Summer travels...aka a desert love story

Several years ago, when living in Japan, I joined a community Art Club. (Like the time I joined the ACT Gospel Choir in college, not knowing the A standard for African, I was not aware that this club was for senior citizens. However, like my gospel choir, they didn’t want to discriminate and welcomed me with good faith and many jokes at my expense). Anyway, I went on a sketch trip to Yamagata with the art club, which is just what it sounds like: a vacation where you stop and sketch the scenery.

I’ve been wanting to go on another sketch trip ever since, but the pace of living is different in the US, and I just never seemed to make the time for it, or it was inconvenient to whoever I was traveling with, excuses excuses...

So, this summer, I went back to my hometown and decided I was going to sketch the trip. I’m a bit rusty (who would have thought that when you neglect a skill, like painting, you don’t magically improve in technique just because you’re older!) I used to think I was talented, but now I realize I was ‘good’ at art because I did it all the time. But here goes...

And, for comparison, here’s a picture of the desert I spent many of my formative years catching lizards in:

When I look at the desert, I see colors that don't come out in my photographs. It's the light there. I'd been away for so long (about 3 years, and then I went back in winter) that I forgot that the light there is different than anywhere else I've ever been. So bright and white, it's like looking into a prism the instant before the colors split. But for me, the prism is there in my mind. When I moved to the desert, I think I saw it like most people see it: colorless, drab, dull. Miles and miles of sameness. I used to imagine being anywhere else. I longed for the jungles of India and Philippines, the open sea (I was really into English novels as a kid). I missed California, with its beaches and people and sense of possibility, its landscape where every kind of flower seemed to grow. I resisted the desert, but we were thrown together, not by choice. I was that weird kid who wandered around alone in it with a hatchet (side note: my husband is the only other person I've ever met who was also a weird kid who spent his childhood with a hatchet hanging from his jeans belt loop) and I came to know the desert. With that knowing came respect, appreciation for its stark beauty, then, eventually, love.