As a practicing artist, Stuart Davis lived in New York but made a short visit to New Mexico in the summer of 1923 to find inspiration in the unfamiliar world around him. While there, he created several landscape paintings, including this one.

Using bright colors and a slightly abstracted style, Davis painted a daytime desert landscape. The foreground, roughly the bottom third of the painting, depicts two light brown, rectangular adobe homes with brown walkways and a road connecting them. Dark brown brushstrokes and dashes on the homes look like wood details of rafters, porch columns, and windows. These homes are nestled in a broad band of dark green, suggesting vegetation. Short light and darker green brushstrokes and dabs overlay the green base, giving the impression of individual plants or trees.

Above the two more articulated homes in the green band of color are brown, abstract outlines of adobe homes that sit in the desert, indicated by a light yellow and tan background. This desert area takes up the middle third of the canvas. Davis used medium brown, and long, loose brushstrokes to define the abstracted desert dunes and hills. He used the same brown in dashes and dabs to suggest plant life, rocks, and sand. Other swaths of browns and oranges appear vertically on the sides of the dunes, making them appear steep. As the desert recedes back into space, a pink horizontal brushstroke gives the effect of hot sand or maybe an oasis.

In the top third of the painting, softly curved rust and orange mountains shoot up from the desert across the horizon line into the blue sky. Again, the artist used short, dark-brown brushstrokes and dabs to create the rocky and sandy terrain. Past the soft orange mountain on the right, an abstract blue squiggly line starts at the horizon line and heads up and behind the orange mountains, suggesting another mountain further in the distance. The blue used to outline the mountain is darker than the blue that fills the inside of the mountains. The fill of the mountain matches the blue of the sky. White, fluffy clouds that span left to right break up the blue sky. The sky fades to darker blues as it reaches up to the top edge of the scene.

The landscape is inside two different gray bands of paint that line the perimeter of the canvas, creating frames within the actual wood frame. The bands are not uniform or straight, but each have their own shape made with squiggly and curved lines. This detail contributes to the abstract aesthetic of the painting. The painting then hangs in a gold and off-white wood frame. The artist discreetly signed his name and the year “1923” in white in the bottom right corner of the landscape greenery.