Paintings of Sage Dancers & the Pink Petroglyph Rock

I’ve been working on this painting of a rock covered with petroglyphs for ages, and have had endless problems with it.

This was the first version, all 4 x 3 feet of it, acrylic and handmade paper on masonite. Al took one look at it and asked, “What’s with the pink pants?” After that, all I could see were pink pants.
This was an attempt to fix the painting in Photoshop. At one point I gave up and started working on a smaller 24″ x 18″ painting of the sage in the background, hoping to glue some paper ‘rocks’ on top of it. But then the sage started dancing – it was out of my control. Putting anything on top of these lively characters just made the painting too busy. I ended up running out and buying a new 24″ x 18″ wood cradle and trying yet again. And again the sage started dancing! By now I was running out of time for my big show so I didn’t finish it (be prepared for more sage dancers in the future). I bought yet another wood cradle and this is the painting I ended up with, no petroglyphs and the sage very subtle in the background. And I finally finished the big 4′ x 3′ painting in the nick of time for this year’s Culture Crawl. Today (Tuesday) I framed it and tomorrow it goes up on the wall and hopefully all will be ready when the crawl starts this Thursday evening! So three paintings instead of one and more coming…