Deep in the desert wasteland between California's Salton Sea and the small town of Borrego Springs, a dragon awaits unwary visitors.
It slithers through the sand in great undulating waves, rearing some twenty feet into the air and stretching so far across the desert floor that it seems less constructed than discovered. From a distance it looks miraculous. Up close it's even better: thousands of overlapping metal scales, a shredded-steel tongue, and the kind of welding that makes you suspect the artist had either a vision or a fever.
The dragon is only one of the many improbable desert creations of Ricardo Breceda, the self-taught metal sculptor sometimes called "The Accidental Artist." Breceda, born in Durango, Mexico, originally worked as a cowboy-boot salesman and construction worker. After a job injury left him sidelined, his six-year-old daughter asked for a dinosaur. A few weeks later he built her a twenty-foot-tall, forty-five-foot-long Tyrannosaurus Rex, and an artist was born.
Eventually, he populated the desert with over 150 sculptures—based first on prehistoric creatures once found in the Anza-Borrego region and later on mythic beasts and Old West figures. Now the drifting sand and scrub brush is populated with mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant birds, wild horses, scorpions, serpents, and other steel apparitions, scattered across the landscape like relics from a delirious frontier dream.
In that harsh sun-blasted emptiness, Breceda's sculptures do something rare. Fearful, solid and huge, they add not softness to the desert, but wonder. They make the landscape a whimsical place, inhabited and enlarged by imagination. And they remind passing travelers to stop the car, step out into the heat, and stare for a moment at the impossible, made possible in the artist's eye.
