A hunter of landscapes

SCOTTY MITCHELL IS worried about the clouds. They drift in from the west, big white tufts that obscure, then reveal the bright October sun.

“A shadow waits for no one,” she reminds me as we set off in search of a pinyon pine in the rugged backcountry of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We hike over slick rock marbled with veins of terra cotta, littered with chunks of iridescent volcanic rocks and the elliptical balls of iron ore some call shaman’s stones.

Mitchell lugs a drawing board, sheets of Tiziano Ingres paper, a box of hand-rolled pastels. She is a hunter of landscapes, a plein-air painter who, in an environment that often privileges hikers and climbers, hunters and fishermen, pursues the elusive conjunction of light and form.

In the early 19th century, before photography and IMAX, landscape painters such as Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and George Catlin introduced the improbable -- even terrifying -- wilderness of the American West to fellow citizens in the East. (Moran’s magisterial watercolors of Yellowstone encouraged Congress in 1872 to designate it as the nation’s first national park.) Some plein-air painters sketch on-site, then finish their work in the studio -- a technique the painter Winslow Homer complained is only “half right.”

Mitchell’s pastels are done entirely on site, which means multiple treks. Each work involves long hours contemplating the high desert: calligraphy etched into the salmon-tinted sandstone of Calf Creek Drainage; winter snow draped across crags at Death Hollow; morning light raking across the Hogsback.

For more than 20 years, Mitchell lived and painted on the island of Crete. She moved to this corner of the Southwest five years ago, lured by the raw beauty of the Grand Staircase.

Here she works outside in all kinds of weather. In the windy Utah spring, she fights with her flailing, rocking and, finally, her “falling-over easel,” as she calls it. In the summer, she defies the gnats by donning ski goggles and putting a wet handkerchief over her head, “looking totally demented,” she describes, laughing.

We follow deer trails, pass glowing ephedra and lightning-hollowed junipers. August monsoons account for the luxuriance of fall flowers: purple desert aster and goldenrod, snakeweed and buffalo berry. Broad-brimmed hats shade our eyes from dazzling light reflected off white stone.

After half an hour, a water hole beckons beyond some pink boulders. Sophie the border collie splashes in as tadpoles streak under the roiled surface.

After another half an hour of walking, Mitchell spies the sentinel pinyon pine marking the spot where she began this drawing days ago.

Her sketch is yet a patchwork blur of colors that compose the steps of the Grand Staircase: chocolate, vermillion, white, gray and pink. Before these gestures on paper can communicate her perception of the astonishing view from the rim, she must make a number of decisions: How much detail to reveal? How much to withhold? How will she give an idea of scale? It would take hours for that red-tailed hawk, hovering above, to fly from one side of the picture to another.

She squints, then gazes across the vertiginous canyon and its maw of ragged stone molars. On a clear day like today, you can see a hundred miles. I follow her example and stare across the abyss. Over eons, water and wind have revealed bold patterns in the sedimentary strata and conjured fantastic shapes in the uplifted rock. The more you look, the more you notice: a minaret, a horse’s head, the face of a sleeping giant.

The late Ellen Meloy, an artist-naturalist whose penetrating essays celebrated this region, once wrote, “Certain places try to tell us something we should not have missed.”

Mitchell is patient. It could take hours of looking before she knows what the landscape wants to tell her. It could take days before her eyes, hands and the place itself are all working together. “Like when you know the basketball will go through the hoop before it does” is how she describes it.

A wary crow watches us from a cedar stump. Coyote mint and sage perfume the clear dry air. If that cloud front moves in, she’ll have to put this drawing on hold until another morning visit. Light is everything to a plein-air artist.

That prospect doesn’t worry her. “You just wait another 15 minutes,” she says, “and something else magical will occur.”

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In plain sight: To see Scotty Mitchell’s pastels, go to www.scottymitchell.com.