It’s been a productive couple of months! Summer is officially here and the desert is officially hot. We’ve even spent a few days in the upper one hundred teens. I think that having no choice but to be indoors much of the time translated to a productivity boon for me, especially in June. I also had some art exhibition opportunities that piqued my interest, so I worked to create some pieces tailored to those. Thankfully, my submissions were well received, too.

FOUND:RE Contemporary in Phoenix issued a call for submissions called Xscape, an exhibition to be centered around “landscapes, cityscapes and mindscapes.” I created a large piece on Aquabord entitled El Curandero (it’s shown below, but I promise it’s so much better in person) that was accepted to this exhibition. The show will run from July 17 to November 14, 2021.

El Curandero was inspired by the Curandero Trail at Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona. This trail features a collection of native plants that have medicinal properties. Each time I walk this trail, I gaze down from the top to this view of Picketpost Mountain and the gardens below. For me, the most powerful medicine of all is the beauty of this place and the way it heals my soul. (Curanderos are traditional healers who use herbal medicines to treat various conditions).

Extra thanks goes to Ampersand, the makers of Aquabord, who sent me complimentary product that I used to create El Curandero and several other paintings in June. Ampersand will be using Fort Lowell Firmament, a painting I created on Aquabord a couple of years ago, for some of their new marketing materials. Aquabord is a clay coated, slightly textured board that is designed for use with watercolor paint. It can be sealed and displayed without glass, which makes the watercolor even more vibrant and luminous. The surface doesn’t behave exactly like paper, and I like the qualities of each for different reasons and different applications/subject matter. Aquabord is especially nice for larger paintings, since framing paper in large format can get really cumbersome and expensive.

Monsoon season began on my birthday (June 15 - yeah, yeah, I’m 45 now…) and I had the opportunity to submit artwork to a monsoon themed exhibition with Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery & Workshop in Tucson. I had actually sketched out some ideas last year that I I liked but never painted (I’m not sure why!) so I worked through those using various media. The first version was gouache (opaque watercolor) on black watercolor paper, then gouache on white hot pressed (very smooth) watercolor paper, and finally transparent watercolor on white cold pressed (more textured) watercolor paper. I think they resulted in some fun and interesting works that exceeded my expectations. The first two iterations of these designs are now showing in Raices Taller’s Agua Sagrada virtual exhibition and the third was sold to a Phoenix-area collector.

In other random news, we had some renovations done at our house in May, which was exciting but exhausting and probably impacted my May productivity. The saguaro cacti bloomed and made fruit. We did more rockhounding, even when it was insanely hot. We spent a beautiful Memorial Day weekend in Orange County, California, eating good food and visiting the ocean. I managed to somehow save a fledgling mockingbird from Lola dog and it spent a week learning to fly in our backyard (and inspired some art that will be featured in future a blog). We got our first day of rain for the monsoon season. It was a good couple of months!

In all, I created 6 paintings in May and 11 in June, including several larger and more time-consuming paintings. I also experimented quite a bit with style, approaches, and materials. I feel like I’m in a season of artistic change and growth, another reason I’ve been creating so much. All the pieces I created are shown below, along with their availability as of this blog post.

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