In 1898, after Ernest L. Blumenschein rode into Taos, New Mexico, he was inspired to write, “No artist had ever recorded the New Mexico I was now seeing. No writer had ever written down the smell of this air or the feel of that morning’s sky. I was receiving…the first great unforgettable inspiration of my life.”
Chloé Marie Burk, Beneath the Rain, oil, 30 x 40”
When D.H. Lawrence first experienced the clear light of the high desert in the 1920s, he wrote that “something stood still in my soul…”
Parsons Gallery of the West, in Taos, has gathered paintings by artists associated with Taos and the American West for its annual Small Works Holiday Show. The gala evening, featuring about 20 paintings, will be held December 8 from 5 to 8 p.m. Many of the artists will be in attendance.
Nathanael Volckening was raised in Taos, inspired by the work of Blumenschein as well as Nicolai Fechin and other artists of the region. Essentially self-taught, he received guidance from various living artists and studied the masters of the past. His painting style tends toward the abstract, imbuing the forms of the landscape and its endless skies with a tangible monumentality. He says, “My current work depicts sublime landscapes imbued with figural qualities, creating a humanistic drama worthy of our care and attention. With this work, I hope to reinvigorate our appreciation and sense of interconnectedness with the land.”
Nathanael Volckening, Three Winds Guiding, oil, 24 x 30”
In Three Winds, the strong Northern New Mexico light is set off by the shadowed hills in the foreground, through which three figures, draped in blankets, are walking. The anonymous figures recall those painted by Dorothy Brett who accompanied Lawrence and his wife Frieda to Taos in the 1920s.
Presaging Volckening’s connectedness, Brett wrote, “My primary subject matter will continue to be the Indians and landscape around me, but for the last several years, I’ve been reaching for a more spiritual character in my work. If ‘spiritual’ is the right word. Connected is maybe a better one. Yes. I’m trying to demonstrate how everything is connected: people, animals, earth, sky.”
John Moyers, The Sky Has Power, oil, 30 x 30”
Volckening explains, “[Three Winds] was painted almost entirely using earth-based pigments, minerals like those found in and around Abiquiu (the inspiration for this landscape)…The three figures in the foreground are painted with the same pigments as the three bands of color in the bluff, making the figures literally ‘of the earth.’”
Jerry Jordan, Dwelling Place, oil, 16 x 20”
Chloé Marie Burk grew up in the mountains of France where her father is a farrier and was a jockey. The family also bred horses. She discovered in Taos an environment that reminded her of home. Before moving to Taos and concentrating on her love of painting, she studied fashion in London and Paris and worked for Christian Dior Couture alongside John Galliano.
Today she lives in Montana where she and her husband have horses. She has said, “It’s important to both of us to be surrounded by horses. It’s a simple way of living. Horses have a simple life but you have to care for them. Even when they’re big they can be sensitive and fragile. I love taking care of another being. The horses give you a lot back.”
Katelyn Betsill Del Vecchio, Rendezvous, oil, 12 x 12”
Her early paintings of horses in the environment were deceptively simple with repetitive patterns making up the landscape. She was initially inspired by the paintings of Frederic Remington whose work she first saw in a book given to her by a friend. She says, “I fell in love with his style. I realized then that painting Western art was a good way of expressing the inspiration of my childhood.”
Her painting, Beneath the Rain, is a complex composition of repeated patterns in her depiction of the rain clouds, eagle feathers in the riders’ hair and the dense foreground of cactus and chamisa. The riders’ regalia is a reflection of her knowledge of fashion and her appreciation of Native traditions.
Roseta Santiago, Fire Clouds, oil, 12 x 12”
Ron Rencher was born in Utah and lived for a time in Taos. He says, “I feel that in order to create a work of art that is real, honest and enduring I must make a subject my own, not by copying whatever it may be, but through interpretation. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendor and he will come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself.’ A painting should bear witness to the artist’s imagination, personality and character. A painting needs to have enough emotional impact to make a connection with the viewer, while having an intellectual construct which is hidden beneath the aesthetic surface.”
Ron Rencher, Winter Ceremony, oil, 11 x 17”
Winter Ceremony depicts an event at Taos Pueblo from a discrete distance. The composition is anchored by the dark blue ribbon of the Rio Pueblo de Taos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, that has its source in the pueblo’s sacred Blue Lake. The solidity of the gathered people and the mass of the pueblo give way to the ethereal mists of the mountains. —
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