1:30pm: below is stage 1 of best left unsaid 5, 16x16." it may also be stage 1,000,223,944.in other words, "finished!" scroll down to my 9/7 post to read my thoughts on the meaning of finished.
can you see a relationship between my most recent collage, on the right, and today's painting?
long, long ago, and very, very close by, there rose up a mighty mountain range, the ancestral rockies. they overlooked a vast inland sea fed by glaciers.
formed 300 million years ago, these rocks-of-rocks, so familiar in local yards, parks, hiking trails and all around town, come from the crestone conglomerate, a member within the sangre de cristos formation.
crestone peak, kit carson, challenger—all the highest peaks are made of this rock. and one of the reasons they are the highest peaks is because this is the hardest rock. It's more resistant to erosion. crestone conglomerate rocks are a mix of quartzite, pink granite, sandstone, schists, and gneisses cemented together in a matrix of fine-grained silica.
if you look at the san luis valley, you'll see it's a big basin with thousands of feet of sand and gravel. the pressure of the sand at the bottom is intense, and the groundwater is slowly flowing through the bottom gravels. the groundwater has dissolved chemicals in it, which are present in solution, and they precipitate in the pore spaces of the gravel, and cement it like concrete. it takes a long time, but it will eventually cement any rock that's at the bottom of a pile.
from an article in: The Crestone Eagle, August 2005:
“Rock of Ages”
The Crestone Conglomerate
by P.J. Smith
during the 500 ft. walk to my studio and back every day, i am surrounded by these rocks, which i photographed yesterday. below is a slide show.
12 noon: i'm about to begin best left unsaid 5. i'll post the early stage photos later this afternoon.
