This series sinks its roots in my earliest impressions of the Sonoran Desert when I first began visiting Tucson, AZ sometime in 2012. I was first introduced to Tucson when I took a field trip to San Carlos Mexico with a group of thirty artists to study the environment in and around the Sea of Cortez in preparation for an exhibition the following year. All of us artists gathered in Tucson before taking a long bus ride south of the border. As excited as I was about Mexico, I was immediately overwhelmed by the beauty of the Sonoran Desert in and around Tucson, especially its most iconic plant life, the Saguaro Cactus. I would return to Tucson in 2013 for the art exhibition and a few years later for my national touring show, Andrew Denman: the Modern Wild, which was also exhibited at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. I was asked to teach a workshop in conjunction with that event, and before I knew it, my partner and I were traveling to Arizona on a regular basis to teach.

We gradually fell in love with Arizona, and a few years in I began to notice something strange and wonderful. As we made the two-day drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Tucson, I would watch for the first saguaros along the highway, and spotting them gave me an uncanny sense of returning home. I had never lived-or imagined I would live- anywhere but the Bay Area, but that feeling, esoteric though it may have been, counted for more than all of the practical reasons that contributed to our decision to move to Tucson in 2019.

I have painted saguaros numerous times, and will no doubt paint them again in the years to come. This study is part of a series that is painted more loosely and directly than most of my work. The mixed media application harkens back to Covid, when I did a large series of small studies of birds and animals combining graphite, watercolor, acrylic, and colored pencil.