Monday, June 1, 2009

Paintings of Peru






Here is one of the Photoshopped versions of a painting of the Incan Salt Pans at Maras that I started while I was in Peru. These salt pans were built by the Incas almost seven hundred years ago and are still being used. An intricate irrigation system diverts an extremely salty (yes, of course we tasted it) natural stream into shallow dug-out shelves, and as the water evaporates the salt settles out.
The first picture below shows the stage I got it to on location (well, back at the hotel). There is actually more work involved in starting this than you’d think. Just deciding how many of the 2000 odd salt pans to include in the picture took quite a while. The other picture below shows what it looked like after I added a little paint and a lot of ink.
I plan to computerpaint more versions of this in various degrees of abstraction and maybe even strange new colours, but first I wll finish some of the other paintings I started.