Devil's Tower. Original painting 36” x 72”, brush-worked oil paints on canvas.
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 and Crazy Horse, plus 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 still heard them in my mind.
Devil's Tower is sacred to the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne. According to oral legend, it is here that strange beings from the sky landed and communicated with the Indians. (This was the reason Steven Spielberg chose Devil's Tower for the location of his film "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 almost reached them, the ground on which they knelt started to rise. The bear clawed at the rising land, carving 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 bute on the plains.
I took the photos on which this painting was based at the first designated observation point along the highway. I wanted to show the undulation of the road and the stream of endless riders in single, double and small-pack formations. At first I painted in all of the riders in the photo I took. Then I removed about six small riders in the distance so that the long ribbon of road ahead could be seen. I also removed a rider directly underneath Devil's Tower in order to leave a path for the viewer's eye to travel upwards. I did not, however, remove the rider's shadow. It remains on the road.
