The Finale.  This is the painting that eventually sat next to Moran's 'Nearing Camp' in the Gallery at the very end of the show. There was always a certain inevitability in me revisiting this view of Tollgate rock and the Palisades but only when I was sure that my...

This was the last painting I started, and by this point I wanted to feature a large piece in each different phase of the exhibition. It seemed a natural choice to gather the many sites of natural phenomena together in a "The Wonders of Yellowstone" section. It was the...

A Mountain to Climb Feeling like this was all one big learning experience I approached each large piece in a slightly different way, this Teton painting was made by a gradual scaling up from a very small sketch to a work that was 60x40cm and then finally the 6ftx4ft....

The Big Country I'm sure that anyone who has followed this blog, through it's various twists and turns, will have become aware that one of my main ambitions was to see how the experience would be communicated in a number of very large pieces. Even in the earliest...

A Long Anticipated Return As the trip culminated in the visit to Green River this was mirrored in it also being the last destination in the studio too. I got to this point feeling the pressure of the exhibition looming and also the challenge of creating work on a...

Action Man I think I always knew there would be a time when the work would possibly take over and my attempts to catalogue it's progress on the blog might become more difficult than I had assumed. When the work first began I was struck that my passing thoughts were so...

Water Falls An update on my watercolour attempts is long overdue. I've shifted my attention onto the Canyon as subject matter, with the results so far seemingly separating along two paths. I have a sketchpad which I decided would be dedicated to the experience of the...

The Lost Canyon After completing an initial sketch for the larger Canyon works I've been spending the last couple of weeks working with colour glazes over the umber base. I usually varnish after this first layer, this is great as I can move the colour around and wipe...

Links to the Past Each page of the buffalo sketchbook seems to be an invitation to discover more about the animal, myself and the very nature of art. I am so used to dealing with the subject of landscape these studies have a freedom and experimentation that seems born...

Dreamworks I am preparing to move up in scale from the Canyon studies. My thoughts keep returning to a dream I started to experience a day or so after first visiting the site. In the dream the RV was precariously balanced on the edge of a collapsing precipice. I can...

Time and Pressure I arrive at the print room, it's moved to a different campus but there is a very reassuring presence here, in the form of the printing presses on which my first prints were produced 20 years ago. A printer has a very unique attachment to presses,...

College Days I want the project to have as much impact as possible, perhaps in the same way that Moran had such a positive influence on my early paintings, my work and Andrew's photographs in the exhibition might hopefully have a similar effect on young artists, who...

Gold Rush Today sees the first day of the initial Canyon phase and I feel that over the last few weeks I've given myself a very good idea of how the rest of the project may progress. Following the trip structure seems to be working, both in terms of a natural route...

Mountains or Molehills It's strange how the passage of a day or so can bring clarity to what seems like a conflict demanding an immediate solution. I can see now that there is no conflict, I've just been giving myself different opportunities, trying a few different...

Peaks and Troughs Moving into the final stages of the Teton work a number of experiments have jarred whilst I am painting them. It's almost as if they could be someone's else's paintings. I realise, in some, I am trying too deliberately to depict the mountains,...

Animal Magic I have the feeling that we were very lucky with our experiences of wildlife on the trip. We got very close to a moose, close enough to both brown and black bears but not as close as we'd like to a ghostly white wolf. These sightings were usually...

Moving On Up I get the feeling that it's time to move up in scale from the Teton Sketch paintings. In these larger works I try a few different approaches, each starting with a slightly different intention. In some of the paintings working directly from photographs as...

Water baby Over the next few days I've continued with the small studies, as well as a few water colours at a similar scale. The challenge for me is to use watercolour in a way which stems more naturally from the way I paint, rather than feeling tempted to adopt the...

Where to start? So after all the anticipation, preparation and reflection, I have a day of exasperation! I spend a number of hours finding more tidying to do, knowing full well it's classic task avoidance. Eventually I am struck by the realisation that I literally...

A Rest is as Good as a Change It's only been three months since the trip to America but in one of those strange quirks of nostalgia I feel like its been an age since actually being there, happily the experiences ideas and the desire to communicate them are vividly...