Art and Impermanence

Perhaps the best part of being in Sedona for several weeks is that I don't feel the same desperate urgency I had during my first short visit last summer. If that trip was a crash landing into love with this landscape, then this longer stay feels more like getting to know someone with long-term potential. It’s still wonderful, but the fantasy has softened into something more grounded. I can imagine returning here again and again, if not as a primary home, then definitely as part of a geographically polyamorous life.

Mesa (study in progress), 12 x 12, acrylic on wood panel

Yesterday we took the winding road up to Flagstaff, about an hour from Sedona and 10 degrees cooler. We visited an art supply store and a sprawling used bookstore, where I found a gem: a book on the women painters who came to the Southwest between the late 1800s and 1940s.

I've read Georgia O’Keeffe's wonderful biography Portrait of an Artist several times, but I'm unfamiliar with the other female painters who couldn't get enough of this region in the days when getting here and painting here were particularly challenging. I'm excited to learn more about their work and their lives, and to feel more connected to the lineage of female painters who faced obstacles that will never compare to my luxurious journey in an air conditioned van and well-appointed Sedona condo, to say nothing of an iPhone that can take all the reference photos I want.

Red rock (study in progress), 12 x 12, acrylic on canvas board

Although the hikes and views are stunning here, I've been most inspired seeing the fleeting and ever-changing landscape flowing past me from the car window — vast lonely expanses that feel impossible to fully know. Golden tufts of grass, dusty grey-green puffball shrubs, subtle gradients of yellow ochre and beige receding into distance, endless skies in constant motion...

to watch it all rushing past me feels like life itself — going by so quickly, and all I can do is try to really see it while I'm here.

Southwest by car (study in progress), 12 x 16, acrylic on canvas board