Yakima Canyon

The Yakima River is older than the ridges it runs through. As Umtanum and Manastash rose, the water kept its line and cut down instead of turning aside — so the canyon is a record of patience, basalt opened one flow at a time. I painted it in the last half hour of light, when the walls give up color and hold only mass. What's left is the weight of the columns, the talus falling away in slow diagonals, and a river that reads as a seam rather than a surface. Working almost entirely in blacks, umbers, and bruised greens, I wanted the darkness to be crowded rather than empty. Basalt isn't one color; it's a hundred near-blacks pressed together, and the eye only finds the divisions if it's willing to stay. The few warm passages — a rim edge, a break in the cloud, the sage going gray-gold before it goes out — are there to measure the dark against, not to relieve it. This is a landscape that doesn't perform for the viewer. It simply continues, as it has, long after the light stops explaining it.