Here in New Mexico

I bought the painting above some years ago. I don't know anything about the artist, nor do I know the title. I bought it because I liked it and it reminds me of the high desert country of New Mexico and Colorado. There's a place up toward Santa Fe on the local highway that reminds me of the log house in the painting. Of course I wonder what is going on with the man in the picture. Does he live there? Is he a neighbor? A stranger? An angel? A demon? Is he coming back from somewhere? Arriving for a visit? What's the story? Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this was painted as an illustration for a story.

The picture hangs in the north bedroom along with a number of other "blue"paintings -- not all of which are actually "blue" but which seem to carry out a theme. There's a painting of the cliffs and the Pacific in fog near Carmel that's very moody and chilly, which is sometimes exactly what the Pacific Coast is like. There's a painting of magnolia flowers on a table. It's old, painted on what might have been a cardboard box lid, and it's damaged, like somebody dropped a bowling ball on it. Yet hanging on the wall, it looks like it's always been there, and the damage isn't noticeable unless you peer very carefully.

There's a painting of a path through the redwood forest in the far north of California. I'm sure it was painted as an allegory, as the light is very focused ahead of the viewer, through the trees. It's probably fifty or more years old, and that's part of its charm. There are two Bob Ross style "mountain stream/mountain valley" paintings, obviously produced in a commercial setting and originally sold as "wall art." They aren't bad, really, now that they've got some age on them, and they have a certain airy imaginative quality that is spirit-lifting, whether that was the painters' intent or not.

There's also a large watercolor of a one room schoolhouse in California's Gold Country, painted by Art Ellis, who is primarily known as an art supply dealer. It's in a kind of primitive style, and it is highly evocative of the Gold Country but not at all an expected view.

Rounding out the collection in that bedroom is a large copy of Picasso's "Le Gourmand." It's obviously a copy, rather determinedly so, and almost cartoonish in its determination to copy Picasso and its brilliant blues and oranges and so forth. And hanging above the closet is a large Peruvian Andean needlework, in natural wool colors. It's quite charming, but doesn't really seem to fit with the other artworks in the room. Most of the other needleworks are in the hallway, but there wasn't enough room for this particular work there, so into the bedroom it went.

The south bedroom has a Picasso as well, an older print of "The Lovers". In this room there is a painting of what could be a Northern New Mexico homestead, with dog, but it's far from certain that's what it is. It could be California as well, except that in California, the old adobes are generally painted white, whereas in New Mexico they are almost invariably brown or tan.

There's a large watercolor of a floral display, an older R C Gorman print, a huge color photograph of Glacier National Park and "Going to the Sun" chalets, several smaller landscapes, and an impressionist "Paris Street Scene", obviously commercially produced some time in the 1950's. You would think. But something tells me these are still being ground out pretty much the same today.

In the living room are more paintings. There are desert landscapes. One is of the Panamints in Death Valley when the wild flowers are in bloom.




Another (it is a print c. 1944, though it looks like a painting) is of yuccas in bloom in a very green Mojave on a cloudy day. Having passed through the Mojave many times I wasn't convinced the green-ness in this picture was authentic until I was passing through the Mojave on one trip after a storm, and by golly, the whole scene was astonishingly green, and the yuccas were blooming vigorously. There's a landscape titled "Jack Tone Road" -- of what could be orchard trees, but it's not certain, painted in a very vigorous style. There's also a landscape of rolling hills dotted with farms, obviously not California or New Mexico, perhaps Wisconsin?, in an almost primitive style. There are a couple of other random landscapes, plus a painting on something like oiled paper of a sailboat in a roiling sea. Change of pace.

And by the fire, there's a painting of a California Valley Quail sitting on a branch; below is a covey of quail and in the distance is a large California barn. Yes, we brought a lot of California art to New Mexico, which is itself innundated with painters and paintings.

My favorite painting in the whole house, however, is an impressionist-pointilist landscape, very bright colors, of a river flowing between heavily treed banks. In the distance a mountain rises. This mountain has a very distinctive shape, its top a flat mesa, tilted at a jaunty angle. This mountain looks very much like the Pedernal Mesa out of Abiquiu that Georgia O'Keefe painted many times. If that's what is in this painting, then the river could be the Chama River. The only problem with this interpretation is that the area is not nearly lush as it appears in the painting, and the Chama is quite shallow, whereas the river in this painting looks quite deep. I'm suspecting therefore, this is a painting of a composite landscape. But I don't know. I just like it.

I make no pretence to being any sort of art critic or afficionado. I buy paintings and prints when they appeal to me, for all kinds of reasons. Although I have some abstract works, and have myself painted in the style, I don't hang any of them in New Mexico, at least not for now. As is obvious, I have an affinity for a particular sort of landscape -- paintings that evoke places or feelings I "know."

Most of my experience as a painter has been painting sets or doing set and costume renderings for the stage. Some of that has been pretty bold. To say the least. But most is really very mundane... kind of like the paintings I collect. Well, how about that!

I'm on dialup while I'm here so posting might be erratic.

I'm looking out the window at a brilliant blue sky, the sun shining on the big gnarled bare trees, the ancient tin-roofed shed and the coyote fence. There's just a little snow on the ground, but they say that weather is coming this weekend.