Rational Beauty

I quite literally headed into the wild when the Mojave Art gallery asked me to create works on paper to celebrate the American Southwest. Mike Abbink, Tyler Owens, and I traversed deserts in both Texas and Arizona to build a collection of images of flora and fauna.

During the pandemic’s shelter-in-place mandates, I strolled around my new chosen city of Austin, and the prickly pear cactus became a familiar friend. Mike and I took hikes in Big Bend. Owens, my intern at the time, was living in Arizona and turned out to be the right collaborator for the project. We would share photos from our hikes and images we swiped from the internet on Zoom. We gradually narrowed our focus to jackrabbits, owls, prickly pears, and a single landscape.

With specimens in hand, we explored how to match the drama and beauty of the sculpted terrain, as much as the playfulness of the movement we spied. We were interested in reducing these forms to their essential shapes and gestures, drawing inspiration for the graphic simplicity from German designer Otl Aicher and Italian modernist Enzo Mari. Both designers had a way of doing more with less that felt particularly relevant to this project. It was a fun exercise to study the work of designers we admired so much and see how we could translate the desert flora and fauna.

The resulting limited-edition series of giclée prints uses a restrained color palette and high-quality paper to translate the character of the Southwest into a simple graphic language.