Through January 31, 2024 | Chimayo Trading Del Norte | Ranchos de Taos, NM

Full Circle

Chimayo Trading Post mounts a show of new works by veteran landscapist Walt Gonske

In the winter of 1971, Walt Gonske was working as men’s fashion illustrator in New York City when he took a trip to visit his sister in Taos, New Mexico. Captivated by the brilliance of the light, the vistas and clean mountain air, he saved up enough money to return the following summer.

The Village at Placita, NM, oil on panel, 18 x 24"

“I came out on a prayer that I could make it as a fine artist selling landscapes,” says Gonske, who was encouraged to see so many galleries showing representational work, which wasn’t the case in New York. “I thought maybe I could go back there and take a crack at selling my pictures through galleries.”

Gonske spent the summer of 1972 traipsing all over the state, camera in hand, gathering enough reference material to keep him inspired back East. Classically trained at the Newark School of Fine Arts and a student of legendary illustrator and muralist Frank Reilly, Gonske started out painting watercolors of the photographs he had taken in the Southwest. He sent four pieces to his sister and asked her to shop them around. The late Louise Abrums, then owner of Brandywine Galleries in Albuquerque, agreed to take them on consignment. Gonske remembers the day he opened up his mail to find a check for $66.67, his share of the $100 sale. Gonske relocated to Northern New Mexico the following year and, by 1974, feeling trapped by his tightly-rendered approach to watercolors, transitioned to oils. He hasn’t looked back in either regard since.

Embudo Creek, oil on panel, 18 x 24"

These days, Gonske, now in his early 80s, can be found scouting for canvas-worthy scenes in his fourth custom paint-mobile—essentially a windowed studio on wheels with ceilings high enough to accommodate his 6-foot-3-inch frame.

“I can stand up at my easel and look out at the world,” Gonske says. “I just love the thing. Nobody bothers me. I’m just inside painting away. I’m out of the wind, rain and snow. From 1972 to 1984 I went out there with a French easel and in the winter I froze my ass off. I’m pretty spoiled now and hate to get out of it if I can help it.”

Most of the time Gonske, who always paints on location and always finishes a work in one go, takes off in his paint-mobile without a specific destination in mind. “I’m really looking and paying attention,” he says. “That’s why I like being alone. I’ll just spot something—some combination of colors or shapes. Something will strike me just right and I’ll get a little emotional jolt. When I get that feeling—bam—I have to do something about it and it’s best I do it right then. Just nail it while I have that feeling and hopefully that excitement gets into the painting.”

Chama, Colorado, oil on linen, 14 x 18"

That feeling leaps and vibrates all over Gonske’s vibrant canvases, which depict landscapes and scenes of timeless villages, farms and adobes. He stopped trying to copy exactly what he sees a long time ago. For Gonske it is all about relinquishing control and allowing his own experience of a place in the moment express itself through stroke, color and composition.

Inspired by Nicolai Fechin’s “incredible bravado in paint,” Gonske started pushing colors further, heightening their contrast to evoke the emotional response that he had while painting it.

Rio Vallecitos, oil on linen, 18 x 24"

“My own way of painting developed in the same way,” Gonske says of Fechin’s technique. “One stroke after another, each one a record of a split-second impulse. Before mixing more paint, I look out and have a different impulse and put that down. And I’m going to leave it alone so the viewer is going to see a record of all those individual impulses and feel the record of that energy going into the painting through the paint itself—the residue of that energy that went into it when I did it.”

A lot has come full circle for Gonske since the early 1970s. For one, he remains in awe that he has had several exhibitions in the Taos Art Museum, the former home of Fechin, who had such an impact on him before he even had an inkling he would move to the Southwest. And in a particularly poignant coming together, his upcoming show will be hosted by Chimayo Trading Company, which began representing the artist several years ago when Gonske learned that the gallery is owned by Gabriel Abrums—the grandson of Louise Abrums, the gallerist who gave him his first break. —