Monsoon Green

Saguaro Monsoon, acrylic on paper, 15”x14”

Tucson Monsoon Green Collagescape, mixed media on board, 8”x10”

After my recent Southwest art adventure, it’s time to start making some art to reflect the road trip.  As a Californian I don’t always think about green being the color of the desert – especially as we’re in the middle of a drought.  But then I arrived in a hot and humid Tucson just as thunderstorms moved in, I experienced monsoon weather in the Southwest – they have had a wet year in Arizona and New Mexico and the desert is green.  I am also thinking back to the work of the Tucson artist Rose Cabat I saw for the first time in Tucson – the glowing shades of green on her ceramics are starting to make even more sense to me as I look closer at Tucson Green.

I have started some Tucson work with both a landscape and a collagescape.  More desert-inspired work to come….

A stop in Tucson

Heading home from New Mexico to California I decided to come via Tucson.  Sultry and 104° with thunderstorms moving in, humidity in the desert is not exactly pleasant – but its one of the perils of monsoon season.  I did enjoy a nearly empty Saguaro National Park late in the day.  On Saturday morning it was already a scorcher at 10:00 am.  I see that Downtown Tucson has been a victim of 1960’s and 1970s brutallist excess that, if not for the sunny desert climate, might suggest the former Soviet Union.  But not to get too dishy, they have some really great public art (unlike my own City).  I was downtown in order to visit the Tucson Museum of Art.  If you follow my blog, you know what a big advocate I am off checking out the smaller city museums along the way.   I knew they were having a show of the WPA artists in their collection.  The Millard Sheets etchings were a good find and the museums older, historic buildings contain a nice collection of Western art.  I always will go out of my way for a look at some Maynard Dixons.

What I also found was a perfect example of why you check out the local art museum.  I should have known, but I didn’t, all about Rose Cabat.  I caught the retrospective of her work on the day it closed.  This year marks the 100th anniversary of Cabat’s birth – and she is still alive and working!  She is well known in Tucson and another artist we should be seeing in a museum in San Francisco.  Rose Cabat one more reason to hit the road now and then and escape the City.