I thought I was just having a good time. I had no idea, going into the 1982 Death Valley Workshop, that the way I paint, the way I relate to others, the very way I perceive reality, would be changed forever. But that’s why we have workshops. It was in Death Valley, on a blustery November afternoon, where I learned to see the sky. Really see it.

"Don't look at it," said Don Davis. "Look around it. Scan the whole sky. Use your peripheral vision." And when I did, there was so much to see. Such subtlety! Crepuscular rays, the cast shadows from high clouds beyond the horizon. Sun dogs, elegantly painting the sky with their ice crystal halos, diamond-shaped rainbows above the desert dunes. And one very special afternoon, the star-like space shuttle in its lazy orbit. Were those astronauts experiencing a paradigm shift in their senses, as I was 150 miles below?

If Don Davis taught me how to look up, it was Joel Hagen who reminded me to gaze down. Twenty artists were perched on the rim of Ubehebe crater, a volcanic caldera blasted from the desert mountains a dozen-thousand years ago. Everyone studied the layering in the deep crater walls, and the ash flows, the meandering colors like a titanic melting sundae, and the grand vista. But not Joel. He was kneeling on the gray ash, studying something else.

"Look at these," he said, pointing to our footprints. "Look at how the sand is raised around them, like a crater rim. And look inside." Within the boot indentations were layers, just like those in the side of the great Ubehebe. Two craters, gigantic and minuscule. Nature's differing scales. Forms within forms. I always remember to look down, to see the small as well as the large.

Later, Joel and I wandered into the bottom of the crater, where I photographed the bizarre mud cracks and he gathered a small sample of clay to fire when he got back to his studio. Joel and I always seem to end up where nobody else goes. In Hawaii, we discovered an ice field on Mauna Kea. It took us about two minutes to scamper down a steep slope to reach the ice, sculpted into meter-high impressions of Three-Mile-Nuclear-Plant cooling towers. The sun filtered through the translucent columns, scattering blue and silver across the red sand beneath. In the thin air, it took us half an hour to struggle back up, but I learned something about painting ice, and about how light plays through a translucent form. I learned something about friendship, too.