Valley of the Rocks

Valley of the Rocks is the translation of the Navajo name for Monument Valley in Utah/Arizona where this picture is located. This is the third painting I have done of this view from the road, a monochrome "Navajo" and "Desert Daybreak" being the others. I quite liked the ambiguous day/night lighting of the previous picture so I thought that I would try it again with this one. I think it gives the pictures a kind of magical dreamlike quality which is fine by me as these are not plein air paintings and are not trying to emulate the usual way of depicting these scenes, they are my take on these landscapes.
These paintings of American landscapes are really aimed at American collectors and now that I have enough pictures I'm happy with and the website is now revamped the time has come to see if I can get some American galleries interested to which end I will now start submitting them to my first eight target galleries...
As usual I generally used the Rule Of Thirds for the composition and like the last one it is based around a blue/orange colour complementary using the same colours pretty much. 
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.