Summer Cloud, Apache Trail, Arizona c. 1927

This is George Elbert Burr’s "Summer Cloud, Apache Trail, Arizona," and he made it using etching. Look at this scene. The sky is filled with clouds, but they're not just any clouds, they are giant, billowing, cartoonish. As an artist, I often look at the work that other artists make and I think, wow, they can do that, and I can’t. Burr did a lot of these kinds of landscape scenes, and you get the feeling that he was a person who really loved a very particular vision of the American West. I can only imagine Burr in the heat of the Arizona desert squinting to capture these beautiful, expansive scenes. Maybe what Burr wanted was to show how tiny we are against nature. He certainly made me feel small.