Dan Flores

All one had to do was paint what was there.

The results were classics of a great career.

Peternal and the Red Hills from 1936, Red Hills and Bones from 1941, The Gray Hills, 1942, and The Black Place III, 1944.

As O'Keeffe told her friends Rebecca Strand and Arthur Dove after finding and buying her ghost ranch home, then moving to New Mexico full-time following Stieglitz's passing, "...I am west again, and it is as fine as I remembered it, maybe finer.

There's nothing to say about it except the fact that for me it is the only place."

I'm about 100 miles from the railroad, 68 from Santa Fe, 18 miles from a post office, and it is good.

I wish you could see what I see out the window.

The earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north.

The full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky behind a very long beautiful tree-covered mesa to the west.

pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby, fine, dull green cedars and a feeling of much space.

It is a very beautiful world.

I wish you could see it.

With John Wesley Powell and O'Keefe, with Robert Hill and John C. Van Dyke and Mary Austin and Evelyn Cameron and many years later Edward Abbey to show the rest of us how to love arid and badlands country, badlands have slowly progressed from denigrated or just ignored western landforms to settings many of us are drawn to and avidly seek out.

Almost shockingly, in our time, Badlands have become the sites of national parks.

South Dakota's Badlands National Park, Theodore Roosevelt Historical Park in North Dakota, Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, Colorado, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, Death Valley National Park in California, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

There are also numerous Badlands state parks.

Mikashika in eastern Montana for one, Toadstool Geologic Park in Nebraska for another, Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, and even a sizable number of official federal wildernesses like the Ojito Badlands and the Bisti Badlands wildernesses in New Mexico.

Once passed over and scorned by homesteaders, then ignored in the push to create national forests in mountains and national parks in western canyons, the West's Badlands have somehow acquired an audience of admirers in the last hundred years.

So it's probably clear enough that I'm Badlands smitten myself.

I'm powerfully drawn to Badlands' sculptural shapes and to a coloring that can easily rival a box of crayons.