Tower of Babel

I fancied doing another South West Desert painting this time looking towards the light (contre jour) as I used to for many years previously. I try to avoid colourful sunsets as I find them a bit corny and much prefer the time after sunset towards dusk when I find the light more mysterious. I wanted to get across that time when the sun has gone down and the land is cooling off after the heat of the day as well as trying to get a sense of distance to get across the vastness of these spaces.
This mesa is called Tower of Babel and can be found in Arches National Park Utah. I love the red of the sandstone and based the painting on a yellow/violet complementary using the violet as the red of the mesa and landscape and a blue/violet for the clouds.
The painting of the mesa is not as tight as it looks and is really made up of semi opaque scumbles painted quite quickly over the Burnt Sienna/Winsor Violet underpainting glaze. The ground in the foreground is the same underpainting glaze broken up by the patches of bushes, the white of the canvas showing through the glaze giving it a slight glow. I noticed that Maxfield Parrish did a lot of that.
Oil on linen 30" x 20".
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting including the colours I used in previous posts on this blog.