If you’ve ever visited one of the Earth’s desert areas, you’ve seen them. The dark-stained rocks that sometimes have a bit of polish to them. Sometimes it’s just a stone, but often a whole cliff-face will be streaked with dark areas, as if the rocks themselves were crying.

In the Desert Varnish series, I selected some of my father’s “spin art” paintings and applied Photoshop’s “Polar Coordinates” filter to create vertical streaking. I combined these with desert stock photos and a colorful jagged texture generated in ArtMatic. Each of these elements were then run through Flaming Pear’s “Organic Edges” filter, and all the permutations combined as layers in Photoshop.

“Desert Varnish – Namibian Highway” combines an image from freeimages photographer Danny de Bruyne, a painting created by my father, Gus Maier, and an image I created in ArtMatic.