New Painting of Joshua Tree National Park

At long last, I finally finished another painting of Joshua Tree National Park, CA: one of my favorite places on earth!

So far, the painting is untitled -- but I hope to remedy that situation soon. Size is 11" x 14" / 28cm x 36cm.

The hill-mountain in the background is one of the many formations in the Park that was never named. But I love all of the many peaks it has, and it seems to be my favorite mountain there. I've painted it before from various angles -- this version is the frontal-most I've done so far. More to come I suspect.

The rocks are made of gneiss ("nice") which often look like a HUGE dump truck came along and unloaded rocks and boulders into an enormous pile. Little large plant life occurs on these hills except for some grasses and such. This mountain has a few Joshua trees on the very top of the hill toward the right -- there must be some loose soil there for the JTs to take root and grow.

And, of course, I included a desert cottontail bunny-rabbit hiding in the shadows.

This is one of those scenes that, frankly, was kind of pain to create -- lots of detail. But in the end, I couldn't have done it any other way!

Mark Junge
www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com
 

Bunnies Bunnies Bunnie Bunnies Everywhere

Most people I know have learned by now that I love bunnies. (Guinea piggies, too!) We have a pet bunny, but I love the wild desert cottontail bunnies that live outside, too. They're so cute. And adorable.

I do put food out for them every evening before sundown, along with chicken scratch for the quail (and other assorted birdies). I also give the bunnies sliced carrots or apple and some romaine lettuce.

The wild bunnies sort of / kind of trust me, but only to a point. When I go outside to feed them, they gather around, but they keep a safe distance from me -- usually. Normally, they "freeze" until I walk past them, then -- supposedly when I can't see them -- THEN they may move a bit away from me.

On occasion, a bold bunny will show up and take food from my fingers, then run off with the goodie to eat it.

In one case, I was able to help a critter I called the notch-eared bunny. S/he had a long cactus thorn stuck in its forehead. There were times it would get into a "boxing match" with another bunny -- common among disagreeing rabbits -- and the bunny with the thorn would scream because its opponent often hit the thorn and made it hurt more.

But because this particular bunny came up to me to take a goodie, I was able to pull the thorn out!

This is the notch-eared bunny (no thorn) coming to get an apple goodie:

Sometimes it's fun to see how different bunnies interact with each other. I had missed an opportunity to get a picture of a blacktailed jackrabbit touching noses with a desert cottontail, but at least I did manage to take a pic of a baby (left) and adult (right) bunny together.

I'll leave with a portion of lyrics from an old (1949) song by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, Ya Wanna Buy a Bunny? about someone with a Shirley Temple voice who apparently didn't know that bunnies totally understand multiplication:
  

Bunnies bunnies bunnies bunnies everywhere.
There's bunnies on the table and there's bunnies on the chair.
Bunnies on the sofa and there's bunnies on the floor.
And there's some new ones coming through the door. MORE!!

www.SouthwestSpaces.com
www.MarkJunge.com

Pinnacle Peak

Pinnacle Peak is the title (and the view) of my latest painting. This special place is located northeast of Scottsdale, AZ. The dimensions are 18" x 24" / 46cm x 61cm.

For some reason, this painting was hard to photograph and make it look like the painting. Close, but no cee-gar.

Here is a detail that shows the bunnies I painted in:

I like the way the painting turned out, but I left myself some room to re-do it several times over -- which I suspect I will do, in time.

Sadly, although the Peak itself is still there with it's hiking trails (it's included in Pinnacle Peak State Park), the surrounding desert is gone. The virgin desert I depicted is now homes, roads, golf courses, a resort, and -- I believe -- a few shops and eateries.

Who knows -- maybe someone who lives near Pinnacle Peak will want paintings on their walls showing how the area used to look!


 

The Enchanted Realm

For desertophiles like me, most of the desert is an enchanted realm. But in this case, it's also the title I gave to my latest painting of Joshua Tree National Park in California.

The Enchanted Realm                                                                         18" x 24"

I was in this spot a couple of times (although I may not return -- the desert has a delicate layer of cryptobiotic soil -- "dirt" + microorganisms -- that is disturbed easily by hiking on it and that can take years to heal). The first time I was there, a neat cloud shadow spread across the land as you see it here.

I added some minor touches of my own, but I was so moved by the way nature painted this magical place, I felt it didn't need much help from me.

I use "The Vast Spaces of the Southwest" as my tagline. This scene is a perfect example of what I love about the desert and all of that distance that seems to touch infinity. It's a place where one can go and be in touch with the universe because we can see so much of it here. Not intergalactic space, obviously, but just -- big spaces and small us!

Those Wascally Wabbits

...or those cute little bunnies, as I'm more apt to say.

I normally don't take pictures of critters with my digital camera--the autofocus feature makes it respond much too slowly for anything that's not inclined to sit still for me. But sometimes I get lucky, as the picture to the right proves.

I must confess to my sins, however. I do actually attract critters like bunnies to our area, partly because it makes me feel good and mostly because I try to take pictures of them to use in paintings. What is my sin, you may ask? I have containers of water for them, and I put out rabbit pellets for the bunnies and chicken scratch for the Gambels quail (actually, bunnies like the scratch, too!) More on the quail later.

Living in a desert region where habitat is sadly disappearing, I feel like I'm giving the critters a helping hand. On the other hand, I'm concerned I may be enabling them to reproduce beyond the region's ability to support them without help. Feeding wild mammals can be an especially bad idea, particularly when the mammals can produce LOTS of offspring.

Of course, we're indirectly feeding the predators, too, since we're supporting the prey. But the predators had a hard time catching the prey around here due to all the wickedly-thorny cholla cactus that grows around here. Still, we have witnessed "wildlife moments" when we happen to look out a window just in time to see a hawk catch and eat a dove or we see a roadrunner with a lizard or quail chick in its beak.

BTW: those roadrunner cartoons where coyote tries to lure the bird with a pile of birdseed while coyote attempts to drop a boulder or dynamite or something equally lethal on the poor roadrunner? IT AIN'T LIKE THAT!! Roadrunners are carnivorous, not seed-ivorous! And since they don't have talons or hooked beaks like hawks and eagles, they have to tear up the meat by whipping their prey against rocks. That's really hard to watch when their prey is a cute "fuzzball" quail chick, but it's all part of how nature works.