There is a moment in the desert that is easy to miss if you are not looking for it.
It happens just after the sun begins to drop, when the warmth of the day hasn’t fully disappeared but the cooler tones of evening start to move in.

The sky holds both at once.
Soft gold lingers near the horizon while purples and blues quietly gather above it. The landscape feels suspended between two different temperatures of light.

That in-between space is what I was thinking about while creating The Hour Between Warm and Cool.

I have always been drawn to sunset in the Arizona desert. It is one of the most familiar and comforting parts of the landscape for me. At the same time, much of my Neon Desert series leans into night scenes, where glowing elements feel more expected.

With this piece, I started wondering how those two ideas could meet.

Instead of building the glow in a dark environment, I wanted to place it inside a sunset. That created a different kind of challenge. The warmth of the sky naturally pulls everything toward golds and corals, while neon elements tend to lean cool and luminous. Finding a balance between those two directions became the center of the painting.

You can see that balance in the sky first. The lower portion carries that warm desert sunset glow, while the upper sky shifts into cooler purples. The transition is soft, which helps hold that feeling of time slowly changing rather than moving too quickly from day to night.

In the foreground, I explored how neon light could live alongside those warmer tones. The agave leaves carry a cooler glowing light along their edges, but the body of each leaf still reflects the warmth from the sky. That combination keeps the plants connected to the environment instead of feeling separate from it.

The saguaros in the distance remain darker and quieter. They help ground the scene while the color and light shift around them, giving the composition a sense of balance. 

There are also smaller plants are placed throughout the scene, each catching a slightly different mix of warm and cool light. Those variations create a sense of depth, but they also echo the main idea of the piece. Nothing is fully one or the other. Everything exists somewhere in between.

This kind of exploration has become an important part of my contemporary desert art work. I find myself returning to the question of how light behaves in the Southwest landscape. Not just how it looks, but how it feels as it changes.

In The Hour Between Warm and Cool, the focus is not on a single dramatic moment. It is about that quieter shift, when the desert begins to move from warmth into evening.

The result is a desert painting that holds both at once, a small pause in the day where color and light share the same space. It's a piece that reminds me that our whole world is in a transition state. From warm to cool. Spring to summer. Life and death. Everything is transitioning and becoming something new.

If you would like to see the piece in more detail, you can view the artwork here.