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The photo underlying this picture was taken somewhere in the Alps of Switzerland. I’m blanking on its name just now, but the cliff overlooked a popular campsite. The cliff was hundreds of feet high and had several waterfalls pouring down it. I’m told the sheer sides were cut by a glacier passing through the valley in ages past.

The photo underlying this painting I took myself while I was traveling through the Alps in Europe. It shows the dam near the top of the Saint Bernard Pass. I edited this slightly to cover up the evidence of modern day: the paved road, a building, and an antenna tower are gone, and the dam now resembles what could be a wall or a bridge, part of one medieval fortress or another.

The color blotches of this picture had a habit of disappearing into each other until I added the sketch lines that picked out the rocks, snow, and ice. The ice is still done pretty lazily, and if I were to paint this again, I would probably outline each sheet instead of scribbling madly over them.

About 7 years before the writing of this post, the Waldo Canyon Wildfire raged barely a couple of miles from my childhood home. My family had to evacuate the house. My mother described the fire coming over across the top of the mountains as “hellish”, saying the fire lit up the sky in orange, like it was sunset. Continue reading “The Burn Scar”