Painted Desert

I lived in the South Western United States for about twenty years and grew to love everything about it. When you grow up in the North East and are surrounded by trees and lakes and have to live through four unique seasons you find it hard to believe that a desert could be any thing other than a dry barren waste land. Nature has a funny way of surprising you. The shear beauty and open space is enough to inspire even the least creative among us to take up a brush and start painting or to write music and poetry. This is a painting inspired by a dream of a place I think I drove through years ago. It seems so long ago I may have imagined the place but then again what is reality?