Obi Kaufmann / Books and Zines / Deserts of California

Featuring hundreds of vivid watercolor maps and illustrations, blending art and science to breathtaking effect, Obi journeys through dozens of wilderness areas that reveal the underappreciated natural abundance of California’s arid lands.

• Materials – Paperback with flexibound, sewn binding
• Length – 576 pages
• Size: – 5.5 X 7.5 X 2.0 inches

Encased in an eco-friendly slipcase embossed with the artist’s designs, this flexibound atlas The Deserts of California is a canonical entry into the literature of the American deserts, uniquely colorful and celebratory, and abounding in hope and wonder. Obi’s signature field atlases have created a genre of their own. Blending science writing, hand-drawn maps, lyrical prose, and Kaufmann’s trail paintings, these reference guides invite the reader to travel—vicariously and literally—through California’s wildlands. Each book is a physical culmination of work that has been years in the making, with a thousand little decisions along the way. 

This item gets carefully packed and will ship within 5 business days or sooner. 

Oakland, California

Growing up in the East Bay as the son of an astrophysicist and a psychologist, Obi Kaufmann spent most of high school practicing calculus and breaking away on weekends to scramble around Mount Diablo and map its creeks, oak forests, and sage mazes. Into adulthood, he would regularly journey into the mountains, spending more summer nights without a roof than with one. For Obi Kaufmann, the epic narrative of the California backcountry holds enough art, science, mythology, and language for a hundred field atlases to come. Lucky us, he is contracted for a series of books that will illuminate the beauty of our forests, water ways, mountains and living things as have The California Field Atlas and State of Water before them.

Learn more about Obi Kaufmann in our Conversations with an Artist series.