Constance Baltuck

Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and other like-minded conservationists, our country has a wealth of National Parks preserving wilderness and historic sites that otherwise could easily have been lost forever.  What joy, to visit these enchanted places, to see the beauty that was once all around us, and to know these sanctuaries exist to protect flower, bird and beast, and every tree and rock, from the ravages of human expansion and development.

Thanks to a great Artist-in-Residence program sponsored by our National Parks, I spent a few weeks last fall focused exclusively on painting in Petrified Forest National Park.  Petrified Forest is small treasure, not much more than 25 miles end to end, but full of delights.  Traveling from north to south you can visit the Badlands, the historic Painted Desert Inn, archeological sites with petroglyphs and pueblos, and, of course, the Petrified Forest, a desert landscape littered with fallen tree trunks turned to stone in every shade of the rainbow.

Check out the photo album to your left for a preview of the show.