Painted Wall from Cedar Point Black Canyon NP Ceramic Art Tile
— the lightning the rock kept.
Not only on a wall.
“The Painted Wall is the tallest cliff in Colorado, rising about 2,250 feet from the river up to the rim at Cedar Point. The dark rock is gneiss and schist, more than a billion and a half years old; the bright streaks running through it are pegmatite, lighter igneous rock that found the cracks in the older stone and stayed. The trail out to Cedar Point is short. Most people walk it in flat afternoon light, then turn around and walk back. The cliff faces them the whole way.
Painted Wall from Cedar Point Black Canyon NP Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park sits in west-central Colorado, about fifteen miles east of Montrose. The park was designated in 1999 after sixty-six years as a national monument. Cedar Point is an overlook on the South Rim Road at roughly 8,000 feet, reached by a short paved trail. The Painted Wall it faces drops 2,250 feet to the Gunnison River, the tallest cliff in Colorado and more than 750 feet taller than the Empire State Building. The river that carved the canyon descends an average of 95 feet per mile through its 48 miles, one of the steepest rates on any North American river.
The bright streaks that name the Painted Wall are pegmatite, a coarse-grained igneous rock that formed when molten material intruded the older metamorphic stone of the canyon and cooled slowly inside its cracks. Pegmatite is mostly quartz, feldspar, and biotite mica; crystals can be large enough to read individually from the rim. The dark host rock is Precambrian gneiss and schist, around 1.7 billion years old, among the oldest exposed rock in the United States. The Gunnison River cut down through both, slowly, because the rock is too hard to weather wide. So it weathers narrow instead.
South Rim Road runs about seven miles from the visitor center to High Point and is open to vehicles roughly mid-April through mid-November; past the visitor center it closes for winter. Cedar Point is one of the road's twelve overlooks, reached by a paved trail about seven-tenths of a mile round trip. The Painted Wall sits directly across the canyon. The park charges a standard NPS entrance fee covering seven days; America the Beautiful passes are honored. The nearest town with lodging and food is Montrose, about fifteen miles west of the South Rim entrance.