I live in a place people travel across the world to see, and somehow it still doesn’t get old. I notice the cliffs when I’m driving to the grocery store, what the light is doing to Pine Valley in the distance, whether there is snow on the peaks, what color the desert is after rain. I notice the sky, always the sky. I’ve driven the same roads hundreds of times and still catch myself looking.
Maybe that’s just how I’m wired. I’ve always noticed things. It’s part of being an artist, although I’m not sure whether being an artist made me this way or noticing everything is part of what made me one. What I find interesting is that familiarity hasn’t diminished it. If anything, knowing this place has given me more to notice.
Knowing a place makes it more interesting
When you first visit the desert, the scale gets your attention. The red rock, the cliffs and the enormous amount of sky are dramatic and unfamiliar, and there is plenty here that almost demands to be looked at. Living here is different because I still see those things, but now I know enough to see the changes too.
The same cliffs aren’t really the same color every day. The desert smells different when it rains, and water can completely change a place that looked dry only hours before. I watch the seasons move through plants I didn’t even know the names of when I first came here. I’ve started learning the birds, which has given me even more things to look for. The longer I live here, the more specific my attention becomes.
That’s the opposite of what we often assume familiarity does. We talk about becoming used to beautiful things as though seeing them often inevitably makes them less remarkable. That hasn’t been my experience here.
I don’t want to get used to it
There are places that become scenery and places that somehow continue to feel like an experience. Southern Utah is still an experience for me. That doesn’t mean every drive through town is profound. Most of the time I’m doing exactly what everyone else is doing, running errands, thinking about work, getting kids where they need to go and figuring out what’s for dinner. The landscape is simply there alongside the rest of my life, and I notice it.
Sometimes it’s only for a second. The cliffs are particularly bright, clouds are sitting low over Pine Valley, the sunset is doing something ridiculous, or a roadrunner crosses in front of me. Light catches a formation I’ve looked at countless times and gives me a completely different composition. Those small interruptions have become part of living here.
Place gets into the work
It’s impossible for me to spend this much time looking at a place and not have it find its way into my work. Not always literally. I don’t feel a need to paint every beautiful view I see, and I’m not trying to document Southern Utah one landscape at a time. Sometimes what stays with me is a color relationship, a shape, the quality of the light or the feeling of standing somewhere with far more sky than anything else.
That’s what interests me about the relationship between art and place. A place doesn’t have to become the subject to become part of the work. We absorb where we live. The colors become familiar, the light becomes familiar, and certain shapes begin to feel like home.
Maybe that’s part of why I’m so interested in place, not simply where we are, but what happens to us because we’ve spent time there. I’ve lived with this landscape long enough that it is familiar now, but I haven’t stopped being amazed by it.
