Tajikistan being in the middle of many powerful countries seems analogous to Switzerland in some ways. A very mountainous country in the center of central Asia, Tajikistan had the misfortune of being conquered by most historical empires, in fact Wikipedia had a lengthy summary of the history. There is some debate as to whether the people are primarily of Persian descent or Turkish descent, but most scholars know the country is incredibly diverse. Scanning around the country I saw mountain after mountain and thought for some time about how I could paint another mountain scene without actually showing a mountain. Using google earth view I rotated the camera into the valleys and saw the most fascinating patters consisting of small flowing rivers and adjacent dried-up remnants of rivers. These would be the leftover of the season glacial melt, when the mountains release their snow melt into great torrents of powerful rivers, until it fizzles out in the dry season. The patterns reminded me of those picture of the surface of mars which used to have flowing water. To paint the scene the main challenge was getting the scene to make sense, with a bit of abstract at first glance. The foreground outcropping is more detailed and uses orange, while the background mountain and its shadow were grey-blue. I did the river by painting around with brown, then over-painting the darker dry rivers, and sharpening the shadow.
World Inspired Landscapes: Tajikistan, watercolour 7 x 10" hot press, April 2025 (No. 2048b)
No comments:
Post a Comment