M0R1BUND

I was kindly approached by TWWM staff to do banner artwork for Majanthi’s greenhouse, back in June, which was a.) extremely my bullshit and b.) very humbling ;_; It was also the perfect excuse to paint some places I’ve wanted to for a long time.

This isn’t a visitable place (at least, not so far as i’m aware) but it is based strongly on Sinagua petroglyphs and cliff-dwellings here in the central highlands of Arizona– perhaps the most well known of which is, of course, Montezuma Castle.

While the Sinagua left these cliff-dwellings around 1425 AD, I recently read that Montezuma Castle was used by the Yavapai as a home as recently as the late 1500s, and probably continued to be inhabited for some time after that. There are lots of paintings of open and empty desert vistas with these sort of lifeless, people-less adobe ruins, so for this I wanted to create a little snapshot of something warm and alive… I was also very inspired by the town of Paquimé as it appears in the game Mulaka. it is the most inhabited area in the game, with a soundscape that layers the bustling din of commerce and life onto a very plucky and domestic themesong.

Anyway. Easy to conjure up images of ghosts haunting an empty desert– they do tend to haunt places that were– but I think that’s a little myopic to the people who lived and worked and continue to live and work there.