Sometimes it’s useful to just look down at the details around your feet, wherever you happen to be. I was at the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, a 37,000-acre outburst of mountains that separates Phoenix neighborhoods and provides beautiful trails and views. In a parking lot at the base of Piestewa Peak, originally called "Vianom Do'ag" by the Tohono O'odham tribe, which meant "Iron Mountain." By the 1900s, white settlers called the mountain "Squaw Peak," a derogatory term for Native women. In 2003 the Arizona government officially changed the name to Piestewa Peak in honor of Lori Ann Piestewa, an Arizona woman who was killed in action in Iraq that same year. Piestewa was the first Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military. As a way to pay homage to Piestewa, local taiko drummer and Japanese folk artist Ken Koshio hiked the peak at sunrise every morning to play his taiko drum and flute between 2020-2023 and he is still often there. Barely stepping out of the van, I looked down to see the most delicately formed and colored wildflowers popping their blooms between the white rocks on the median. Never made it around or up the mountain that day, but for an impressionist, of course, that doesn’t matter and there is another day and a larger view, perhaps, in my future. I think this is a Coulter’s Lupine and I did not identify the tiny purple star shaped blooms but will go back and do so next spring, but they were each quite tiny, just a few inches tall under the massive grandeur of the mountain, easy to miss, without a slow look at what might be beneath your feet.
Sometimes it’s useful to just look down at the details around your feet, wherever you happen to be. I was at the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, a 37,000-acre outburst of mountains that separates Phoenix neighborhoods and provides beautiful trails and views. In a parking lot at the base of Piestewa Peak, originally called "Vianom Do'ag" by the Tohono O'odham tribe, which meant "Iron Mountain." By the 1900s, white settlers called the mountain "Squaw Peak," a derogatory term for Native women. In 2003 the Arizona government officially changed the name to Piestewa Peak in honor of Lori Ann Piestewa, an Arizona woman who was killed in action in Iraq that same year. Piestewa was the first Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military. As a way to pay homage to Piestewa, local taiko drummer and Japanese folk artist Ken Koshio hiked the peak at sunrise every morning to play his taiko drum and flute between 2020-2023 and he is still often there. Barely stepping out of the van, I looked down to see the most delicately formed and colored wildflowers popping their blooms between the white rocks on the median. Never made it around or up the mountain that day, but for an impressionist, of course, that doesn’t matter and there is another day and a larger view, perhaps, in my future. I think this is a Coulter’s Lupine and I did not identify the tiny purple star shaped blooms but will go back and do so next spring, but they were each quite tiny, just a few inches tall under the massive grandeur of the mountain, easy to miss, without a slow look at what might be beneath your feet.
#234 - Acrylic on Canvas
Painting: 3” x 4”
In Frame: 4 1/2” x 5 1/2”
