Tag Archives: nature

January 11, 2017 – Clouds

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I moved back to the desert for a reason. This is one of many.

There’s a quality to the light, to the landscape and skies, that amazed me when I first moved here sixteen years ago. I love the monsoon rains, the mountains, the clouds. They say that nature does all of the hard work, and all you have to do is be there to capture it. There’s some truth to that. But it’s so easy to take our experiences for granted. When we see the same landscape, the same sky, the same friends, the same lover – when we see it every day, we appreciate it less.

Being an artist is recognizing this tendency, and never taking anything for granted.

This is all temporary, and it’s all incredibly amazing. I love being here, and I am in love with life.

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January 05, 2017 – The Cardinal

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Bird photography is incredibly challenging, but it’s also very addicting. I’m certainly no expert, but there are times when I will grab my telephoto lens, go for a walk or a hike, and hunt around for birds to try and capture.

I’m not the only one who loves cardinals. They’re bright, vibrant creatures with a very distinctive song. I seem to have better luck photographing these guys than just about any other species of bird, too.

I looked up the symbolism behind cardinals recently. Evidently, they make pretty wonderful animal totems – if you’re into that kind of thing. From what I can gather, the cardinal is supposed to remind us to hold ourselves with pride – not ego pride, mind you, but rather to stand tall, be more regal, and step into our natural confidence.

I can dig that.

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Cardinal (illustration)

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Life sometimes gets in the way, and I haven’t had the opportunity to really pour myself into a project recently. My uncle, who has fallen ill, has been on my mind. Family is in from out of town, and everybody is coming together to see this whole things through.

One of the things that has completely stuck with me, though, is my uncle telling me that one of his favorite things to do is sit outside in his backyard. He enjoys spending time listening to the birds. At first, I think people gave him grief about it; it’s odd to sit on a porch and stare up at the sky for hours at a time. But then, if your time on this earth might just be running out, I would also imagine that the sound of a gentle breeze coursing through the trees might sound that much more soothing. The sound of birds chirping might sound that much sweeter.

Everything changes when you realize you’re living on borrowed time. When you realize how little you may have left.

So, thinking about these things, I sat down yesterday and worked on this illustration. It’s based on a photograph I took last year. I’ve always had a tough time getting decent photographs of birds, and one afternoon this cardinal managed to just hang out, for a good long while, on the tree outside our living room window. I’m sure my girlfriend thought I was crazy, walking back and forth, to both ends of the house, out the front door, through to the back door, moving like a slow lumbering, stalking maniac with a gigantic camera lens clutched in his fists.

But every moment truly is a gift. Even when we obsessively try to snap a picture of a bird and curse under our breath when we can’t get our camera to focus properly. Every moment is a gift, because we only ever get to enjoy each moment once. Enjoy your day. Find an excuse to smile. It’s important.

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February 29 – Reflections

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02-29 Reflections postToday I present the final image for Film February, a landscape made with my favorite old film stock, Fujifilm Velvia.

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The Dead Flower

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Dead Flower post“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
~Albert Camus

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I was reminded of this painting, based on a photograph, by an unlikely figure: Facebook.

We all have a profile and engage in it’s meticulous, brilliant distraction. Over the past several weeks, I’ve plucked the crust from my eyes each morning and reached over to quell the grating sounds of my alarm clock – which would also be my phone. Usually there’s a recommendation from our social media overlord to reminisce and share an old memory – I’m guessing they’ve been pulling at your nostalgia-strings too. The catch, at lease for me, is that the past twelve months of my life have been, mildly put, troubled.

Facebook’s algorithms have yet to filter out the job losses, financial woes, marital strife, and death. It’s hard to fault an equation for hoisting my life’s misery back upon me, even as I scramble to escape the sense of demoralizing defeat, but there it is, like a mirror, holding your failures as a civilized man right up to your face.

Today, thankfully, brought a different narrative. Rather than a friend-turned-enemy or a recently-deceased compatriot, I was reminded of a painting I’d made and quickly forgot about. I made a simple picture of a crisp, lifeless twig; I was satisfied. The canvas of the earth shifts during the winter time; colors turn from vibrant to monochrome. A very good and close friend, deeply religious, often speaks of God’s divine design, proclaiming that “the colors of His palette never clash.”

I certainly couldn’t be described as a religious or faithful human being, but my friend is right. The colors of the natural world do not compete for glory – they sit side-by-side in exquisite harmony, promoting a sensory experience that is indeed “miraculous,” and can easily be described as “heavenly.”

And now I spread my gospel to you.

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January 28 – The Lone Tree

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01-28 The Lone Tree post“Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.”

~Mark Twain

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There’s a lone tree in a field along Kenneth Road south of the city. It’s a tiny family-owned plot of earth with a sign that proudly boasts “Welcome To Kenneth – Population 10” in drips white paint. A couple of ramshackle barns litter the adjacent field. Along the fence-line on the south end of the property is the family plot; a dozen or so headstones jut out from the island of manicured grass.

Family farms are becoming rare in the post-industrial age, but every now and again there’s a slice of land owned by hardened farm workers, proud to have held onto the family farm, and exclaim with bravado the number of generations their bloodline has worked the soil.

This place is the epitome of the Midwest – open spaces, flat fertile fields, and the whisper of the prairie wind in your ears. There’s a calm to the Great Plains that’s as unique a sensation as standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. An ocean of water flows beneath your feet. On a cloudy day at dusk, there’s electricity in the air – a current strong enough that you can feel it on your skin and the hair on your arms stands up.

There’s nothing more beautiful on this planet than looking across a field uncorrupted by concrete and automobiles, monumental spires and neon light. Our cities are a grand thing, too, but in a different way. And certainly these fields have been sculpted by human hands. But to my mind, a properly run family farm is one of the last places a person can find a healthy balance between human intervention and nature.

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January 25 – The Sunflower

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01-25 Sunflower State post

It is said that on the darkest days, the sunflower will still stand tall and seek out the light. I rather like that sentiment.

It may just be because I was raised in Kansas – the sunflower state – but I always assume everybody’s seen those time-lapse videos, fields of sunflowers craning their delicate necks from east to west, tracking the movement of the sun. It’s a marvelous thing to consider, that these organisms bend so literally to that glowing orb in the heavens. Everything that we enjoy is because of that mysterious object, and it’s promise to return in the springtime.

Entire populations have bowed in worship of the sun. It is the light that lets us see, the warmth that keeps us alive, the energy that draws life from the soil beneath our feet. Even in an age where the sun itself isn’t deified, it’s rising and setting provide powerful metaphors.

Today’s photograph doesn’t require much explanation. This is ‘pretty for the sake of being pretty,’ or ‘ars gratia artis.’ At the same time, I have a lot of memories anchored to this image.

Two summers ago, I walked by a small patch of sunflowers on my daily walk up Brewery Gulch in Bisbee, Arizona, on my way to Mimosa Market. The tiny brick bodega is another Bisbee landmark, although it’s far enough up the thoroughfare that many tourists never manage to set eyes on it (and those that do are often stymied by the cash-only practice). The proprietor had grown a little patch of sunflowers in the side yard, and I made sure to bring my camera with me one day to photograph the frenzy of bees rolling in the pollen like excited children in a snowbank.

I remember one monsoon season, years before I ever moved to Bisbee, walking up the road past Mimosa Market toward Zacatecas Canyon; the entire road was a river of water from the rains tumbling down the mountain from that morning’s rain-shower. A family was in the middle of the near-vacant road, and a baby in a bloated diaper from the water was sitting in the middle of the stream slapping her hands in the water and giggling. I’ll never forget how excited that fat-cheeked, mostly-toothless face looked.

There’s nothing like an Arizona monsoon. There’s nothing like saying hello to a beautiful flower as you walk by, every single day. There’s nothing like the collection of simple little pleasures that, together, are what make life grand.

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