On a sunny Sunday in May, 2010, Evoke and Louisa McElwain hosted a lunch, painting demonstration and tour of Louisa’s 13-acre “gentle person’s farm” with its cattle, horses, and goats, her new guest house and the nearby Santa Cruz River running fast and cold with melting snow from the mountains. Louisa, who died in 2013, was often referred to as a “force of nature”. On her farm she showed that, indeed, she was one with nature.

The highlight of the day, of course, was her creating a finished painting before our very eyes, from a blank canvas strapped to the back of her pickup truck to one of those vibrant, color and light-filled landscapes of northern New Mexico that I first saw and admired when I moved to Santa Fe in 2007.

In her demonstration that day, Louisa moved paint around until it coalesced into a view of Cerro Pedernal above Abiquiu Lake while she simultaneously explained her technique and the insights she had garnered from teachers such as Alex Katz and Neil Welliver and delivered a mini-course in abstract expressionism and sensuous application of paint.

The following year, I wrote an article about the abstracted landscape and included her work. At that time, I wrote: “Watching Louisa McElwain paint is like watching a force of nature. First a loose abstraction like a purple Franz Kline suggests a composition and then great globs of paint are pushed around with palette knives and masonry trowels at the end of long sticks until a landscape appears with no individual bit of paint or field of color representing any particular object.

“As she describes the process, ‘I am interested in exploring a way of describing my experience of places in Nature, without subordinating the marks and strokes of paint to the motif. Paint and the gestures that move it are made to the rhythms of Nature through Time, each with its own identity as paint, yet contributing to the meaning of the work as a whole.’ She uses her knives and trowels to move paint around quickly and to avoid describing the particulars of the scene she is painting.

“McElwain acknowledges her debt to the sense of ‘respect for materials and gesture held by the action painters of American Abstract Expressionism.’ When Hans Hoffman suggested to Jackson Pollock that he should refer more to nature in his work, the provocative Abstract Expressionist is said to have replied ‘I don’t paint nature. I am Nature.’ McElwain echoes Pollock when she asserts she becomes nature when she paints.

“Abstract Expressionism celebrated process, gesture, spontaneity, and emotion and, to be a little redundant, abstract imagery. It, along with other movements in the first half of the 20th century, allowed artists to free themselves from making scrupulous representations of visual realty. Many of the insights and techniques of these movements later found their way into the realm of representational painting, adding another layer of richness to an ancient tradition.”

Louisa said, "It took me years to recover from art school” but she chose the best from her education to form her career. She had studied with Alex Katz and Neil Welliver at Skowhegan during a summer in Maine, and studied with Welliver again at the University of Pennsylvania. The color theories of Josef Albers conveyed through Welliver taught her “Instead of relying on a tonal structure, a painting is built on the relationship of colors. I came to understand how light is created in a painting through the relationships of colors to each other, rather than by a tonal structure of lights and darks."

Grounded in color and the physical properties of oil paint, she found a way to invite her viewers into her painted landscapes which are embodiments of her actual emotional relationship to it. Her connectedness to the landscape and her awareness that she was “not the origin of this creativity that’s flowing through me,” sometimes caused her to stop at the end of a painting and exclaim “Whoa! Where did that come from?”

Although trained in the, perhaps, heady philosophy of the New York School, she painted with a spiritual and physical connection to nature. She said, “I often feel energy, like electricity, surging upward from the ground, through my knees, through my arms and right on to the canvas.”

We spoke several times about that energy and its association with the divine.

Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the country’s first important landscape painter and founder of the Hudson River School. He wrote, “It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths…. To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.”

Louisa’s Fanfare, 2001, is the work of a poet. In a 2021 interview in “Forbes”, Kathrine Erickson said, “Louisa McElwain was NOT trying to describe a beautiful landscape on a two-dimensional surface with oil paint. She was trying to—and did—commune with the landscape. It’s that communion, that relationship with the landscape, that comes through her work.”

She would often head out as a storm was coming in to experience its energy and to portray it on canvas often in only a matter of several hours. She moved paint around until all the white of the canvas was gone and the energy of the moment and the energy of her movements were captured on it.