The Wetlands of Lithium Valley (2025-2026) is an in-progress series of paintings that describes the wetlands encircling California’s rapidly shrinking Salton Sea. These habitats include the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge (the oldest of these sites) and the spontaneously formed Bombay Beach Wetland. Other wetlands include the newly built Species Conservation Habitat (located where the New River meets the Salton Sea) and the Imperial Irrigation District’s Managed Marsh complex, constructed to compensate for the loss of environmentally critical agricultural return flows to urban southern California. My paintings describe the artful engineering, stoic dignity, and feral precarity one can find in these damp spots in the desert. These modest wetlands maintain an intrepid toehold amid a vast extractive landscape of industrial agriculture and geothermal power production.

(Click to enlarge the images)