Coming Together

A future painting.  This is a tree on the low road to Santa Fe on a dangerous curve in the road. Didn't feel safe doing it plein air

 

Taos and our too short venture into Santa Fe, New Mexico, showed us a unique coming together of cultures, not always a mixing, but a respectful influencing and sharing.  It makes for vibrant food, art and architecture.

Taos Pueblo.  Must pay high fee to paint there.

In Taos we spent a few hours at the famous Taos Pueblo and discovered a shop owner and pottery artist by the name of Carpio Bernal.  In his youth he had toured the country in the American Indian Theatre Ensemble and had performed and become friends with the now famous Dame Helen Mirren when she was with the Royal Shakespeare Company (proof provided by a book she'd written with his picture with her in it and her personalized inscription).  He chose to return to his beloved pueblo. Dame Helen visited him and his family a few years ago in Taos and present him with her signed book. His patient wife, rolling her eyes, had endured the Helen Mirren story many times, which was nonetheless interesting to these tourists and garnered them a pottery purchase!

In Santa Fe we, of course, meandered through all the wares of the American Indian artists in the central square, and then savored several hours in the nearby Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.  We were awakened to her watercolor work and to her Hawaiian period, which re-energized her career and work.

From our B&B in Taos, we had a daily coming together of morning fellowship at breakfast, meeting and greeting fellow travelers from around the country.  We heard stories and made new friends.

The diversity and sharing of the southwest was not lost on us.  We always incorporate something new from our trips into our everyday lives—from Taos: green chilies, boldness in painting, good stories, and new friends!

 What’s on the horizon?  We head southeast for a painting holiday in Key West, Florida.

 

(The answer to the riddle posed in my newsletter: What do Dame Helen Mirren, a potter and Georgia O’Keeffe have in common is . . .  Taos—O'Keeffe was in Taos for a good bit in the late 1930s before going off to her beloved Abiquiu, NM and much later still to Santa Fe.)

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Failing Up

8 x 8 oil Available here Lilacs on LeDoux

I really didn’t get it right.  I was excited to find the two beautiful lilac bushes flanking the door near the Blumenschein Home and Museum* on Ledoux Street in Taos.  I set up my plein air easel and quickly set about painting.  After two hours of struggle it was clear I had a failure.    The composition was dull—one, two, three things in a row.  The middle was a gaping dark uninteresting rectangular door, the wrong focal point--not the flowers, the whole reason for the painting!  The painting was 95% dark.  The brushwork was heavy-handed. I was disappointed and disheartened.  So distraught I destroyed the painting. I had come to paint lilacs, and, by-gum, I was going to get these lilacs!—just not today.

Photo of the first composition try.

 Of course, part of my problem, was in not thinking before painting. If I were to make progress I was going to have to look at this mistake and find the roots of it. First, I chose to paint the scene from the most comfortable vantage point (shade and level ground), not from an interesting composition vantage point. Bad me! Second, so worried about losing the light late in the day, I didn’t take the time to work out a few small sketches.  Finally, had I thought any about what my teachers had taught me? I went back to lessons on compositions, about light versus dark, about balancing warm and cool, and about finding some exciting place for a spark of unexpected color.  What was I trying to say in the painting? After reconsidering these, I went back later in the week.  The result is my failing up “Lilacs on Ledoux.” (top)

A lesson learned in the hot and dry western land is not soon forgotten. You’ve got to use your brain when you paint.

Postscript* The Blumenschein Home and Museum is an appropriate place for a “failing up”, of making progress as a painter.  Ernest L. Blumenschein was  one of the New York and European trained artists who settled in Taos, NM in the early part of 20^th c and founded the Taos Society of Artists.  Though it was disbanded about the time of the Great Depression, he and its members are largely credited with making Taos the artist colony that it continues to be today.

Thank you for reading. I'd like to hear from YOU!  Please leave comments and questions. Please share with your family and friends. 

My paintings are available at Sheffield Art Studio in Cary, NC and online and now, if I have paintings on auction, at Daily Paintworks auctions (see above.)

 . . . And by contacting me at the following links:

Sheffield Art Studio

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Why'd the Artist Cross the Road?

"Reaching for the River" 8 x 8 oil Available. Painted outdoors below the John Dunn Bridge

Whirr, whirr. We saw and felt the sickening sight of flashing trooper lights behind us on 64W, the same 64 near our home in Cary.  We had just come back onto Paseo Del Pueblo Norte, aka 64W, from viewing the big Rio Grande Bridge.  I determined that painting there would be difficult because of wind. How could this be, going only 55 on the open, flat, clear road outside Taos? The officer approached our car, and seeing we were a tourist couple in a rental car, warned us we were doing 55 in a 45, but kindly only directed us to our next destination, the John Dunn Bridge in the smaller Rio Grande Gorge. 

Relieved we were on our way.  To the right we viewed the Pueblo Peak of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range.  

Pueblo Peak area

The road soon dropped down into a deep arroyo, a small stream bed, that ran left to the Rio Grande.  We turned left at an old hippie colony from the 1970s and followed a small paved road until it turned to dirt.  Bump, bump, bump.  Up the hill we drove to the mesa trailing more dust and dirt, then we dropped down steeply into a ravine to a one lane bridge.  More dust and bumping over rocks.  I was losing faith there was a John Dunn Bridge.  “Let’s turn back!  I’m not inspired!  Only sagebrush and rocks in sight”, I yelled at Walt in anguish.  Just then a car approached in the opposite direction.  “You’re there.  Just round the next bend.” 

One view from the John Dunn Bridge

We did.  A beautiful site.  A wide running river sparkling in the western sun, high cliffs, a wood plank and metal truss bridge, flat sand beaches, and toilets.  A plein air painter’s paradise!  And a place of community to walk the road to fish, to picnic and to drive across to work.

Thank you John Dunn for opening this “road”.

Long John Dunn (1857 – 1953) was a saloon keeper and gambler who owned the only bridge and stage coach into Taos.  He was a former cattle driver from Texas who escaped a 40 year prison sentence for murdering his brother-in-law by sawing through the bars and floating down river.  He was wise and resourceful, however, in understanding that roads, rivers, and mail opened up land all through the expanding continent and he made it possible in northern New Mexico.  His obituary quotes him as saying, “Transportation made the West, not blazing guns as is so often preached - although I know the guns played a big part. It was those sweat-stained horses and tireless mules, those worn saddles and creaking wagons and the men and women who were riding them across muddy rivers, rocky ridges and up those long dusty trails."  For more on John Dunn, see John Dunn’s Story

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My paintings are available at Cary Gallery of Artists 200 S. Academy St. in downtown Cary in Ashworth Village. 919-462-2035 Mon-Sat 11 am - 5:30 pm.

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Pointing Home

Bella's Lilac's 8 x 8 oil SOLD

I bent the white, lavender and pink blossoms to my nose.  If I couldn’t reach them, this skinny kid could climb to the highest spindly branches and sit among them and take in the fragrance, knowing that school would soon be out, jackets shed and, if I remained still,  butterflies would land on my arms. Spring in Michigan! Our small yard had at least three lilac bush-trees. 

The crape myrtle is sometimes called the southern lilac and is lovely, but cannot match the lilac for fragrance.  I miss the lilac and in recent years have added Lilac Festivals to my travel and painting list.  Several years ago we traveled to Mackinac Island in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for a June festival.  They did not disappoint.  The UP’s combination of severely cold winters and moist air provides an ideal growing condition.  Abundant, large spikes of florets to wander among were heavenly and awakened long ago memories.

 A few weeks ago we sought to recreate that experience in Taos New Mexico’s Lilac Festival.  I was at first amazed to learn that Taos had such a festival, associating as I did lilacs with northern states.  I learned, however, that Taos did, indeed, have cold winters at an elevation of 7000 feet and that lilacs had been imported into the area around 1900 by a British citizen.  After de-boarding from or air flight in Albuquerque and driving several hours to Taos, I ran excitedly to the central plaza to see the lilacs I’d come to paint.  In disappointment I exclaimed, “Where are the lilacs?”  Several locals nodded knowingly and remarked, “A late snow last week froze the buds.  There are no lilac flowers this year.”  I was simply horrified I had come all this way for burned buds!

I wasn’t so easily deterred.  In searching around town, we found a few lucky protected places where some survived and I happily painted their beauty.  Outdoor painters must be resilient, so we were on to plan B to find southwestern splendor and create new memories in Taos.

Plan B included painting in the garden of Nicholai Fechin; he was a Russian immigrant painter who lived in Taos for many years.  He planted Aspen trees outside his studio windows to remind him of his native Russia where he hoped he would return.  I went to Taos to rekindle memories of my home in Michigan, and found kinship with a painter who sought memories of his home in Russia.

Pointing Home 8 x 8 oil Available Painted at Nicolai Fechin House garden

I’d like to hear from YOU!  Please leave comments and questions.

My paintings  are available at Cary Gallery of Artists 200 S. Academy St. in downtown Cary Ashworth Village. 919-462-2035 Mon-Sat 11 am-5:30 pm

  . . .And by contacting me at the following links:

 Sheffield Art Studio

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