A Stroll in Staunton Park

I love painting the Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah.  I love the sculpted red sandstone of Arizona, and the wooded ponds of Missouri.  I have been privileged to live in many beautiful natural places in the United States and hope to see more in the coming years. 

I started drawing and painting in my earliest childhood, as I watched my late father paint and draw.  I often would grow frustrated looking for the most compelling sights, the high-country vistas of Summit County Colorado for example or the rugged Tetons of Wyoming.  Sometimes these breathtaking scenes are simply too overwhelming to be expressed on canvas. 

At those times I try to remember that beauty is always available, you must use your imagination and the childlike ability to see beauty everywhere.  The child can be more fascinated by a broken twig of grass than by a granite dome peaking a mountain. 

One November day Julie and I drove to the small little known Staunton State Park, between Pine and Evergreen Colorado.  This 1720-acre plot of land was donated by the Staunton family preventing it from further development.  I think of this as a “walker’s” park. 

On this afternoon Julie was very tired and stressed by the pressures of a job.  We sat and ate our chicken dinner, then took a stroll.  A jogger told us there were deer ahead on the trail.  We rounded the corner into the speckled brown and grey-green pallet of late autumn.   A herd of white-tail deer, small and fragile, filled the forested area.  They were calm and accepted our visit. Other walkers passed, and the deer stood still and grazed.  At one point I counted about twenty brown, grey deer almost invisible in the dry autumn grasses and evergreen canopy. 

The beauty was in the speckled light, and the quiet peace of a warm autumn day.  This inspired my painting I composed from the many photographs on our cell phones. I did not just want to record the visual landscape, that can be done better by a camera. I wanted to capture the mood. Beauty is not always majestic; it is not always overwhelming.  Sometimes it is quiet.  Beauty is where you find it.

To see the full account of this painting, and other stories of my journey in art, visit my website davidmortonart.com

You are invited to purchase prints or custom made products with my art at Fineart America, https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/david-morton/shop.