n' Clouds showcases some hills made of gneiss (pronounced "nice"), a type of rock found everywhere in the local Mojave Desert. These hills happen to be in Joshua Tree National Park, a place that -- as everyone knows -- is one of my favorite places on earth.
I love messing around with things like dramatic lighting and cloud shadows, the latter which I've done here. In fact, I put a lot of effort into painting clouds -- I suspect I'm really a skyscape painter with some desert thrown in! 😃
So -- I'm tempted to take a break and to start getting into an autumn mindset. I love fall and the beginnings of all the neat and fun holidays that follow! But -- there's lots to do yet in whatever time I have left in this life, so-o-o -- the break will need to be a short one. 😕.
Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com
Dry Times refers to the droughts we in the West often get stuck with. It is also the title of my latest painting depicting some dry times in Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA.
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| Dry Times 18" x 24" / 46cm x 61cm |
This year, some of the Joshua trees did bloom -- we had some rain, and it stayed pretty cool - cold most of the winter -- just the way JTs like it! Also, Joshua trees bloom earlier than the annuals and shrubs do, so it would be unusual to see flowers on the trees AND all over the desert floor at the same time. It does happen, but things have to be just right -- and this year, they weren't.
So I painted the scene pretty much as it appeared the day I last visited there. We can see the green creosote bushes, the gray blackbrush, the pale yellow Indian ricegrass and the reddish-brown seedpods of wild buckwheat.
But no wildflowers! 😢
Well, I love the desert whether springtime color appears or not. But the color sure would make it prettier!
Mark Junge
www.MarkJunge.com or www.SouthwestSpaces.com
