Wichita Mountain Buffalo

This painting is dear to my heart because of my connection to a buffalo herd that lived for a time on the Colorado Ranch. Their presence is so powerful and so full of their essential being that I am always drawn to them. I had never painted animals before and it was important for me to paint them as well as I could. The landscape of the Wichita Mountains is of the kind which most clearly speaks to me, so the combination of the two subjects was a natural. I will probably keep this painting always.

This is the last painting I will post for awhile as I am changing gears somewhat and working on small still lives to develop my technique and skills. I have some large paintings in mind - New Mexico, Wyoming as well as Oklahoma - and need to mull them over before starting to paint. I will, however, keep posting thoughts about my painting and my struggles to improve as an artist. I watch my mentor, Richard McKown, as he paints the first of four paintings he is doing with me as his model and learn so much each sitting. He also has assignments for me now and again to push me and help me grow. Next posting, will be an interesting execise he gave me.

All painting postings will wait, however, until I have a chance to photograph them!

Oklahoma has a varied and diverse landscape even though people often think of it only as a flat prairie. This painting is above Turner Falls in the Arbuckle Mountains looking westward to the open lands that stretch through the Texas Panhandle. The vast vistas and far horizons are typical of Oklahoma and often define the state's image. What people don't always realize is that four climate zones meet in Oklahoma, creating large and widely diverse vegetation ranging from the swamps of the southeast to the arid Panhandle, from the Crosstimbers of the east to the canyons of the west. Add to this the large number of rivers and lakes in the state and there is something new and unique almost anywhere you look.

In the summer of 2007 I attended The Writing Salon in Taos and decided to drive home via the Oklahoma panhandle - a part of the state I had never seen. I didn't expect much and was blown away by the beauty of the country - I love the panhandle. It is far from everywhere and feels incredibly vast. Black Mesa is the highest point in Oklahoma, entering the far NW corner of the state from NM and Colorado. This view of the mesa is looking west along the highway with the mesa in the distance. Not far from where I was standing is the entrance to Black Mesa State Park - canyon and stream, lots of vegetation, even wild turkeys. It also has some beautiful rock formations which you will see one of the days on this blog.

For now, I have painted four small "an-apple-a-day" paintings and was pleased to see progress with each one. Will be doing more small paintings while completing some larger ones I have started - then on to new New Mexico paintings! Today, however, is more chore-driven, having spent the morning with the electrician here and having to clean house before chimney and carpet cleaners come next week - fortunately, in that order! Tomorrow is Saturday and I will get back to the easel early in the day.

Santa Fe Home

Many artists have painted this house on Delgado Street in the old part of Santa Fe. Not only are the architectural elements appealing but the landscaping of rocks, desert plants and potted geraniums has been typical of New Mexico for many years. This early painting is from a photo taken about five years ago. Today, Santa Fe landscapes often include desert plants mixed with blue spirea bushes and lavender-blue Russian sage. In the near future I want to paint a house in Lamy where the perimeter wall is lined with Russian sage - the cool lavender-blue against the warm adobe is quite lovely.

I have one more completed painting to post as well as a few small ones of apples. After that, I will be working on new paintings for a show next June-July and will post them as I complete them. In the meantime, I will try to blog daily giving an update on my painting progress and any other thoughts that come to mind.

The arts in Oklahoma are going strong and it is exciting to be a part of it all. There are many elements related to the arts community and one can pick and choose the activities which most appeal. Today is the docent recruitment coffee for the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. I have been intermittently involved with the museum as a docent and as a temporary, part-time employee since 1993. Being a docent is one of my most enjoyable and rewarding activities over the years. We are lucky in Norman to have an excellent art museum with a superb collection of southwestern art, a great resource for study. In January, a large part of the museum will close in order to add another story to the original building to house the Adkins Collection of Southwestern Art. It is an exciting time to be involved.

Approaching Storm

This painting of an approaching storm is truly a representation of the creative storm that is consuming my thoughts at this time. It is one of my first paintings and my recent trip to New Mexico during "monsoon season" brought it to mind. The ranch where I lived bordered a large open basin bound by mountains on the far side. Summer storms began with incredible cloud formations that coalesced and eventually produced great thunderstorms which would move across the basin. I would sit on my portal, very like this one, and watch nature's beautiful drama as it progressed across the horizon. This year, housesitting near Santa Fe in a similar setting, I watched the storm clouds grow throughout the day and was once again overwhelmed by their power and beauty.

My New Mexico trip did not really go as planned but turned out to be much better in ways I could never have anticipated. An artist friend and mentor had talked to me about my painting the day before I left and his words intensely focused my thoughts in new amd more serious directions. I spent a lot of time traveling to places I have known and loved, visiting with old friends, looking, absorbing and thinking. There was also a reaffirmation of my connection between visual and verbal during a casual brainstorming session with two writers. All of this has brought me to the conclusion that I have to recommit myself to painting in a more deliberate way than I have done in the past. I came back with hundreds of photographs from which I will create many NM paintings, but more importantly, I began to identify the core elements that are essential to how I perceive the world around me. These are the elements that will be the formative energy in what I create.

The most powerful images for me are of rocks and clouds - the basic structures of our world and its most ephemeral manifestations. Human structures, especially churches, parallel these natural forms with a sense of foundations and spiritual yearnings. The Catholic churches of NM, built of earth or stone and reflecting the clouds in their architecture, serve as a metaphor for the human experience. Adobe structures - whether pueblos or individual homes - bring these same elements to our daily life. Finally I realized that painting fruits or vegetables or flowers (none of which have interested me before) is just another way of relating a universal process to an individual's life and growth. Making this rather obvious jump has encouraged me to expand my painting horizons to include still lives, which will give me much practice at painting directly from the object - something I cannot do with NM forms while living in Oklahoma! So I will continue to paint from photographs while also spending more time outside painting directly from nature.

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe

Like many churches in New Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Santa Fe has undergone many renovations and restorations. This painting was based on a photo taken after the work done in the early 1920s. It is the first of three paintings commissioned by dear friends and is their favorite church in Santa Fe. This was an early effort and it taught me a lot about hard and soft edges, values, and perspective. As with all those things in life which we find difficult but through which we persist, I moved from frustration to real pleasure with this painting.

I have a book of New Mexican churches with historic photographs and am going to select a few of them to visit for new paintings - and in some way try to imply the structural history of the churches while painting their current form. I am not sure if this is possible or how I would go about it but it is, at the very least, an interesting way for me to view the current structures. I respond strongly to the underlying structure of things and the way that structure forms what we see even when hidden by other layers. I plan to explore this in future paintings and this way of looking at the churches will certainly provide me with lots of challenges.

Gran Quivira

Franciscan priest Fray Diego de Santander began building the mission church of San Buenaventura soon after his 1659 arrival at Gran Quivira; it was, however, never completed as the pueblo was abandoned by 1672. The smaller Chapel of San Isidro continued to serve the pueblo as it had since the the early 1630s. Unlike the sandstone pueblos and churches at Abo and Quarai, the pueblo and mission buildings at Gran Quivira were limestone constructions. Where Abo and Quarai were situated in valleys coming off of the Manzano Mountains, Gran Quivira sat atop a mesa considerably to the south. Members of the three pueblos gathered salt from the salt flats in the Estancia Basin to the east, thus the Spanish name of Salinas for the province and its communities.

The history of the 17th century missions, just one element of the Spanish incursion into the southwest, is a fascinating one and the Catholic Church has continued to play an integral role in the development of New Mexico's contemporary culture. The missions themselves are iconic structures that draw people from all over the world and are the subject of many, many paintings - including my own. In my upcoming trip to NM I plan to visit both my favorite missions and some with which I am less familiar in order to create more paintings in the near future.

San Gregorio de Abo

When the Spanish first arrived in the Salinas pueblos they built small chapels before beginning construction of the mission churches. No one had found the small chapel built in the 1620s at Abo until Jake Ivey began the Historic Structures Report. Working together we discovered the walls of the early chapel had been expanded to create the nave of the much larger and more complex mission of San Gregorio built in 1629. Only one tall wall remains with its bell tower and buttresses on the west side. There were two conventos at Abo, one built on top of the other and visitors can see remnants of both. Abo sits in the middle of a valley opening to the south from the Manzano Mountains in NM. A stream provided water to the pueblo and its fields, as was the situation at Quarai (see previous post). However, like Quaria, drought and famine forced the abandonment of Abo by 1672 and it was never resettled by the native population.

Painting has taken a back seat in my daily activities lately and I am so looking forward to a NM trip to start painting again. The land there reaches into my being in way difficult to describe. I think that spending some time exploring new and familiar places and visiting with old friends will stimulate my creative muse and get me started with a new group of paintings as well as new ideas on life and living productively.