Moving to Arizona From California
California sends more people to Arizona than any other state, by a wide margin. If you are one of them, welcome. I hope the summer has not scared you off yet.
A few things change about living with art when you move here, and I thought it would be useful to say them plainly, because nobody warns you and they all matter.
The light is a different animal
Coastal light is soft and diffused. It comes through marine layer and it is forgiving of almost everything.
Our light is direct and it is relentless. We get around 211 clear days a year and roughly 85 percent of the sunshine we could possibly get. A painting that lived happily on a wall in Newport or Marin for fifteen years may be in a genuinely different situation here.
Nothing to panic about. But do walk your new house at four in the afternoon in summer and see where the sun lands before you hang anything you love.
The air is drier than anything you are used to
Coastal California runs comfortably in the humidity range paintings prefer. We spend our afternoons around 23 percent, which is well below it.
Your canvases will feel this. Nothing dramatic and nothing quick, but a piece that has been stable for two decades may go slightly slack in its first dry Valley winter. That is the air, not a defect, and the thing to do about it is nothing at all.
Please do not tighten the stretcher keys. That is the one move that turns a harmless seasonal change into a cracked painting.
Everything got bigger
This is the one that catches people off guard. Homes here are built at a different scale, with taller ceilings, longer walls and more glass than most California homes of equivalent price.
Art that anchored a room in Los Angeles very often looks undersized here. I have watched people move a beloved collection into a new Valley home and feel unexpectedly deflated, and it is almost never the art. It is the wall.
You may find you need one large piece for the great room and that your existing collection is perfect everywhere else. That is the usual answer.
What is worth doing in the first year
Rehang everything you brought, deliberately, rather than putting it where it was in the old house. The rooms are shaped differently and the pieces will want different walls.
Wait on the big empty walls. You will know your house much better in six months, and the great room wall is not a decision to make in week three.
And go look at what is being made here. The Valley has a real art scene, not a decorative one, and it will not be what you expect.
On the desert itself
Most people who move here from the coast go through a phase of missing water and then, usually around the second spring, quietly fall in love with the desert instead.
If that happens to you, the Sedona Earth work carries actual ground from Sedona in the surface, which is a different thing than a painting of a landscape. And if you would like to see new work as it finishes, the Collector's Circle sees it first.
Welcome to Arizona. Drink more water than you think you need.
Warmly,
Dani
