Untitled (Red Rocks)

This untitled painting by artist Albert Lorey Groll depicts a southwestern “red rocks” landscape. The work is two feet wide and one and a half feet tall, painted with oil on panel.

Albert Lorey Groll, a foundational Western American artist, was acclaimed for his ability to capture the sweeping blue expanse and billowing cloud formations of desert skies. In Untitled (Red Rocks), he guides the viewer on a visual journey through seemingly unbounded time and space. For more about this painting style and the history of the artwork, read the “About this Artwork” section above.

The image depicts a rolling landscape, with an expansive sky filling two-thirds of the painting above fields, hills, mesas, and rock formations in the lower third of the painting.

We’ll start in the foreground, where a long, winding dirt road extends into the far distance, passing a rock formation on the lower left and ultimately leading to the iconic red rocks depicted in the painting. The road is varying shades of light and dark brown, and appears to almost glow a soft yellow, in contrast to the heavily shaded reds and browns of the rock formation on the left. This contrast draws our view to a small group of travelers in the distance with a covered wagon. They travel along the road, coming from or traveling to the light red rocky hills in the background of the painting. On the left, a structure of tall, chimney-like red rock formations rises, while on the right, a range of low, red clay-colored hills unfolds. The red earth appears to glow red under the bright sun. Between the left and right red rock formations, a low, flat-topped range of mountains and mesas in the far distance appear dark blue beneath the open sky.

The sky captures our focus in the painting, dramatically extending across most of the middle and upper portions of the image, stretching high above the red rock formations. Giant, fluffy clouds seem to glide across the bright blue sky, some slightly smaller in the distance and others significantly larger, giving the impression that clouds sweep across this vast sky at both low and high levels.