I have never lived in the American West, yet it has lived in my imagination for as long as I can remember. Growing up far from those red deserts, I met the West through films, photographs, and stories, and it always felt like a place made of pure light and silence. When I began this piece, I wanted to capture that feeling of looking at a land from the outside and still being moved by it. The towering sandstone mesas, the vast cobalt sky, and the cacti standing like quiet sentinels were all things I had only dreamed of, and I wanted to capture them with the wonder of someone seeing them for the first time. The longhorn cattle and the lone rider became the heart of the scene because they seemed to me the truest symbols of that world: strength, patience, and a life shaped by the land itself.
What inspired me most was the idea of “home,” which belongs to every culture, not only America. Though my own home is thousands of miles away, I recognized something familiar in the rider’s slow, steady journey beside his herd. Every person has walked a long road toward a place they belong, and I wanted that universal feeling to live inside this foreign landscape. I chose flat, graphic shapes and a soft grain, like the posters and illustrations that first introduced me to the West, as a tribute to the way imagination travels across borders. Trailing Home is my respectful offering to a land I admire from afar, and my reminder that beauty and belonging can be shared by all of us, wherever we come from.
