About
Obi Kaufmann & California
Obi Kaufmann has dedicated his life to studying California's natural world. In his first, genre-breaking work, The California Field Atlas, Obi depicts California as networked system of living forces comprising a super-entity, that although wounded, remains capable of incredible resiliency despite humanity's voracious extractivism. In his subsequent works, The State of Water and The Forests of California, Obi continues his artistic and analytic investigation into deeper realms of ecology, art and philosophy. When not backpacking the backcounty, you can find the poet/painter at his desk in Oakland. His email is coyoteandthunder@gmail.com and his blog is www.coyoteandthunder.com
"My creative and professional voice is so completely stitched to and woven around this place that my process of understanding California has become the process of understanding myself. I’m happily swallowed and so wholly taken by its biography and its habitat diversity that my ability to take the measure of what is beautiful in this world, my aesthetic sense of judgment, is based on my appreciation of California’s natural world. With the salmon, I move down the river, from the headwaters of my birth to the ocean, and if I am lucky, back again. The river moves through a watershed, the watershed is defined by two ridgelines, one is hope and the other is truth. The ridgelines determine the course of the river. Out here in the wild watershed, there is time. There isn’t any time in the city. Everything in the city is right now and that is poison for our perspective. If there is time, there is hope. In wilderness then, there is hope." Obi Kaufmann
The California Field Atlas
Based on decades of exploring the backcountry of the golden state, artist-adventurer Obi Kaufmann presents the California Field Atlas. Blending science and art to illuminate a multifaceted array of living, connected systems like no work has done before, the California Field Atlas is full of character and color, the ultimate road trip companion and love letter to a place.
The bestselling California Field Atlas has been awarded the 2016 James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, the 2017 Book of the Year award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, the 2018 bronze medal for design by Pub West Books, and the 2017 Gold Medal for Significant Contribution to Publishing by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. ORDER NOW