Sliding Away All Night

30” x 40”

Oil, charcoal, and acrylic on panel

“Sliding Away All Night” was commissioned by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Noelle Phares’s 2024 exhibition that focuses on the Colorado River. Wildfire is not uncommon in the forested areas surrounding the Colorado. Here, shadows of the Grizzly Creek Fire that burned along Glenwood Canyon in 2020, threatening the Shoshone Generating Station, bears down on the slopes. Fires play a special role in shaping the downstream watersheds as sediment loads gather steam when burned brush and trees roar into the river and crash along the banks and canyon walls, reshaping waterways and deposits.


The poetry composed to accompany this and the other two pieces in the exhibition depicting the Glenwood Canyon area:

“There’s a jewel box high in the mountains
left hanging there like the last ornament on the tree.
Fringed with curtains of Columbine and Bog Orchid,
it can’t contain the glinting collection of emeralds
that seep slowly from the travertine into the Colorado below.
A dead horse marked the gulchway up from the river
at least according to the lore
decrepit totem to the travelers beneath, beckoning
come, come and see!
Year after year I drive the careening passages through Glenwood
always noting the byzantine zag of the rocks
a violent portrait of the carver working dutifully
on these layered walls
aided now and then by a fire
that sharpens the artist’s blade with the sediment of the burn
sliding away all night
to the consternation of Lake Powell, its heiress.
At the foot of this cleavage
river waters mingle with those from the Yampah springs 
Big Medicine as the Ute called it,
pooling genially into folds hollowed out by long-dead hands
thrusting upwards into the spark-spray of the Grand Fountain.
Last time I was there
my daughter soaked quietly in my belly
jelly-like, unformed yet.
She, like the canyon,
is of the water
I reckon”

This work is not for sale at this time.