That rust colored line that looks like a shaky flopped long division symbol? It’s there to evoke the plateaus and mesas of the desert Southwest. It also represents a major breakthrough in my use of Illustrator, so be kind.
I actually owe my time in the Southwest to my former company. The person who first fired my interest in those landscapes was an art director who shared black-and-white photos of a winter trip through Canyon de Chelly, and that’s all it took, seeing those massive structures and the tiny houses, horses, and people on the canyon floor.
As for my own visits, most of them happened because I was headed to a company meeting in that area anyway (Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado). Tack on a few days before or after, get my friend-of-longest-standing from Oklahoma to meet up, and away we went. Canyon de Chelly to start, then, Monument Valley, Valley of the Gods, Moki Dugway, Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef, Escalante, Bryce. Once we sat on a ledge at Dead Horse Point at dusk and watched (and listened to) a line of storms passed in front of us miles away, a half dozen cells moving together as if on parade, thunder echoing all around us, each cell illuminated by lightning strikes that seemed to follow an agreed-upon sequence.
As haunting as those locations could be, there were ways to connect. That red dirt was the same red dirt Mom was always trying to get out of my clothes — and off of me — when I was growing up. A lot of the sites were familiar from the movies (you can stand on John Ford’s Point in Monument Valley, turn around slowly, and relive the entirety of The Searchers). Then there was my most resonant cultural touchstone — the Road Runner and Coyote cartoons (of course!). Chuck Jones, the mastermind behind those Saturday morning mainstays, was from Santa Fe, and those oddly-angled, otherworldly backgrounds, those cliffs over which the coyote repeatedly fell, were more or less photorealistic. It really looks like that.