Monsoon Agavix

The Century Plant (living 20 to 30 years) is a low thick leaved agave found throughout the Sonoran Desert and bordering areas. As a desert plant, it's a significant landmark 6-10 feet around, and at the end of its life, putting forth a heroic asparagus-like stalk that branches and flowers to a height of 20-30 feet. This one iss in the backyard of my friend Richard Spelker and is vast and inspiring. 

I wanted a dramatic, rocky background, so I journeyed to the Dragoon Mountains, known for this sort of thing. I've never been to this area during the summer monsoon months, usually driving through on my way to Mt. Graham, where being outdoors in the shadow of pines is more tolerable. The area was bursting with life from more than 18 inches of summer rain filling ponds that dry up in the summer and growing grasses above your waist by the end of the season. Insect and reptile life was abounding as well as birds migrating by.

"Just add water" should be the tagline of this summer Eden. The grass dries out with a blonder cast to the landscape for the rest of the year. My framer recently saw a resemblance to William Wiley's work, which I first spotted at the Indianapolis Museum, making enough of an impression that I researched him. His checkered patterns and black lines resonated with my etching work, and I thought it appropriate to credit him in this piece. NASA's latest moonshot test rocket has these registration markers included, and it is a fitting metaphor for something that takes decades to charge up before blasting up and away.

O. Apachex

 

Illustrating a freshwater fish in its natural habitat, in a natural pose other than the usual water splash caught in mid-air from the muscle-arched body lunging toward a mayfly, mouth agape; the fisherman's wet dream of a perfect strike. This pose presented an exciting challenge of depicting above and below water landscapes in the same piece.

Small canyons with streams and cool blue-green pools do exist in the Sonoran Desert. The endangered Apache Trout thrived here, but interspecies competition with the Spotted Trout, stocked by humans, has reduced its domain to 25 miles of the Gila River, smaller tributaries, and adjacent parts of New Mexico. A fly fisherman in my past life, I like to spend time with good fishing spots, although these days it's with a sketchbook and camera. I try to spot what I can through the ripples, but the real telltale signs of trout are tiny fly lures and the glisten of fishing line in unreachable branches of trees around.

The trout is a notoriously difficult catch for a fisherman due to the miracle of its vision. The trout eye is engineered to deal with light refraction through the water's surface and is sensitive enough to see insects above water by the dim light of the stars. The trout can also see you unless you are crafty enough to be outside of its wide cone of vision.

Although the Apache Trout is not a current resident of the Sonoran Desert, I felt it appropriate to include it in my series considering the conservation efforts to restock this rare and wonderful inhabitant of our desert.

Prints for sale at patterntology.com

Amethyx

Ah, crystals. I know what you think when you see crystals. New Age guru was not my intention, though. I wanted to depict something mineral, if only one subject, to make a footnote in my work that the Sonoran Desert is a wellspring of gems, precious metals, and beautiful minerals. Given that, yearly, I'm steps from giant tents of vendors and prospectors selling their gems and minerals at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, I've become a fan. I also like following posts at the Mineral Database, considering I know very little about the field. I do know there are hidden treasures in hard-to-find places here.

Walking along the surface of the desert in hilly or mountainous areas, the possibilities below your feet are reality. Chambers of water, fault lines ever moving, cavities filled with mineral formations, and spelunkers are still discovering immense cave systems. It was hard to pick one thing from the ground that symbolized it for me. Copper, turquoise, and silver are actively mined here. Meteorite finds are commonplace, given visible craters and the ease of spying them in bare earth areas, so the extraterrestrial angle was interesting. In the end, I settled on Amethyst.

As volcanic lava cools, it traps pockets of gas and silica-rich liquid to form Quartz crystals. If the liquid has trace amounts of iron and you wait millions of years, you get the purple-hued Amethyst. There is a background overlay in my piece of a sequential nonrepeating pattern echoing quartz's hexagonal base structure and organic growth. (Also, somewhere in there are some coordinates.)

I can't ignore the labeling of crystals with spiritual significance. It exists for many people. I can't ignore the monetary value put on them either, but I do. To me, unseen secrets below the ground flesh out the detail of the terrain, mimicking the rarity of natural life on the surface. It makes perfect sense to me.

Prints for sale at patterntology.com.

Codex Sonora Printed

The whole process of inking prints and putting them up for sale to ultimately end up in a book is like releasing movie trailers until the movie comes out; only in my case, it was six years of trailers, including a pandemic. There's an elegance to this process that includes a pace keeping me interested and always working toward a final product.

The text is off-putting to some who either discount the whole book as nonsense or are discouraged by not reading it immediately. The other group finds an enchanting mystery in the document and even focuses enough to read it right away. It's funny to me that people are brutally honest about their opinion of something in book form. Still, if presented with something indecipherable in an art gallery, they walk away humbled, thinking they lack the sophistication or expertise. A psychological principle at work here about reactions to new things? I lack the sophistication or expertise to explain that principle!

I could create text that looks like a written language to suggest cipher code to be cracked (or not), but I do have thoughts about each piece while I build each piece. Text usually comes in list form derived from my observations and research I put into the subjects. The font I chose is of my creation called Quotasoon. I'm not sure if you would call this writing poetry or prose comprised of list-like terms or phrase snippets pulled from science writing that formed my understanding of the subject or phrases that encapsulate the subject's feeling and place. Maybe this is something akin to what an AI would do if using object-oriented philosophy. I read it off internally, as you might read:

"...doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One..."

― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

 

Copies available at patterntology.com

Sonoran Deserex

I am no expert on the Sonoran Desert; although I live here, and considering a majority of it exists inside of Mexico, which I have camped in about ten times, I'm familiar with the terrain. A few years ago, I did this 3d map of the Pineleño Mountains. Then there was the paleogeographic project I teamed up with a geologist to render the creation of the Gulf of California back to 10 million years. This time, I revisit the map as an art print and an essential part of my upcoming book.

There were a lot of decisions to make during this piece. How much texture, color, include roads, walls, cities, vegetation. Maps aren't maps without bathymetry, which tells the whole story IMO, especially in the gulf where the peninsula has peeled away from the mainland and is on it's way to Alaska. My spacecraft crashed here, and my information screen was on the fritz, and the power supply was waning, so I made some paper and ink and started tracing the screen to save the information.

Speleox

Like the otherworldly biom of the Sky Islands in Southern Arizona, there is another world underground. Thinking about the natural world under our feet, I was inspired by Kartchner Carverns. By happenstance, I was hired to my year-old creative director job by Gary Tenen, co-discoverer and protector of the caverns that eventually became a state park.

The bat seemed a natural fit for this piece. Nesting below ground and hunting outside, no one is more aware of the advantages of cave life in the desert than the bat. Listening to recordings of it's high frequency echo locations, I felt some grunge. Flying through the choppy sound waves to navigate its way through cave chambers and out into the open air, the bat not only helps control insect populations but is integral in the pollination of desert plants.

My aim with these prints are to collect them into a book, "Codex Sonora." My next print will be a map of the Sonoran Desert and then I'll spend the next year working on the cover, text and layout of the book. I'm excited to finally make a book since starting this series in 2015, then it will be onto Volume 2!

Apidaex

The last ice age pushed into the Sonoran desert and pushed out the Saguaro cactus and the Ironwood trees down to the middle of Mexico and replaced by Juniper forests and giant sloths. When the cold receded, the Saguaro came back to Arizona thousands of years faster than the Ironwood. Why? Birds. Birds can migrate hundreds or thousands of miles pooping seeds from the Saguaro fruit along the way. Ironwood seeds are eaten and pooped out by pack rats. Pack rats have small domains of a mile or more.

But first, plants need pollinators. In the desert these are bats, insects, and bees. They are genetic networkers for the plants they forage. They will forage up to 4 miles away and periodically, the whole hive will strike out and find a new place to resettle. Which makes me think of computer networks and networking software, site visits (like to a blog), and social media.

Insects with a queen are really one organism. Grouped together, I image a hive to be the size of a small dog. A small dog with 10,000 stingers. I've encountered a hive on the move while on the trail. I heard them before I saw them. I always give them space and respect because they can be aggressive. Our bees down here are Africanized, Africanized hybrids, aggressive, but are immune to the fungus that's killing bees elsewhere.

Peregrix

The Peregrine falcon is a wide-ranging species and a seasonal migrator, but the Sonoran desert is one place it breeds and calls home all year round. I have some nesting near my office, and at break time in the back when the wind is flowing over the Tucson Mountains, one of them might kite slow and low over me to take a look. Then there's that sound effect Hollywood is so fond of.

Out in the desert, circling in long slow arcs among rock towers and dodging dust devils, birds have a different spacial reality than we do — especially the strong fliers of the predatory world. Looking up at them, we're like the bottom feeders of the sky sea.

In this piece, I was thinking about the layers of air being like floors in a multistory building. I see birds cruising for prey, but sometimes I see them way up there on the top floor, far beyond hunting zones, watching the curvature of the earth and soaring smoothly on thermals.