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When most people visit Zion National Park, they enjoy the massive canyon walls that surround the Virgin River.  When painting with light, familiar iconic scenes aren’t necessary to create beautiful and inspiring art.  These are often places that are passed by unnoticed by thousands of park visitors.  To create something that is magical and mysterious, I use dramatic lighting to transform these simple scenes at night when most visitors are asleep dreaming about the day’s adventures.  Dramatic night skies complement pleasant landscapes.  And so my goal of showing you something you have never seen before is accomplished.  Echos is such a scene located beside a main park road.

The link to Echos is here: https://lightpaintingjeffmaresh.com/product/echoes/

Many of us light painters who visit desolate and abandoned places feel that we are in a race against time to capture their beauty before they are gone.  Vandalism, arson, development, and neglect can destroy these often sensitive sites.  More of them are being declared off limits by their owners. 

Arriving with excitement at the remains of a historical adobe building at a desert national park last week, I found it heavily vandalized.  It was discouraging to see.  Earlier in the year, I also learned that six months after I had visited the historic False Kiva that it had been vandalized again and declared permanently off limits to visitors.  Today as I write I think back to the delightful experience I had on my visit.  You can read about it here on my web site:  https://lightpaintingjeffmaresh.com/product/aboriginal/

Five new pieces have been added to my web site from two of my outings this summer.  Due to the pandemic, I had postponed all of my trips until it was safer to go.  Accompanied by my wife Paula in June, we drove to New Mexico to visit Bisti Badlands and the Valley of Dreams which we had visited several times before.  They are both amazingly scenic remote locations and most people have never heard of them.  They are a vast area of white, grey, black, red, and purple sands, rock, and ash that have eroded leaving strange and unique landforms.  These places are so peculiar that after being immersed in them for several hours at night I feel like I’m on some other planet.  The piece for this blog is entitled Enchanted and it is from the Valley of Dreams.

I also made another trip to Bryce Canyon National Park and the surrounding area in Utah.  My goal was to spend some time on the lesser travelled trails deeper in the canyon to find some new and spectacular scenery.  It was a lot of fun hiking on steep and long trails and I wasn’t disappointed.  Parts of these trails have steep drop offs and I felt more immersed in the scenery walking beside vertical walls and tall pinnacles hundreds of feet tall. 

To see all of the new photos, click on this link: https://lightpaintingjeffmaresh.com/deserts/

Hi everybody and welcome to my web site.  After a number of years of developing my own style and building a portfolio, I’m excited to share them with you.  I hope you enjoy their unique beauty and presence.

I’ll be blogging periodically on many topics that I think you’ll find interesting and enjoyable.  I’ll be talking about the painting with light art form, its origins, my artistic influences, and how I got started.  Since most of my excursions are to fascinating outdoor locations including national parks and ghost towns, I’ll be posting about my field technique and things I experienced. 

You can stay in touch with me in a number of ways.  You can contact me directly from the contact page on this web site where you can also sign up for my newsletter.  I can be reached on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/lightpaintingjeffmaresh/.  I’ll be on Instagram soon and it will also be accessible from the contact page.

Matt Hill, one of my favorite night photographers, stated recently that we are entering the golden age of night photography.  I couldn’t agree more.  And I’m happy to be on this adventure with fellow artists and photographers as this art form evolves.