This series is inspired by the Tuolumne River area of Yosemite National Park and it's varied granite. The works are interpretations: a merging of representation and abstraction, part observation and part invention/response. Like many visitors to the park, I'm awed by the magnificence of the rock—what Kenneth Brower referred to as “dizzying verticalities of stone”—and the history of its formation millions of years ago. Picking up a small rock from the river and contemplating it's transformation, from magma to raw, solid granite to smooth stone carved by ice and water, is to feel time in your hands. The promise of strength, longevity, stillness, and beauty, a sense of well-being and endurance—all of this contributes to what is for me the magic of granite.
Granite is mute, but it's surfaces speak volumes. Layering charcoal, graphite, ink, pigment, and paint, I translate in close-up focus the surprising colors and complexity of Yosemite’s unearthed rock and its extraordinary visual language. Each painting presents a different challenge as I focus on aspects of this complexity: the layering of natural processes over time, the characteristic textures, striations, and colors of the mineral crystals that form the granitic rock, and lichens and other elements that have left their marks on this majestic landscape of stone and water.
Granite is mute, but it's surfaces speak volumes. Layering charcoal, graphite, ink, pigment, and paint, I translate in close-up focus the surprising colors and complexity of Yosemite’s unearthed rock and its extraordinary visual language. Each painting presents a different challenge as I focus on aspects of this complexity: the layering of natural processes over time, the characteristic textures, striations, and colors of the mineral crystals that form the granitic rock, and lichens and other elements that have left their marks on this majestic landscape of stone and water.
WORKS ON CANVAS
WORKS ON PAPER
WORKS ON WOOD PANEL
© Elaine Michaud 2026