Ocotillo in Arizona at Sunset

I spent a portion of winter of 2011/2012 in Tucson, Arizona.  I immediately fell in LOVE with the skies, the Sonoran desert, and the fact that every single bit of it looked like an alien landscape to someone coming from the midwest!  I learned while hiking and exploring that every single bit of it also hurt.  It either consisted of jagged rocks, thorn, or had a stinger!  In a way, that was part of the thrill of the scene…and why I love this photograph.

Such defensive beauty.  Painful yet delicate in appearance seems to be the theme out there.  It is ironies such as this one that I often love to portray in my work and that never cease to make me ponder the bigger picture when I find them.  I wish I could get more people to look closer at things and scratch the surface to see ‘what it really is’.  But maybe if I got lots of people to do that, there’d just be a lot of scratches in things and a lot of confused people.  I’m not sure how that experiment would end up.  I do know that if we tossed them into an ocotillo bush they’d be pretty mad and their surface would be scratched up a bit.