Art & Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

A “very long series” is a quiet flex: not just ambition, but allegiance. Terri Windling isn’t talking about a single desert scene or a one-off mood piece; she’s staking out a sustained relationship with a landscape and its stories, the kind that takes years, repetition, and a willingness to let the work evolve. The desert here reads less like a backdrop than a narrative engine - a place where survival is visible, where emptiness is never actually empty, and where myth tends to cling to rock and wind the way humidity clings to greener climates.

“Based on desert folklore” signals a particular ethical and aesthetic posture. Folklore is communal, slippery, and often uncredited; it resists the gallery-friendly notion of singular authorship. So the subtext is: I’m not inventing ex nihilo, I’m listening. But it also raises the tension every contemporary artist has to negotiate - when does “based on” become borrowing, and when does borrowing become extraction? Windling’s phrasing keeps that question open, suggesting research and reverence, while stopping short of claiming ownership over tradition.

There’s also a cultural context embedded in the choice of desert. In an era when climate anxiety is pushing landscapes into the foreground, returning to desert folklore can read as both escapist and confrontational: a turn toward older, hard-won narratives about scarcity, heat, distance, and resilience. The “very long” part matters most; it implies the artist expects the desert’s stories to outlast trends, and that she plans to earn her way into them one painting at a time.