Pink Skies, Lavender Lava and Fools Gold...

Happy first day of Summer everyone!

Here's a sneak peek at the latest Screaming Mimis ad, with both backdrop and palette loosely inspired by the work of mid-century abstract artist (and founding editor of Artforum magazine) Arthur Secunda: whose awe-inspiring torn paper collages Jeff and I spotted for the first time at the Palm Springs Art Museum and have been in love with ever since.

Those perfect desert colors, dusky pinks, soft sands, and silvery shadows, are so dreamy and so elusive that I probably have thousands of swatches in my color libraries, so it was especially fun to sift through them all to try to capture the ever-so-fleeting tones of magic hour in the high desert!

Summer adventure wise, in what has now become basically an annual tradition of life-imitating-art-imitating-imaginary-adventures we were actually semi-coincidentally packing up the wagon and setting sail for the high deserts of Eastern Oregon pretty much the minute after I dashed the ad off to print...

On the itinerary: teepee camping, tumbleweed spotting, bird watching, scout guide assisted campfire building, sandy picnics, ghost towns, petrified forests, and, at the very top of our sightseeing list, the Painted Hills at the John Day Fossil Beds. Every section of the park has a different color winding through the landscape, from the aqua blue craters that looked like the surface of the moon to soft rolling pink and green hills that looked like something out of a 1920s German fairytale, to my personal favorite, the tiny psychedelic pink, orange, and lilac volcanic mountain-scapes that were almost too otherworldly to comprehend:

I'm so beyond obsessed with even the very idea of the lavender rhyolitic lava in that last shot that I still can't stop thinking about it, and we took a mini detour at every roadside rock shoppe in hopes of finding a tiny souvenir. Instead, we ended up with a bit of a geology bug, big chunks of pyrite, rose quartz and petrified wood cluttering up every surface of the house, and giant boulders of all of the above at the top of our wishlist for future landscaping plans. Oops.

We're already hatching plans for another high desert adventure later in the summer, in hopes of finding both the hot springs and the wild horses that eluded us this time around and taking so, so many more pictures of pretty, pretty rocks!

As always, there are oh so many more photos over at Instagram, along with the usual rotation of pottery adventures, cat portraits and new plant friends!