"Devil's Tower"
In August 2004, I went to Sturgis rally week. Amidst 400,000 mainly Harley Davidson motorcycles, I visited the South Dakota towns of Deadwood, Spearfish, Wounded Knee, Crazy Horse and Devil's Tower in Wyoming. The roar of the Harleys filled my head all day long and at night, in the quiet of Custer, I heard them in my mind.
Devil's Tower remains sacred to the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne. From oral legend, it is here that strange beings from the sky landed and communicated with the Indians. This was the reason that Steven Spielberg chose Devil's Tower for the location of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Native lore also tells the story of how two children who were about to be attacked by a bear, fell to their knees and prayed to be spared. As the bear reached them, the land on which they knelt started to rise and the bear clawed at the rising land leaving deep ridges on the sides. Western lore explains Devil's Tower as being the remnant of a volcano that was weathered by nature leaving a butte on the plains.
I took the photos on which this painting was based at the first designated observation point. I wanted to show the undulation of the road, the stream of endless riders formed in single, double and small-pack formation. How Devil's Tower was so central to the landscape and how the igneous rock creates a blue shadow rather than the red shadow created by sandstone or granite. At first I painted in all of the riders that were actually in the photo that I took. Then I removed about six small riders in the distance in order to see the movement of the road. I also removed a rider directly underneath Devil's Tower in order to leave a path for the eye to travel upwards. However I did not remove the rider's shadow. It remains on the road.
Manon Elder