While the Artcloth Network conference was a feast of inspiration, support, laughter, hard work and all those concommitant issues that come with organization, the Arizona landscape was a delicious appetizer of dark and light, spine and sticker, beautiful harshness and harsh beauty. More than any other landscape, the bones are so there - the physicality of shape and form in each plant, in each vista. And the presence of such an extreme climate always calls up wonder at our human adaptability -- for good or for ill. To live here comfortably takes all the technology available. To live here and keep the desert healthy is an enormous challenge. This is where we other Americans get our copper, our tin, our mercury -- where we want to stow our radioactive wastes. And, yet, look at this landscape. It is far from bare, far from unpopulated. I wonder at its fullness, its abundance, its other kind of lush.
Most of these were taken at the Sonoran Desert Museum, where Susan and I spent 3 hours walking and shooting pictures after I arrived. It was a day of dramatic thunderstorms, and the most amazing sunset tinted rainbow -- wish I had
been able to capture that photo!
