Here I am at the Baja coast on the Sea of Cortez, reveling in the change of climate and the overdose of sun. marveling at the power of Desert Nature: The cactus and mesquite, exposed mountains made of walls of crumpled rock (a geologists wet-dream) that edge the brilliant blue sky while vultures circle and but few clouds skitter.

The sea gets a darker blue as the winds pick up in the afternoon. The whole mode here is “tranquilo”; chill, relax. Something that I need on a regular basis and what the world could use as well.

The above painting was done at my friend Reed’s hacienda Luna Negra. The subject is a stone room surrounded by bougainvillea vines. It fits in the desert nicely and seemed a good place to start for this trip.

Painting is very simlar to meditation. You have to sit and focus and quell the monkey mind that insists that you could and should be doing something different, because any time you do anything you are neglecting everything else; robbing the world of attention.

What’s the point anyway? No one will buy it…..It’s not that good…..The style is too old timey….The composition is all wrong…..You don’t know how to use watercolors….. and AI could produce 10,000 mages in the same amount of time….probably more.

TMI monkey mind. You’re on a wheel that never stops turning, and I’m doing this painting so I can get off that wheel for a bit. So I can relate to something without just labeling it and walking on. Soak it in, interact, interpret, see a scene change as it marches through a day.

It’s takes a while to really see something, and we rarely take that time. Painting forces you to see one thing at a time and to string these observations together like the beads that make a necklace. A painting is not an instant captured, it is many instances fused together into a singularity.

Baja - Playa El Coyote