I painted this on a commission from my sister. I'm including here her description of what she wanted the painting to be thematically.

"I don't know if you've been to the desert so I'm going to try my best to explain how I feel about these places. You get out to the desert and it's so open but there always seems to be some mountains or cliffs or something in the background. And everything seems so huge. Surreal. Raw. So there are the open spaces with the shrubs, the juniper, the rocks. Sand. Lizards. Crows (they seem to follow me when i'm out in the desert), sometimes hawks soaring above. The sky almost always seems to be dark, bright blue. There are slot canyons with walls so narrow a person can hardly squeeze through and so tall you only see a thin strip of blue sky above you. They're the secret places. Quiet. It's hard to describe because there are so many aspects. The huge open spaces, the towering cliffs and rock formations, the narrow twisty canyons. It's all so beautiful and raw. I feel calm. I feel awe. It's like looking at the bones of the earth, or the earth stripped down to its bare essence. There's power and serenity."

That's what i tried to capture in this painting. Deconstruct the essense of what we view as the desert and what we understand to be a desert scene and portray it at a core aesthetic, simply painted, to convey this scenery abstractly.