The Story Behind Red Tide

Introduction

Red Tide is an ocean name for a desert photograph, and I understand why that might sound strange at first. There is no surf here, no salt in the air, no pull of the moon on open water. This image was made at White Pocket, in the remote sandstone country of northern Arizona, a place that asks more of you than a paved road and a parking lot. It sits roughly an hour and a half east and southeast of Kanab, Utah, and the last stretch demands a capable vehicle: high clearance, enough power, and the patience to work through pockets of deep sand that can swallow momentum if you hesitate.

On the drive in, I still hear my big brother’s voice: Give it the Onion. Every time a soft sand pocket appeared in the road, that was the instruction: accelerate with purpose and push through. It is not elegant advice, but it is reliable, and it has carried me to one of my favorite landscapes on earth.

White Pocket looks like someone squeezed sandy mud from a giant hand and let it set into an odd, beautiful pile on a sagebrush flat. From a distance it is improbable. Up close it becomes a world. And within that world, one formation stopped me, not because I was hunting an ocean in the stone, but because the stone itself was already moving.

Discovering the Scene

I have returned to White Pocket many times. On one visit years ago, I watched a lone vehicle leave as I arrived, spent the evening alone on the rock through sunset and into the Milky Way, and woke to photograph sunrise. When I finally drove out, another solitary vehicle was just pulling in. That kind of solitude was once part of the place’s character. It is harder to find now. White Pocket has grown more popular, and I am glad more people get to see it, but I still cherish the memory of having the rock to myself.

Red Tide belongs to a later trip, a follow-on visit on a warm morning with no wind. Others may have been somewhere on the pocket that day, but at this formation I had the area to myself. Before I even raised the camera, the scene asked me to pause. Clouds had gathered, and the sky had turned yellow in that particular sunrise way that changes how everything below it reads: warmer, slower, more deliberate. I stood still. Not to plan a photograph. Just to take the place in.

If you have never been, it helps to know that White Pocket is not one texture or one color. Much of the area is white, orange, and red sandstone, and it shifts personality as you move across it. In some zones the white stone cracks into patterns that look like the hemispheres of a brain, with hexagonal breaks forming the lobes. In others, where this image lives, the sandstone flows in waves of red, orange, and white, as if the ground remembered motion long after the forces that shaped it went quiet.

That contrast is part of what keeps me coming back. The brain rock is extraordinary. So are the other formations scattered across the flat. But on this morning, the flowing stone held me.

Reading the Landscape

What stopped me was specific: an upturned formation toward the center-right of what would become the frame, and the wavy rock leading up to it. I was not thinking about titles or collections or print size. I was responding to texture, to the way the stone curled and crested, to the sense that something powerful had been interrupted mid-gesture and left for centuries of light to study.

Even then, I was seeing abstraction, not as a conceit I would apply later in the studio, but as an immediate experience on site. The lines were not standing in for something else. They were fully themselves: layered, physical, and strange. At the same time, I could not ignore the feeling of tempest in the upturned sandstone, a storm caught in rock, a violent elegance held still. I still have questions about how White Pocket was formed. I am comfortable not having all the answers. Some landscapes are better approached with wonder than with certainty, and this is one of them.

The reds are what pull me in deepest. Not as a single block of color, but as a richness that seems to gather light rather than reflect it passively. Against the yellow sky that morning, the stone felt warm in a way that had little to do with temperature. It felt inhabited by silence, the kind you only find in remote desert places where the horizon is wide and the noise of ordinary life falls away.

Finding the Composition

This image was discovered, not rehearsed. I had not walked in knowing this exact frame waited for me. I spent perhaps thirty minutes at the formation, working patiently, panning back and forth through the viewfinder, letting the landscape suggest relationships I could not see with the naked eye alone. And then it clicked. Once the upturn found its way into the frame, the composition came quickly.

I wanted the viewer’s eye to enter low in the center, travel the wave, and arrive at the upturn, a simple path that mirrors how I encountered the stone. The sky remained visible. It was not an afterthought. It balances the frame and adds atmosphere, a ceiling of weather over the movement below. I was careful about what to exclude. A few small weeds or plants would have pulled the eye away from the intended target, so they stayed out. The white brain rock and other nearby formations competed for attention, as they always do at White Pocket. On this morning, the wave won, for its reds, for its rhythm, for the tempest I read in the upturned stone.

When I made the exposure, I felt I had it. I also felt the familiar worry that comes with caring about the work: whether I had placed focus where the full sweep through the frame needed it to be. That concern did not spoil the moment. It simply reminded me that discovery and precision often share the same minute.

The Meaning Behind Red Tide

The title came later, while editing. On site I was inside the stone, its warmth, its solitude, its abstract language. Back at the screen, the wavy texture and the upturn began to remind me of waves crashing in the ocean, and Red Tide settled into place. Naming it did not change what I felt so much as solidify it. The photograph became more itself.

Warm solitude is still what I feel when I look at it now, the reds and the yellow sky contributing equally to that mood. The image belongs to Where the Land Grows Quiet, a collection built around landscapes that invite emotional immersion: places where it is easy to get lost in the view, and just as easy to feel the privacy of being alone in a remote country. I think that is what I offer collectors who live far from the desert: a borrowed quiet. A warmth they can bring into a room that may never see a sagebrush flat or a stretch of deep sand road.

On the wall, I think of Red Tide as a defining piece, not because it shouts, but because the bold reds and the movement hold attention. It adds a splash of color. It warms a space. It does not require explanation to be felt.

Bringing It to Print

I released this image because of the deep red color, the wave forms, and the tempest vibe I see in the stone. As wall art, it works through color and movement, qualities that change when the work leaves the screen and takes on physical scale. At fairs I often display it at 48 by 32 inches, and it can go larger still, depending on the room and the collector’s appetite for presence.

Medium matters, and I do not think one answer fits every home. Metal brings out color pop and saturation. The reds assert themselves with clarity and confidence. I tend to steer collectors toward metal for an office or bedroom, where that warmth and visual energy can carry a space through long days and quiet evenings. Acrylic offers something different: less emphasis on saturation alone, more on depth and mood. In an intimate living room, where someone might sit with the piece from a shorter distance, acrylic can feel like looking into weather and stone rather than at a surface.

The collectors who respond most often love the Southwest, are drawn to abstraction, or simply trust color to do emotional work. I understand that impulse. It is the same one that pulled me in at sunrise.

Final Reflection

There are things a screen cannot carry. Printed large, Red Tide reveals grit, the fine particles of sand scattered across the sandstone, a tactile reality that makes the stone feel less like an image and more like a place. In person, people often remark on the color pop and the depth. At the booth, color is what pulls them in first.

That is the hidden layer most viewers overlook. The reds arrive immediately. The tempest-in-stone reading comes later, if it comes at all, after the eye has lived with the movement for a while and the upturn begins to feel less like geology and more like weather arrested in time. I do not mind that order. Color is the door. Quiet is the room behind it.

I still have questions about how this landscape was made. I hope I always will. White Pocket has given me sunrises, solitude, yellow sky, and a phrase from my brother that still makes me smile on the sand roads. Red Tide is my way of sharing what I found there, not the whole desert, but one discovered moment when the stone looked like it was still moving, and the world, for a little while, grew wonderfully quiet.

Limited edition fine art prints of Red Tide are available at gwfine.art. Part of the collection Where the Land Grows Quiet.

View Red Tide limited edition prints →

Part of the collection Where the Land Grows Quiet.