The company responsible for decorating a dining room opening this week at Sagewood, the retirement community where I live, recently selected this image as one of the new restaurant's six art pieces. (The theme of the restaurant itself uses the same title as this image, which made it a good fit.) They printed this image nearly four feet wide, so that it's detail will be visible from a distance. When I saw this large print for the first time, a message came through that was not immediately apparent to me. This layered mass of wildflowers became more than a mere carpet of color. It becomes a metaphor for the desert itself, a matrix of color and textures vividly contrasting to our pre-conception of what a desert looks like. The huge sizing of the print on the dining room wall made the spines on the cactus so visible that they powerfully contrast to the soft, delicate colors of the yellow Brittlebush blossoms arrayed below them. From a distance, an "S-Curve" composition becomes apparent -- the image flows out of the lower right hand corner and moves from purple and green to the bright yellow of the Brittlebush that sweep back across the entire frame into the row of Cholla cacti that carries us back across the uppermost layer of the image. This photograph makes a powerful counterpoint to the closeup image "Desert Surprise" that follows this image in this gallery. (The restaurant designers also made a large print of that image and used it to contrast with this one on an opposing wall. On the side wall that runs between them, they have placed four large paintings of vividly colored desert blossoms.)