This painting — a 12-by-36-inch acrylic on canvas — was painted from photographs, actual sketches at the park, and from a feeling in the mind of the park. Where we used to live, on a good day I could walk from our home to the park and the old welcome center and back home in about four hours.

We have enough photos of the park to fill an album. We have a couple of photographs with five waterfalls pouring over the cliffs after a ton of rain; the pictures were taken from the very same spot where this painting was done.  

The sunset is real; the sun does go down like that when conditions are right. The railing is partially real. Only the few sections the figure is leaning on are real; the rest are mentally fabricated. The path is only real around where the figure is standing; the rest is made up. The cliffs and background landscape is real, all the rest is made up. That is about it.

However, the sections of the painting that are from the mind are basically typical of other locations throughout the park; none of it is phony.

Originally the figure was going to be my wife, but I changed to a fellow — easier to do.

An aside, on one of our trips to the park to check direction and make a few sketches for the painting, a couple was eating lunch on a table out by the railing. (I know it was their lunch because they said so.) The couple was older but not that old, retired but just. They said that, most every nice day, this is where they have their lunch and have been doing it for a few years now.  

The painting has been varnished and will be framed and placed with the others. A friend that has purchased a couple of my works said that my paintings are like a diary. To which I replied she was correct.

The paintings do represent the locality, places we have been, and people we know. Sometimes though, there are commissions that are different, but most of them are not hanging on my walls, nor are the commissioned ones in the pile at my daughter’s house. They have found homes all over — even in other countries.