Crown of Stone

The Work

In the final minutes before twilight, the mesa ignited.

The basin below had already gone dark — the swirling textures of eroded shale and fossilised earth losing their colour to shadow. But the mesa held the light. Its upper flanks caught the last direct sun and turned from sandstone-tan to a deep, burning amber. For 3-5 minutes, the formation looked less like geology and more like architecture — a crown of stone, constructed by erosion and lit by the day’s last act.

That morning, I set out from a nearby campsite. I spent the entire day traversing the Badlands, waiting for the sun to set. Just before dusk, driving along a dirt road, I arrived at Factory Butte—a place I already knew well. April is a month that brings very pleasant temperatures. This rock formation is recognizable from a great distance, and the silence that prevailed there only added to its majesty— “The Stone Crown.”

I titled this Crown of Stone because of the mesa’s silhouette at that moment — the flat top and eroded flanks forming something that resembled a crown more than a mountain. The erosion is the detail. The flanks don’t fall smooth — they cascade in terraces and gullies, each one catching or blocking the light at a different angle. At print scale, these textures become legible in a way that the screen cannot reproduce.

The Location

Factory Butte and the surrounding Caineville Badlands occupy a stretch of eroded Mancos Shale in Wayne County, Utah — a landscape so barren and lunar that NASA has used it as a Mars analog research site. The mesa in Crown of Stone rises approximately 1,500 to 2,000 feet above the desert floorfeet above the basin floor, and its flanks show millions of years of sedimentary deposition in alternating bands of tan, grey, and rust.

The Edition

Crown of Stone is released as a strictly limited edition of 15 / 25 prints worldwide, offered in two sizes. Once the final edition is sold, the image is permanently retired.

Every print is hand-signed and numbered on the recto by the artist, accompanied by a serialized Certificate of Authenticity with dual-hologram provenance, personally inspected before leaving the studio, and registered in the Light & Shadows edition archive.

Current edition status: Edition 14/22 of 15/25 available.1/3 sold.

The Capture

The Print

Produced on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm — 100% cotton, acid-free, museum-grade — using archival carbon pigments rated for over 100 years of colour stability.

The eroded flanks of the mesa contain the widest tonal range of any colour image in the collection. The lit upper surfaces are a warm amber; the shadowed gullies range from cool grey to near-black; and the sky at twilight transitions from warm gold to deep blue within a few degrees of arc. The cotton rag substrate holds all three zones — warm, cool, and neutral — without the colour crossover that metallic substrates introduce in transition zones. The basin’s swirling textures, visible in the lower third of the image, are a mix of ochre, grey, and muted purple — colours that compress or shift on glossy surfaces but breathe on matte cotton rag.

Framing in hand-finished hardwood with museum glass. The artist recommends natural walnut or dark oak — warm wood that complements the amber of the lit mesa.