Jon Cowan, I Saw the End, 2021, oil and acrylic on canvas, 12 x 10 in. For my first post in quite a while, I wanted to present a photo essay of a recent show in Santa Fe. High Desert High! at Smoke the Moon features work by 22 artists from LA to London and many places in between and is billed as "A summer salon of important paintings celebrating the Dez." In much of the work presented here, there is a strange sense of spare tranquility punctuated by an underlying sense of expectation ( Aryo Toh Djojo , and Will Bruno to name two) . While Rat Face , a painter from the U.K. uses an economical palette to depict deftly rendered scenes of futile desperation and dark humor. There is a conceptual complexity in her piece, Head in the Sand as well as in the always sublime work of Jon Cowan . Both present us with a glimmer of a somber uncertainty (or certainty) that sets their painting apart from much of the vibrant, humorously cool and laid-back work in th...