blue thunder is a New Mexican geographic allegory about the pattern of human awareness. The desert becomes the setting for a journey inward — through washed-out arroyos of mythology and the layered remnants of memory — toward a meeting of conscious and unconscious experience. The recurring image of the monsoon serves as a metaphor for union between land and sky, heaven and earth, when inner and outer worlds briefly align.
The title draws from the recurring thunder in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where thunder signals revelation and the beginning of a new cycle of consciousness. Like Joyce’s cyclical narrative of fall and renewal, Medina treats the desert as a primordial voice. Across a progression of paintings, the New Mexican landscape becomes less a description of place and more a map of transformation.
Medina’s paintings approach the southern New Mexico borderlands as sacred terrain. Drawing from Piro-Manso-Tiwa history, prayer traditions, and cosmology, he layers landscape with portals, symbolic figures, and radiant color. Glowing skies and charged sunsets turn mesas and grasslands into thresholds rather than locations. Rather than documenting a site, the paintings function as acts of remembrance, translating lived and ancestral knowledge into visual form.
As storms gather and pass, the imagery moves from tension toward clarity. The desert shifts from barren to full, suggesting that emptiness and solitude are states of perception rather than reality. What appears desolate becomes a place of presence.
In this sense, Blue Thunder is a love letter to the desert — a meditation on memory, transformation, and the thunder and lightning of a wild monsoon.
Diego Medina, I will return, 2025, oil on linen, 58 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and smoke the moon. Photo by Brad Trone.
Diego Medina, the arrival, 2026, oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and smoke the moon. Photo by Brad Trone.
Diego Medina, glimpse 1, 2025, oil on linen, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and smoke the moon. Photo by Brad Trone.
Diego Medina, until we meet again, 2025, oil on linen, 58 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and smoke the moon. Photo by Brad Trone.
Banner Image: Diego Medina, I will return, 2025, oil on linen, 58 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and smoke the moon. Photo by Brad Trone.
