Every once in a while, I find an old photograph that already feels like a painting waiting to happen. High Desert Tipis began with one of those images—a circa-1927 photograph preserved by the Library of Congress showing a Blackfeet person and white horse beside two beautifully decorated tipis. The photographer is unidentified in the Library's catalog, and the image is listed with no known restrictions on publication.

What immediately attracted me was the composition. The great triangular form of the foreground tipi, its painted animals, the explosion of poles overhead, the smaller lodge juxtaposed in the background—almost everything I needed was already there. But the sepia photograph also contained something irresistible: a tremendous amount of empty sky.

That's when I started imagining an impossible little episode in art history.

What if Vincent van Gogh had visited the American West in 1887? What if he had come upon this encampment, carried his paints onto a patch of flat ground, unfolded an easel and spent the afternoon painting those tipis and that extraordinary sky?

Using Photoshop as my studio, I worked with digital brushes of different shapes, textures, opacity and paint behavior to emulate the directional marks and restless surface movement I associate with Van Gogh's paintings. Short strokes build the earth and vegetation; longer marks describe the hides and poles; curling, rhythmic strokes transform the empty sky into a field of blue, turquoise, cream and yellow movement. Digital painting programs can extend that vocabulary still further with downloadable brush sets and plug-ins that simulate everything from dry bristles and palette knives to impasto and traditional-media textures.

The result isn't intended as a reconstruction of either the historical photograph or an actual Van Gogh painting. It's an imaginary collision of the two—a moment that never happened, but one I rather wish had.

High Desert Tipis asks us to imagine Van Gogh standing beneath the immense Western sky, squinting at those painted lodges, loading his brush with yellow and cobalt blue and thinking, Well...this ought to be interesting.

• Digital painting based on a public-domain historical photograph
• Available on watercolor paper, wood panel, metal panel and gallery-wrapped canvas
• Available in multiple sizes up to 50 × 40 inches
  
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