Butte States

"Butte States" is conceived as a companion piece to "City of the Sky People" in that it's another fantasy landscape painted in relatively real colours although the initial impetus to these paintings is really about the sky. This one is an imagination of a South West American desert landscape such as New Mexico whereby each mesa and butte is an individual city state kind of like there were in Italy in the Middle Ages, each one fortified with towers etc - sort of a futuristic Medieval fantasy landscape/cityscape!
As the painting developed the foreground butte and arch started to look deserted and abandoned which I liked the idea of and kind of gives it a bit more narrative. Maybe this one was abandoned due to water issues and the distant ones that are more modern looking have survived...
I have tried to vary the colour as much as I can to avoid two blocks of colour, blue sky and red landscape although the painting is based on the blue green/ red orange complementary colour axis.
This is a painting I hope to take to IX in October.
Oil on linen 30" x 20".
There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.