Amber And The Pursuit of Dust to Dust

 March 19, 2025

   As you may know I carry a sketchbook with me everywhere I go and often sketch random things I see, or build on ideas I would like to see.

Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France, 2015

   So, I had my sketchbook with me this past weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books. On Saturday afternoon a young girl came up to our booth, spied my sketchbook sitting on a chair behind me, and asked if she could look at it. I didn't think anything about it and handed it to her. Most people who look through my sketchbooks, do so with mild interest and promptly hand it back, but Amber looked at every page intensely, reading my notes, even turning back several pages to reread a section, apparently trying to catch a flow. I started to get slightly nervous about it because I often put raw notes in there. Stuff like, "I wish I could draw better!" and, "Well, there goes my career!" Anyway, after about ten minutes I said, just to be polite, "So, do you want to be an artist?" To which Amber smiled and said, "I already am."

Amber is an Artist

   I loved her immediately.

   Meanwhile, in my current sketchbook, the one Amber perused last Saturday, I am hell bent on discovering all the subtle shades of dust. Here is a sketch from this morning.

Daily Whip Out: "Visibility Almost Zero"

   In a typical Kingman dust storm—that I grew up in—you can't see anything, but at the moment it starts to pass, vague shapes come into view. That is the moment I am trying to capture.

Daily Whip Out: "Incoming Dusty Chaps"

Daily Whip Out: "From Dust to Dust"

   Come to think of it that would be a cool title for for an art show.

"Everything is dust in the wind. . ."

—Kansas