New Mexico Paintings

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Here are a few of the watercolors I did when travelling in New Mexico with a friend:

Canyon Road in Santa Fe is filled with art galleries from one end of the street to the other.  The artistic talent represented here is truly amazing for its range and quality.  We found a shady spot at the top of the hill and painted this typical Santa Fe adobe building.  

It's hard to see the scale here, but these are towering white cliffs of volcanic ash at a place called Plaza Bianca in Abiquiu that Georgia O'Keeffe called the White Place.  It was a favorite place for her to paint and there are a couple of her paintings of the cliffs at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.  In one letter to Alfred Stieglitz she wrote about how she was driven away by the insects.  My friend and I arrived very early in the morning to paint before the heat of the day, but like Georgia we were soon driven away by the heat and the insects.

Very close to Georgia O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu is the Penitente Morada, a small church that looks out toward the Sangue de Cristo Mountains.  The skies in New Mexico are immense and the cloud formations spectacular.

This trip was all about seeing where Georgia O'Keeffe painted so we went to Ghost Ranch where Georgia O'Keeffe painted in the summer.  Ghost Ranch conducts a fantastic "Georgia O'Keeffe Landscape Tour" that takes you to many of the places she painted on the ranch.  This is an amazing cliff at one end of the ranch.  It's part of the Colorado Plateau.  The rock striations of lavender-grey, naples yellow, ochre, burnt-orange, and rose were a treat to paint.

Echo Canyon is just up the road from Ghost Ranch.  It's a naturally occurring amphitheater, I suppose carved out of the rock by wind and water.  Rich iron ore stains run down the canyon wall where water has poured down over the canyon rim.  The curved rim with its bit of vegetation hold the intense blue sky like a cup.