The Obliq Ascent: Obliq Art’s New Chapter
One year ago, the truck rolled north out of the Sonoran Desert carrying forty-five years of light, dust, and story. Obliq Art had taken root in Phoenix—gallery doors flung open every First Friday and Third Friday. Downtown Phoenix street corridors are waking up with music and tenants who believe a building could be more than square footage. I was there when the old Mercado was revived as a campus, which later created a downtown alive with students. I had treated real estate like sculpture on a civic scale and art like oxygen.
Then the call came, quiet at first, then unmistakable: Come higher.
Prescott. Mile-high air, sharp with pine and the promise of four seasons, and not the oppressive heat of the summer. The house on the hill became OBLIQ ART—live/work studio home. At first, I realized that the horizons curved differently. The soil was not the same. We were strangers in a strange land, unpacking crates of desert memory into mountain rooms. Yet the philosophy that named us in 2009 had always been about the oblique path—the bend that reveals what straight lines miss, the non-ordinary angle that lets light break through.
Now it is May 2026. One year later, the resin studio is nearly finished. The lower level has become a sanctuary, my studio is where I write, where my art hangs on the wall or on floor pedestals. The new studio addition is for casting resin with rare-earth pigments that catch and hold light, then release it again. Century-plant leaves and agave quiotes, once defiant in desert wind, are preserved in translucent bodies that glow like captured bioluminescence. The Final Bloom reaches skyward, a mixed-media quiote that carries the desert’s sharp architecture into new altitude. But the work itself is undergoing its own transformation.
Spring 2026 brought the Chrysalis series. The image had sat in the studio for months, antennae testing the air. A figure lies in a garden—white shirt, vest, pressed trousers, the uniform of the constructed self. No arms to clutch what was. From the collar, moth wings unfold in browns, blacks, and silver. The garden witnesses dew, ivy, and opening flowers. The suit is dissolving. The old identity is breaking open. The question the work keeps asking is simple and merciless: What can no longer contain you?
This is not abandonment of the desert. It carries the desert’s resilience skyward, where it can breathe and take new form. The agave taught us how to stand in harsh light and still offer beauty. The moth teaches surrender—the necessary death of one form so another can breathe. Human and botanical meet in cast resin. The high-contrast palette feels clearer, more precise, as if the mountain air itself demanded honesty. Faith threads through every pour: the same light that shines in darkness (John 1:5), the same invitation to die to the old self so the new creation can emerge.
Obliq Art’s new chapter is not a clean break. It is an ascent, and it remembers every step below. The oblique perspective still governs—seeing around corners, listening for the calling that feels like home. Open studios and Soirées are returning in this new key, artists sharing light across traditions and mediums. The gallery space is taking shape; new logos carry stylized glowing agave motifs that echo the sculptures themselves. Substack grows slowly, organically, one reader at a time—invitations rather than algorithms. Community is being planted again, this time with mountain soil underfoot.
Quiet life. Work with your own hands. The ancient counsel feels newly alive here. No longer building on civic scale, but sculpting sacred objects that carry stories of surrender, emergence, and light. The same God who met me in rivers, storms, and boats continues to meet me in the studio—inviting participation in ongoing creation.
Things are looking up.
Like grabbing the rope when the deck tilts, or the root that saved a boy in a Yosemite river long ago—the rescue comes, then the climb. The new chapter is not a destination. It is the continuing oblique path, each pour and each wing unfurling, adding perspective we could not have seen from the desert floor.
To those who walked with Obliq Art through the Phoenix years—thank you. The story is richer for the altitude. To those arriving now—stay close. The chrysalis is opening. The forms are emerging. The light is catching in the mountain air.
The house on the hill is alive.
Welcome to the new chapter.
