The deserts of the Southwest have many attributes: beauty, mystery, majesty and reverence. These themes, and many others, will be on view at Ode to the Desert opening May 2 at Gallery Wild in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The show, featuring the works of four artists—Patricia A. Griffin, Rocky Hawkins, Silas Thompson and Jared Sanders—celebrates the desert in many iterations.
Silas Thompson, The Walls of Zion, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in.
For Griffin, who is showing works of canyons and tall cliff faces, she was exposed to the desert through TV and film. “A scene with all its dusty warmth and exposed layers, winding canyons and high Mesas dotted with scrubby plants, that contrasted my early life in the dense, lush, ecosystem of the Northeast,” she says. “Watercolors and a sketchbook in hand at 21 years old, I spent two weeks sketching from the window of a bus. The Southwest leg of that tour stopped in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. The canyon echoed stories of abundance. The rock face smoothed into flesh, and peoples that have never left continue to share their interpretation of the antelope on the rock. Thirty-five million antelope existed at one time [in] Canyon De Chelly, part of their southern range.”
Jared Sanders, Zuni Mountains, oil on panel, 26 x 20 in.
Thompson will also be showing dramatic cliffs, including in his work The Walls of Zion. “The desert is a particular motif that cultures and peoples have used almost universally throughout time, and there is a particular beauty to the hostile and almost alien landscapes that predominate the Southwest landscape,” he says. “The Walls of Zion is inspired by a small subsection of Zion National Park where the almost monolithic rock walls burst forth from the desert scrub. The high-hue contrast between the rock and the sky juxtaposed with the small cap of snow from a rare desert snowstorm really stood out to me and is what ultimately inspired the piece.”
Rocky Hawkins, Strangers from Mesa Canyon, acrylic on panel, 18 x 24 in.
In Sanders’ Zuni Mountains, the drama of the painting originates not from cliff faces, but vast desert plains. “I’m striving to distill the landscape down to its most essential elements in a way that is compositionally pleasing,” he says. “By simplifying the scene, I used the foreground, background and sky as three distinct bands of color almost like a [Mark] Rothko painting. I’m interested in how the elements of a landscape relate to each other when they are necessarily flattened out within the four sides of a canvas.”
Patricia A. Griffin, Canyon de Chelly, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in.
Hawkins, whose works are even more modern, is also drawn to the “emptiness” of the desert. In his work Strangers from Mesa Canyon, he paints riders and heat. “In that painting, which has an aloneness in a vast Western landscape, I tried to portray silence. The minimal landscape can be very haunting and beautiful at the same time,” Hawkins says. “[Painting] is an awareness of my connection to nature and the unknown, which is why the riders are less important in the painting. I leave it to your imagination.” —
Gallery Wild 203 Canyon Road » Santa Fe, NM 87501 » (505) 467-8297 » www.gallerywild.com
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