A 3:2 photograph of the folded sandstone at Coyote Buttes South in Arizona, available as a limited edition print in four sizes and four presentations.
At Coyote Buttes South, in the Vermilion Cliffs of northern Arizona, the sandstone moves. It curls and folds and breaks like surf caught mid-collapse, and the first thing to know about it is that water had nothing to do with it. This is Navajo Sandstone, laid down about 190 million years ago as a desert of migrating dunes on the scale of the Sahara, the largest sand sea in the geologic record. Every line in the rock records a wind direction. It resembles the ocean because wind and water move the same way, not because the sea was ever here.
I came first before sunrise, could not find the frame I wanted, and lost the light. That evening I came back at it from a different side, set up, and waited for the sun to go.
There is something particular that happens looking at this. The perceptual system is built to track motion, and everything here reads as motion, curling, rising, about to break. But nothing moves. Attention keeps bracing for the next instant of a wave that finished arriving a hundred and ninety million years ago, finds no next instant, and eventually stops waiting for one. What is left is unusually quiet. Not the quiet of an empty scene, but of a scene full of movement that has already resolved.
Poseidon in Stone is that borrowed name for something the sea never touched, held in the last light of an evening far too short to matter to it.
The subject is cross-bedded Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, deposited roughly 190 million years ago as a wind-blown erg on the scale of the modern Sahara. Its swirling strata record ancient dune migration, and the red, orange, and violet coloration comes from iron oxide moving through the porous rock. Coyote Buttes South lies within the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, a permitted access area managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Most photographs have a subject and a background. This one is closer to all subject. The folded rock fills the lower two thirds edge to edge, the hoodoo stands in the middle, and even the far valley is doing work rather than sitting behind.
That density means it behaves differently at different distances. From across a room the composition reads as a wave breaking left to right, one large gesture, immediately legible. From a few feet away that resolves into hundreds of separate bedding lines, and the wave becomes rock. The photograph does not settle into one reading, and it does not run out. That is the quality that distinguishes an image you keep from one you notice.
The palette is the warmest and most saturated in the collection: red, orange, and violet in the rock, with a band of gold at the horizon and a stripe of green valley through the middle. It is a lot of color. In a room with strong existing color it will compete, and in a neutral room it will be the event.
What it asks for is a wall with some space around it. The frame is dense to all four edges, with no quiet margin built in, so hanging it tight between a door and a corner makes the room feel crowded. Give it room to breathe and it does the opposite.
Related Reading: The Language of Light: How Natural Light Shapes the Emotional Life of a Landscape
All four sizes shown to scale, sharing a common center line.
This photograph is offered in four sizes and four presentations, from $650 to $11,000. Full pricing across all sizes and presentations.
Each edition closes permanently once filled.
Not sure which size the room calls for, or want dimensions not listed here? Sizes beyond 60 × 40 are available on request and ship crated by freight. That conversation is welcome before an order is placed. Start that conversation and I will answer within one business day.
At two to three, the Intimate size is twenty four inches across and sixteen inches tall. Unlike the panoramic proportions, that is small in both directions rather than narrow in one, so it does not find a home in a hallway or above a doorway the way a long frame does. It belongs where a small piece is meant to be looked at closely: beside a desk, in a reading corner, on a wall you pass within a few feet of. What it will not do is hold a room. The Collected at thirty six by twenty four is the first size that works from across a space, and the Expansive and Statement sizes are where the detail described above becomes available without walking up to it. If you are weighing a size against a specific wall, choosing the right print size covers the measurements and the viewing distances in more detail.
The rock stops being one thing and becomes many. At twenty four inches across the folded sandstone reads as a single pattern, a wave shape you recognize and file, and the bedding that makes it up is texture rather than structure. At sixty inches across the layers separate. You can count them, follow one line through a fold and out the other side, and see where two dune faces met at different angles a hundred and ninety million years apart. That is when the photograph stops being about a shape that resembles water and starts being about a record of wind, which is the more interesting thing and the one it cannot say at a small size. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a landscape reaches the size where the eye has to travel across it.
A room with neutral walls and not much competing color. This is a saturated photograph, red and orange through the rock with violet in the shadows and a band of gold at the horizon, and it will set the palette of any room it hangs in. That is fine if the room is white, gray, plaster, or pale stone. It is a problem in a room that already has a strong color scheme, since the two will argue and the photograph will win.
It also wants space around it. The frame runs dense to all four edges with no quiet margin built in, so a wall where it can hang clear of doors, corners, and tall furniture will serve it better than a tight fit. Given room, it reads as an opening. Crowded, it reads as a lot.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Collector Edition of 25 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Edition of 50 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Edition of 50 · ChromaLuxe Metal Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100 · Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.