I am always looking at art. Seeking it out has become part of how I move through the world—whether in museums, along the road, or even scrolling late at night. Discovering Jed Bowker’s Santa Rosa’s Grandview online was one of those moments of convergence. The scene he painted was one I had glimpsed myself, from the window of an airplane flying westward toward San Diego: the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains folded like ancient parchment, and the Salton Sea gleaming like spilled silver on the desert floor.
From the sky, the desert looked immense, almost impersonal—“a landscape in which time itself seems to have been broken open,” as Rebecca Solnit once wrote (Savage Dreams, 1994). Bowker, however, places us back on the ground. His painting restores the intimacy of the step: a cactus lit like a lantern, purple blossoms spilling from rock, a trail leading into shadow and sun. It reminds me that deserts are not only to be surveyed from afar, but also to be walked, breathed, and lived.
That recognition folds into my wider journeys across the American West.
I begin with the Great Plains, where the horizon stretches into infinity. At Windlass Hill and Chimney Rock, I walked ground still scarred by the ruts of the Mormon Trail. Willa Cather once called the Plains “the vast, shaggy coat of the world” (My Ántonia, 1918), and standing there, the earth itself felt like an animal—immense, breathing, alive with memory.
In Texas, I have walked Palo Duro Canyon State Park, the “Grand Canyon of Texas.” Red cliffs and carved mesas rise abruptly from the flat Llano Estacado. Here, Mary Austin’s words ring true: “The desert is the home of all things austere, and the austere finds its own kind of beauty” (The Land of Little Rain, 1903). Palo Duro embodies that austere beauty, where erosion itself sculpts grandeur.
New Mexico carries its own poetry. At White Sands, gypsum dunes shimmer like frozen seas, their whiteness a brilliance that nearly blinds. Nearby, the Painted Desert unspools in bands of rose and lavender, each layer a stanza of geological time. Robinson Jeffers once wrote, “The desert is the face of the earth contemplating itself” (1935), and in these places I felt that stillness—the earth holding up a mirror to eternity.
Crossing into Arizona, I visited Homolovi State Park, where ancestral pueblos sit exposed to wind and sky. Here, history itself seems baked into stone, and the desert holds not only ecosystems but human memory. The land is a palimpsest of endurance, where survival is not just natural but cultural.
In Utah, at Fremont Indian State Park, I traced petroglyphs carved into sandstone: spirals, hunters, animals etched by hands long vanished. The desert here is not empty, but a text, written and rewritten by generations. Driving further, I passed arches and canyons, stone sculpted into cathedral.
Nevada offers yet another rhythm. In southern Nevada, the basin-and-range sequence repeats endlessly—mountain, valley, mountain, valley. Silence reigns, vast and unbroken. The Mojave Desert deepens this impression, its Joshua trees twisted like figures in perpetual prayer.
And then, Death Valley: salt flats blinding white, golden canyons twisting into shadow, distant peaks capped in snow. It is both the harshest and most fragile desert, a paradox of heat and beauty. To stand there is to understand Mary Austin again: “The desert has its own form of worship, austere and wordless.”
Finally, the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains, Bowker’s subject, bring this journey full circle. His painting embodies the truth I have glimpsed in all these places: deserts are not voids, but living ecosystems where every cactus, every stone, every shadow testifies to resilience. Lawrence of Arabia once said he loved the desert because it was “clean.” Perhaps he meant stripped down, bare. But that is only half the truth. The desert is not sterile; it is complex, layered, alive.
Artists and photographers have long wrestled with this paradox. Albert Bierstadt rendered deserts as sublime spectacle, mythic and golden. Georgia O’Keeffe found their intimacy in bones and blossoms, writing, “The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive” (1939). Ansel Adams revealed deserts in luminous black-and-white clarity, while Richard Misrach, in Desert Cantos, showed the scars of human history across their expanse. Each vision is true, but partial.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observed in Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), “The desert wears a veil of mystery, and what it hides is more essential than what it shows.” Bowker’s Grandview lifts that veil just enough. For me, it unites flight and footstep, memory and vision, all the deserts I have crossed and all the art I have sought. The desert, like art itself, is not barren but abundant, not empty but overflowing with poetry.