Yesterday I received a big ol' packet in the mail from Paula Eastwood at the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance in Albuquerque. Some months back she contacted me after seeing a page of my sketches back when I was on the quest to do 10,000 bad drawings. She liked one page—a gouache of a New Mexico landscape inspired by the lone grave west of Datil—so much she wanted to run it as is, but with one change: she wanted me to take out the gravestone and replace it with a century plant. I thought this was rather strange, but whipped out a separate painting of a century plant and emailed it to Paula. Here is the cover:
Paula Photoshopped the century plant over the gravestone (good job, by the way). When I opened up the guide, there was a second image of mine on the Contents page:
This is a Daily Whipout Painting I did last summer called "Sky Wilderness." Actually works rather nicely. On the left hand page you can see a sidebar titled "What Is Wilderness?" and in the copy it says, in part, "Wilderness is defined as an area that has primarily been affected by the forces of nature with the imprint of humans substantially unnoticeable." Oh, okay. Thus the removal of the headstone. I get it.
Check them out at New Mexico Wilderness Guide.
"I love not Man the less, but Nature more. . ."
—George Gordon Byron
