Beginning August 2, new works by wildlife artist Rebecca Haines will be available at the charming adobe-style gallery Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The show, Elementals, features around 15 paintings that highlight Haines’ “emotive paintings of abstracted animals, with subject matter including coyotes, ravens, deer and other wild, wonderful creatures,” says gallery owner Deborah Fritz.
She continues, “Each painting in this captivating new collection serves as a portal to an elemental world, where fire, water, earth and air are not merely substances but living, breathing entities that embody emotions, spirit and the untamed wild.”
Elemental, oil on panel, 16 x 16 in.
Haines shares that the title for the show, has helped shape and focus the direction of her current body of work. “While I’ve been experimenting with wild animal imagery for over a decade now, I continue to both broaden and deepen my ideas as well as my commitment to sharing the essence and importance of these amazing creatures with the world through my paintings,” she says.
While continuing to showcase wildlife, collectors will also notice a couple of changes to the new paintings—starting with a fresh color palette. “While some pieces will contain a wide range of colors, most of them will be a bit more monochromatically focused,” says Haines. “For example, the title piece Elemental,of the coyote, is mainly composed of a warm palette of oranges, reds, yellows and their tertiary neighbors (on the color wheel) with only a few complimentary blues and blue-violets to provide contrast in places. Fire, being one of the four elements of nature, and coyote mythology being full of the ‘trickster’ archetype, this combining of creature to color palette helps intensify the meaning of both.”
Awholenother World, oil on panel, 18 x 18 in.
Other new additions to the work include textural elements and a few new animals that have not been a part of Haines’s oeuvre in the past. We see this in the painting When Magic Comes Calling, Feed It, depicting a western tanager, and Trust the Wisdom of Your Own Song, showing a blue grosbeak. “Flocks of both of these gorgeous birds were migrating through Santa Fe (and my backyard) recently, so I took the local inspiration and gave it presence in my work,” Haines explains.
Grandmother’s Watching, oil on panel, 36 x 24 in.
Another striking bird painting, Awholenother World, depicts a barn owl that challenged Haines in unique ways. “[This piece] really took hold of me and brought out my latent descriptive, photo-realistic abilities and tendencies that I used years ago in my human portraiture work,” she says. “These days, I prefer to dance the line of realism and abstraction for both conceptual reasons and personal preference. But with this owl, I was drawn into her eyes, reminding me of how we can see whole other worlds when we really look deeply. She stands on the border of day and night, as owls do, and projects a deep wisdom and insight that we could all benefit to learn from.”
Elementals opens with a reception on August 2 from 5 to 6:30 p.m., and closes August 25. Haines hopes that viewers come away from this show thinking more about the natural elements that compose our world as well as all living things—harnessing a deeper compassion and respect for both the animals and our shared planet. —
Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art 702 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, (505) 986-1156, www.giacobbefritz.com
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