Capturing Light, Shape and Color in Yosemite NP
This summer, painter and trail runner Paige Klugherz joined Aspire’s Yosemite Valley Views trip, balancing long days of trail running with time spent painting Yosemite’s monolithic granite peaks their surroundings. In this Q&A Reverb entry, we explore Paige’s approach to wilderness travel, painting on the go, and finding inspiration in the details.
All photos captured by Sarah Attar.
How does running/movement connect you to a place?
I’ve always loved the feeling of moving through places. There’s a unique satisfaction that I get from crossing big swaths of terrain, especially in a single day. The High Sierra is my favorite place, and because you can spend so much of the day above tree line, you can turn around hours later and see just how far you’ve come- the high rocky passes, the meadows, the lakes. It makes me feel like I was actually within that landscape, fully experiencing it by moving through it.
How does painting connect you to a place?
Whether I’m making a plein-air painting on site or working from a reference photo in my studio, it changes how I experience a place. When I’m running or hiking, I’m always thinking about what might make a good painting, and I’ll take lots of photos to look through later. Inevitably, when I bring to mind a place that I’ve painted, it becomes some combination of my actual memory of being there and the memory of painting it and the visual decisions I made in the process- mixing colors, simplifying forms, tweaking composition, etc. My connections to those places feel deeper and more layered.
Tell us about your connection to Yosemite National Park.
Growing up in Northern California, I took numerous family vacations and class trips to Yosemite over the years. I have such great memories of staying in the tent cabins at Curry Village, watching rock climbers on El Cap through a telescope from the meadow below, special dinners at the Ahwahnee, and exploring in the woods with my cousins. One of the first hikes I ever did was the Mist Trail, and I can still remember the awe I felt standing at the top of Vernal Falls watching the water plummet over the edge!
What type of painting kits did you bring to yosemite? Do you bring paints in your running pack? How does that work?
I brought both my tiny watercolor setup and my plein air oil setup. You can get away with a lot less when painting with watercolors, and my kit practically fits in the palm of my hand, so that’s easy to bring along in a running pack for a quick sketch.
Although I have a pretty minimal oil painting setup, it’s definitely too bulky to bring on a trail run! I use a thin pochade box that holds my palette and supports my painting as I work on it, but I also need multiple brushes, solvent, oil, a rag, sometimes a tripod to attach the pochade box to, and the oil paints themselves, which can be quite heavy! And then the extra difficulty in working with oils is that they stay wet for a long time, so you can’t just stick it back into your bag where the surface would get smudged. For this trip, I had taped some canvas paper to cardboard and punched holes in the corners so that I’d be able to strap it to the outside of my hiking pack with cord when I was done painting.
Can you tell us about your painting process outside?
Before I start, I generally just wander around a bit until I find something that speaks to me. Maybe it’s the way the light is hitting the side of a peak, a patch of snow that’s melted into an interesting shape, or a particularly vibrant color that I want to replicate. But there are also other considerations such as needing to be in the shade so that you can mix paint colors accurately or how quickly the light is going to change on your subject. I try to get down the large shapes and important blocks of color fairly quickly and then do my best to fill in the rest and either adjust as the light changes or try to remember how it was when I first started. It often feels like a race against time!
For the painting I made on this trip, I was drawn in by the verdant green of the meadows and the distinct shadows striping across them. It was mid morning on what was going to be a very hot day in the Valley, the sun was hitting the side of the main tree with strong, warm light, and I continually find the form and shadows of Middle Cathedral to be an interesting subject to paint.
What was it like to be on this trip and to balance both running and painting?
I haven’t spent much time in Yosemite in recent years, and it was very special to be back in a place I know but exploring new-to-me trails with a group of people who were as excited to be there as I was! Quite a few runners on this trip were from out of state and were visiting Yosemite for the very first time, so it was extra fun to experience it all through that lens.
Going into the trip, I wasn’t sure how’d I’d balance the two activities, but it ended up working out perfectly! I ran with the group on the days that had routes I was most excited about or hadn’t done before, and then I spent one of the days in the Valley painting by the Merced River before joining up with the group as they finished their run. It felt like a really lovely combination of activities- and since I hadn’t been running big mileage weeks, the painting day was a well-enjoyed rest for my legs!
Paige Klugherz is an artist, trail runner, and climber. She lives in Reno, NV with her husband where they enjoy great access to the Sierra Nevada.
You can buy prints of her artwork, including “Higher & Middle Cathedral from Leidig Meadow” (pictured above) at paigeklugherz.com.
The granite walls, ponderosa pine and pristine swimming holes of the Yosemite backcountry are rivaled only by the profound views offered on our “Yosemite Valley Views” itinerary. There’s no better way for an endurance athlete to experience the wilderness this park has to offer.