the desert Series

When I finished the Spring semester of teaching, I was eager to head into the studio, for pure looking and silence. I often  think about the time that I camped in the desert, the macro and micro levels of experience- the landscape, plants, the close palate, the stripped down feeling of it. I have not been there since September, but I was inspired to make small drawings as meditation, as exploration, as memory and hand work. For this series of 50 I used walnut oil and prussian blue water color. This series is available on etsy. Enjoy

rip rap and lichen

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

pool and needles

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

fish hooks

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

arch and drag

walnut ink 

watercolor 

pen and brush

8" x 8"

lucid maps of stillness

"Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color." Susan Brind Morrow

"Winter on the Colorado Plateau has not been arduous, only a thin cold without storms, a lucid map of stillness. Caught in the abrupt instant of its rising, our faces take the tangerine sun, our backs dissolve to silhouette in the brilliant dazzle of its incandescent beam. The nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep, enduring purity of eye-blind dark. The mesas creak and stain in the frigid air audible only if I lay my ear to them. The colors in their flanks-- terra cotta, blood-red, salmon, vermilion-- bear the temperament of iron."

from "the Anthropology of Turquoise." by Ellen Meloy

I remember reading this to a friend while we were sitting in a truck in Philadelphia. This week I flew into and out of and back into snow covered landscapes, and thought of it again.