Years back, I showed in a great little gallery in Sedona, AZ, right on the main tourist drag. Sadly, the gallery owners have long since moved on, but it was a fun gig. A lot of my best sellers were tiny canvas paintings with mini wooden easels, to be had in blank form at several local art supply stores. With a little prep, some acrylic paint, and some faux finish magic, a 3″ x 3″ stretched canvas could become a vivid souvenir piece for a traveler from far away.
I’m fortunate to live fairly near the red rocks of Sedona and the crazy town they shelter. It is a madhouse on the best of days. I’m thinking of setting a funny fantasy novel there, which is basically an excuse to call a road trip a business expense.
Most people, looking at these tiny canvas artworks, might think I played with the color balance a bit.
Not really. That’s what sunset on red sandstone looks like at our latitude. I remind myself of this, when wondering what internal landscapes I might have adopted if I’d grown up in Seattle or Lubbock. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have a pre-set for towering green forests or endless plains.
But I like the red rocks, as long as I remember they are a pre-set part of my experience, and that other people may not know what I mean when I merely write ‘the red rocks of Sedona’. It’s my job to make that place come as alive in my writing as it is in my art.
A spirit of place is important to any story. I’ve never been a fan of writing that assumes generic settings. I have a hard time with a popular romantic fantasy author, also a native of the American Southwest, because she’s used vague setting descriptions for places I know intimately. I’ll read her books, and love the characters and plots – then get derailed with ‘Waitaminnit. The landscape west of Chama looks *nothing* like that!’
There’s a fashion now for such minimalist writing, letting the reader fill in almost all the gaps. I’m not happy with it. I want an author to take me on a journey; if they’re too lazy to do even that, they probably won’t be a good tour guide with the other stuff.
Her work may be out of fashion now, and her gigantic paragraphs hard for the PowerPoint generation to read, but I’d recommend the gothic romance novels of Mary Stewart, as well as her ‘Merlin’ series of historic fantasy. Stewart first introduced me to the art of location-as-character, with real-world settings culled from 1950’s and 1960’s destinations or old historical accounts. Isolated Greek islands, a half-ruined citadel near Damascus, a French chateau haunted by old betrayals, an apricot orchard in southern Wales, Scottish lodges looking over steel-gray seas…when Stewart wrote about a place, the reader was there.
Your paintings of the red rocks sent me back to look at my holiday snaps of Sedona’s sandstone outcrops. The day I was there, taking the pictures, it was searingly hot and the sky was a merciless deep bright blue. Desert landscapes, heat and clear skies resonate with me: Australia’s full of them, and they’re the most immediate way I know to remember how ephemeral we are.
Agreed. There is something so nakedly honest about deserts. They’re not kind. Anything living in them does so on the desert’s terms. But there’s a beauty there I have seen nowhere else.