Ode To The High Desert

The high desert is for people who don’t require immediately obvious beauty.  We’re willing to wait for beauty to emerge and quietly stun us into awe and wonder.  We see it in the buck rising from his bed beneath the bitter brush.  We catch a glimpse of it when we see the golden eagle in the gale, sketching concentric circles with her wingtips.  It comes to us in the steady, blond rattle of the bunch grass in the canyon winds.  It touches us as the sage turns to pale violet in the gloaming.  This piece speaks for that simple beauty, that easy solitude, that fearless and inhospitable and redemptive place I call home; the place that claims me as its own.

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Malawi agate, sleeping beauty turquoise and one other American turquoise — though I am unsure of the claim, so too is the lapidary artist who cut it.  I’ve incorporated a cast jackrabbit vertebra (which I found in the sand country of New Mexico while bird hunting), fabricated sagebrush, one of my SOS nuggets, a golden eagle and a spangling of dimensional feathers.  While working efficiently, I made just shy of 150 solders to build this piece — some tiny and some very large.  The stones I chose to include in this piece speak to the palate of this river canyon and the agate itself looks like the sun popping up over the canyon rim.  This design is burnished with intention and understanding: if you know the high desert, then you know.

I’m proud of this piece.  I feel it is inspired, that the vision of it was breathed into me while I was out in the sage running, riding my horse and seeking treasures that my animal friends leave for me in life and death.  Most importantly, it is true to my life and that is the greatest measurement of all when it comes to what I make:

Is it true and is the work original to me?

Yes.  Yes it is.

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I am planning on making this piece available in my shop tomorrow.   Before then, all inquiries are welcome if anyone is interested in purchasing it outside of Etsy.  Please shoot me an email if you’d like pricing details.

thenoisyplume at gmail dot com

If it sells before tomorrow at 10am, I will post it as sold in this space.

Thank you all for claiming my more diminutive (but no less special) designs so that I can have the time, space, momentum and support to build these larger scale narrative pieces.

Thank you.

+Of The West+

:::EDIT:::

THIS PIECE HAS SOLD