I’m plodding my way through reading John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. I love the description of the country, rivers, and canyons, the understated adventure, and visualizing what the west was like in the 1800’s. Occasionally Powell gets pretty poetic in his description like with this quote, “The clouds are children of the heavens, and when they play among the rocks they lift them to the region above.” It created such a visual in my mind, I wanted to start carving!

I chose to base my artwork on the etching in the book titled, The Inner Gorge. This artwork was created by Frederick Dellenbaugh and presumably based on a photograph by John Hillers near Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon. Both of these men were on Powell’s second expedition in 1871-72.

This linocut is 12 x 12 inches and the paper is 15 x 15 inches. It is printed with very dark brown ink on Stonehenge Fawn paper and painted with gouache in an edition of 20.