Followers of this site will already be familiar with many of the details of our remarkable trip to Chile back in 1991, just several months after the demise the Pinochet regime.
As if to mark this new era of democracy, freedom and hope, the month we arrived, the southern Atacama Desert experienced – what we were assured by the locals – were the first meaningful rains in forty years, and so, as if in celebration, exploded in a riot of colour. It was as if a vast technicolor carpet had been laid atop the normally monochromatic desert floor as every cactus, every succulent and every dormant seed erupted into vivid flower.
Even in normal circumstances Chile’s many disparate landscapes offer a stunning smorgasbord for the visual senses, but this was simply wondrous. Rarely have we experienced, before or since, such good luck being in the right place at the right time.
The dozen or so images presented here give a taste of what we were so privileged to witness with our own eyes…
(Camera used: Nikon FE with Agfachrome film)
ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA 
We were fortunate to be in death valley after an unusual amount of rain – not this last year’s flooding. It was covered with flowers but each was well spaced from its neighbors so it was nowhere as lovely as this.
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Wonderful pictures, Adam.
Did you ever get a chance to show them to my dad? He’d have loved them.
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Thanks Ian. So far as I can recall (my last exhibition was over 30 years ago), your parents visited all my London shows? However, the painted versions of these pictures would have been first shown at my big Chile exhibition at the Julius Gottlieb Pyramid at Carmel, so not sure if they got there? However, they would have seen some of them when they visited my mum and also at the Briegals, who purchased one or two of the gouaches…
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