Wotta View Mr. Keys Had!!

I love Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park. Lots of potential for doing paintings!!

Keys View is named for Bill Keys, a pioneering type who settled and worked in what is now the Park. The distant mountain is Mt. San Jacinto, part of makes the desert a desert by blocking rain-carrying clouds that come from the west (which is to the right).

Someday, I need to paint this place. Many times over!!

eBay Paintings

Sometimes I paint small (8" x 10"/20cm x 25cm) paintings for the express purpose of putting them on eBay and seeing how they do with this online auction. Most of the pieces I put there do sell; a few do not.

In general, autumn landscapes (like the one to the right) and desert scenes do reasonable well. The few Colorado views I've painted haven't sold at all!

It's hard to figure out what collectors might be interested in, so I try to follow the old artist's adage -- just paint what you want, and don't think about the marketplace when you do. That can be a hard bit of advice to follow, but I try!

As a sidenote: it's likely I'll stop placing paintings on eBay and sell them directly from my Website (which just happens to be http://www.southwestspaces.com). I'll need to create a page just for this purpose -- it's on the agenda! Someday. When I have time. (Yeah, right!!!)

Art Rocks

A Thing from space! An uncouth being, risen from the dead for Halloween!

No, it's just another petroglyph. Like the other petroglyph I shared, this one is also in Joshua Tree National Park, not far from the previous one.

But as before, how do we know what this rock art means? How accurate is the depiction? What if the ancient artist simply rendered what s/he saw? Does the thought make you wonder what else might exist among us, possibly unseen by our modern-world eyes?

Welcome to rock art, where art rocks!

Portrait in Rock? Or...?

Whoa!!! It's autumn, and here's a picture of a football!

No, wait -- maybe that's a mask, with a big frown, furled eyebrows and faint eyes and nose.

Maybe it's a portrait of an extraterrestial.

Hard to say. It's one of the petroglyphs in Joshua Tree National Park. I doubt that the ancient ones who made this rock carving knew what a football was, and we today can only guess as to its meaning -- if it has a "meaning" at all. Maybe it was simply the equivalent of a modern-day doodle, as we might scribble on a piece of paper (a much easier process than chiseling into rock!) when we're feeling a little bored.

I'm sure I'll say this again, but sometimes I wish I had a time machine. There are SO many things I'd love to know. Of course, having a TM would open up the possibility of changing things in the past that could affect the world today.

Maybe it's safer just to guess about the past ... and keep alive our wonder and amazement about things we can't really know about.

Art in Cyberspace

Ahhh...I finally got around to updating my Website (which, in case you missed it, is http://www.southwestspaces.com).

I now have "Add to Cart" and "View Cart" buttons beside the paintings, making it easy for N-E-1 to acquire one of my desert or western landscape paintings. I'm always excited about the idea of someone adopting one of my paintings. For a small adoption fee, of course!

Doing all this has definitely cut into my painting time, but in these economic times, I realize I need to spread the ol' eggs around into as many baskets as possible.

So the next step might be to figure out how to increase my presence in search engine results, which won't be easy. If you Google "desert paintings" or "desert art," you will get literally millions of hits -- and I'm not even in the top 100 pages of hits! It may be too late in the Internet game to wiggle my way closer to the top, but I gotta try anyway. It'll definitely take time -- that's why I need to get things moving NOW.

See ya in cyberspace!

Lotsa Space -- No Time

Here's another picture from my quick trip to Joshua Tree National Park yesterday. As you may know from previous posts, I like to paint scenes like this: lotsa space, overlapping mountains that become more obscured by distance, and the surreal forms of the desert.

You may be asking yourself: "Self -- why does this Mark Junge dude keep posting photos of the desert instead of his paintings"? Well, frankly, it takes a long time to get paintings done, especially when life gets busy (like, for example, going into Joshua Tree National Park instead of the studio). But I've also lost time from having to get some work done on our pickup truck, wedding anniversary stuff, having to convince our mortgage lender we have enough flood insurance (yes -- flood insurance...we live in the desert on a hillside!) and other distractions.

However, you can, of course, visit my Website (http://www.southwestspaces.com), which hasn't been updated in a while, but at least you can see some paintings! And someday, you may see a painting of the above photo.

If I can find the time.

A Desert Lizard

I made a quick trip to Joshua Tree National Park today for some inspiration and to see how the fall-flowering shrubs were doing. I didn't see as many flowers as I would have liked, but there were some. Perhaps I can post some pix of scenes that inspire me beyond belief to paint.

But first, I must share a picture I took of a lizard. I think I saw more lizards than flowers. Cute little guy, isn't he? Or she? I don't know how to tell males and females apart. I'm sure, however, they can tell; otherwise, we would soon run out of lizards! Regardless, I expect this little lizard (about 6"/15cm nose to tip-of-tail) to appear in some paintings someday.

I'm not sure of the species, but I believe this is one example of a side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana). The coloring varies somewhat, and this one appears to be banded rather than blotched. But you know--even lizards gotta do it "their way"!

More desert pix to follow.