Jay Bailey has never been to Duckwater, Nevada, but he does know Jack Malotte. Jay was born in Reno and Malotte was brought up there--nearly a quarter century earlier. But their paths crossed.

“I was a quiet kid,” Jay says. “I was very insular. My parents were always supportive of my interests, Little League, my BMX, art. I was a latchkey kid and I was allowed to run around on my bike with the Sierra Nevada rising in the distance. I took the landscape for granted when I was young. In my 20s I lived in San Francisco, then Las Vegas,Texas. They never felt like home despite the initial comfort I felt being there. As I’m getting older, I’m trying to find home again in my work. My paintings are love letters to what I understand to be home despite the dilemma of ‘is home a place or a feeling?’”

Jay writes, in an artist statement, “The landscape of the American West has always calmed me and steadied my heart. I need to paint these spaces. Spaces with which I feel kinship. Spaces which make me feel like I’m home. They are the blur of my childhood memories. They are sediment and mountain shaped by time immortal. A dissolve of sunlight in the particles of parched air that carry sound, still and long. They are adorned with draught shaped wonders and skies of flowing stone. They are lonesome and demonic, pure in their inhospitable grandeur and uncaring of their sapien witnesses.”

When he was in elementary school, he met Jack Malotte and his parents arranged for him to take private art lessons. Malotte (Western Shoshone and Washoe) had attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and was an editorial illustrator for the then Nevada State Journal. Later, in the 1980s, he became involved in Native American and environmental causes. In 1999, he arrived in the remote community of Duckwater to paint a mural in the school gymnasium . . . and never left. In 2019, The Nevada Museum of Art produced a traveling exhibition of his art.

Jay’s painting I’ve never been to Duckwater, but I know Jack Malotte is an homage to his mentor with whom he has reconnected on Facebook. “We would make work together,” Jay reminisces. “He showed me what an artist does, how to be an artist. The work was free-form, non-restrained. Many of his works are great desert landscapes.

“I was a pretty cautious young person. I drew because I liked comic books. It was easy to go from Marvel comics to the Sistine Chapel with the same muscular figures. Jack had been influenced by the artists of the Bay Area from Chuck Close to psychedelic alternative comics.”

Jay received his BA in Fine Art from the University of Nevada in Reno, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received his MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

“When I was an undergrad,” he says, “I didn’t connect with Jackson Pollock. I didn’t know why people were enthralled with his paintings. When I was at the Art Institute I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw my first Pollock in person. “I instantly got it. It was like a religious experience. It unlocked a new experience that I merged that with my figurative work. Seeing Picasso’s Guernica in Spain when I was a kid had a big impact on my drawing the figure. Seeing the Pollock in person allowed me to step away from the figure and toward landscapes. The figures may creep back but losing them allowed me to become a better painter.

“In the landscape, there’s the horizon, sky and ground. That gives some leeway. It leaves room to play, to find more expression.

“There isn’t a ton of color in the desert. I had seen a piece by Jack on Facebook in which he had extended the color range. The art critic Dave Hickey was a professor at UNLV and gave a talk here in Reno. He said he loved folklore because it contains truth even if it’s not true.

“There are a lot of paintings rusty brown things in the desert. The more I’ve painted I’ve tried to find the right rusty brown. It pushes me to express the colors of the desert further even though I don’t see them directly. It’s visceral. I know when it feels right. The blue sky in Nevada doesn’t feel quite right when I paint it blue. When I disrupt it, it feels more honest. It needs to be undone a bit.”

Jay doesn’t lay out a sketch on the canvas. He just starts painting. Mark making, to him, has as much purpose as making an image. “I’ll talk to the marks,” he says. “I’m not in control. I’m responding to what happens. There are multiple responses. A mark can communicate a certain vitality. If the image becomes too rendered, it’s not satisfying to me.”

Pollock’s process was similar. He wrote, “When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.”

Jay comments, “I want to experience the landscape through the lens of what paint can do. Cormac McCarthy saw landscape as a character in his novels. I want to depict that character in a way.”

In “Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West”, McCarthy commented on the sameness and diversity of the desert. “In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.”

Although Jay calls himself an “indecisive painter,” his instinct and willingness to destabilize the conventions of landscape painting make his landscapes “feel more real. I’m finding the edge of where a thing is and where it isn’t.”

Painting in layers, he knows that “one color influences the colors on top of it. The impossible blue sky in an early state of I’ve never been to Duckwater… gets a yellow wash that becomes green as the blue shows through, and the white clouds allow the yellow to be yellow.

Jay comments, “After months of thinking this painting was finished, I layered in more weirdness that only those who have spent time in the high desert know to be true. Colors melt out there.”

When Francis DiFronzo was a beginning art student at California State University, Fullerton, he finished his drawing quickly in a life drawing class and went outside for a smoke. His teacher, who felt he was talented but not really applying himself, stopped him and said, “If you’re done, change your position and do a second drawing.” By the end of the semester,he admits, “I was more competent at drawing the figure. My teacher told me that he wished he could lock me in the desert for a year to see what I could do without distractions. A couple of years later I felt under pressure to find my own voice. I thought maybe I should go to the desert. I was too influenced by other artists and my teachers.

“I went to Bell Mountain near Victorville in the Mojave Desert. I found a house that had been turned into a duplex and half was for rent. It was super cheap--2 rooms and a bathroom. After 8 or 9 weeks I didn’t know what to draw or what to paint. There was no radio and it was a 30 minute drive to the nearest phone. I was 21 and knew I was not ready to be on my own all the time.

“Interestingly, last year I purchased a negative to digital converter. I did take photos in the desert. When I converted them I was afraid to look at them at first.”

There were visual and spiritual experiences, however. “I remember sitting at the front door of my house, at sunset” he recalls. “I was looking toward the east rather than at the setting sun. It was the nicest experience, how the Belt of Venus appeared in the sky above the shadow of the earth. Night rises as the sun sets.” Explaining the Belt of Venus, the BBC states, “To properly see the Belt of Venus, all you need is a clear sky, shortly before sunrise or after sunset, and an unobstructed horizon.” Francis had unobstructed horizon in abundance to observe the pink band named after the Greek goddess of love and beauty and the girdle she wore that had the power to inspire passion. His “nicest experience” was the beginning of his passion for the desert.

He left the desert and attended graduate school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He found he was still trying to find his voice and, later, decided to return to the desert. “I wanted to shake myself up. I wanted to spark something. I said, ‘You’re not who you were back then.’ When I arrived in Bell Mountain, the house was gone. There was a pile of wood where the house had been and a clean concrete slab. That ended up to be the impetus to move on.”

And move on, he did. He has always admired the work of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper and says, “I want to portray the desert with the same passion and attention to detail as the east coast artists did with their environment. In simple tonal paintings, I want to portray how I feel about the southwest and the timelessness of nature—nature as continuum.” The fading signs and rusting box cars in his paintings may outlive us and the concrete slab of his home in the desert will undoubtedly outlive human life on the planet.

Along the way, he was awarded a Stobart Foundation Fellowship in the Arts as well as a Pew Fellowship in the arts. In 2015, 5 of his paintings were featured in the second season of the award-winning television series “Better Call Saul”.

Among his paintings at Evoke is Crossing Paths, Part 2. A summation of many of his experiences imagined into a cohesive composition that invites the viewer’s exploration and response. He says, “I think the thing that makes good art is a sense of mystery. I like being a little opaque. I draw people into my world and give enough information so they know there’s a meaning.”

On the far right of the 5-foot panel are faded signs for real estate, symbolic of failed dreams. One still legible sign bears an active phone number.

“In general, he explains, “the Crossing Paths paintings are about transportation, the mark that humankind leaves everywhere, like the concrete slab of my house in the Mojave. Worlds cross, airplane contrails cross in the sky. And there are unseen crossed paths. The thought or premise is how human lives interact, how lives cross paths. In , I wanted to give some sort of reference to my own life, how opportunity comes and goes. Call that phone number.”

The railroad crossing signs are self-explanatory and are a fortuitous link to an art installation just down the street from the gallery at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary. Last year, the museum’s first artist in residence, Colombian artist Oswaldo Maciá. created a sound sculpture installation, El Cruce—“cross” or “crossing” and all its meanings. He incorporates the sounds of crossing from migratory bats and the sounds of wind in the desert to the sounds of the railyard just below the sculpture terrace where his piece is installed.

In an essay I wrote for the museum, I refer to crossing. “Today, it continues to refer to intersections but also to transitions (‘crossing over’, ‘crossing borders’) and, in the case of sculpture, ‘crossing the limits of perception’. Maciá refers to the migration of the Spanish and colonists to Santa Fe and the migration of artists drawn by the desert and its extraordinary light. He refers, as well, to present day migrants crossing through Central America to our southern border.”

People have come and gone from the desert of the southwest. Among the photos Francis took when he first lived in the desert were several of a long-abandoned church. Painted on a rafter was a passage from Genesis—“Why are you distressed, and why is your face fallen”—words God spoke to Cain after he accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s.

Francis incorporated the quote in his painting, The Cathedral. “I often imagined what those words would mean to a child,” he explains. “There’s no reason God favored Abel. As a child myself, I loved the sense of community, of a family coming together. In this painting I was thinking about how in the old days, religious people used to travel and spread the Word in cars and wagons and would open a temporary church.

“I had envisioned people who had gathered together inside the cathedral, the younger generation writing on the side of the box car the things they heard inside, repeating what they learned. In the tic tac toe games, they make the same mistakes over and over again. We should learn from our mistakes.”

“I had envisioned people who had gathered together inside the cathedral, the younger generation writing on the side of the box car the things they heard inside, repeating what they learned. In the tic tac toe games, they make the same mistakes over and over again. We should learn from our mistakes.”

Francis is now teaching drawing and painting at California State University, Fullerton. David Hockney wrote, “Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.” Francis teaches the craft from stretching canvas to understanding chroma. “I also introduce them to pathways they can use to tap into their creative impulses. They have to find their own way. You learn it from yourself.”

In his extraordinary autobiography, the historian Henry Adams wrote, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” As an undergraduate student of painting at Syracuse University, Judith Stewart studied with the sculptor Dominick Angelo who introduced students to the work of the contemporary Italian sculptors Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzú. His lasting influence was that he “taught students to ‘see’ sculpture not frontally, but at the edge, along the contour, where form is established.

Later, when teaching painting at the University of West Florida, Judith received a grant to go to Italy where the subject of her paintings was “Roman sculpture in the context of today, as encountered in museums, in the forums and public spaces of the cities, often as fragmented remnants in unexpected places.”

While in Florida, she took a class in bronze casting. Part of the process was “pouring wax out onto wet a cloth and when it was cool enough, ripping it up into random pieces and sticking them together to see what you get,” she says.

Today, the beauty and immediacy of the process continues in her work in clay, maneuvering large slabs into female forms. “Clay gives me a lot of freedom to make form,” she explains. “50% of each piece is suggested by what the clay wants to do. That’s very important to me-- the back and forth between process and the idea. I’m open to the surprises.”

She writes, “New figures are not conceived externally, as drawings or models fully realized. Rather they exist inwardly, unformed, waiting to be formed. My pieces are never anything I have seen, but a merging of many things I have seen, images, histories and memories accumulated throughout my life. Intuition guides the building and shaping of a sculpture, bringing ideas forth while allowing the materials used to declare and keep their own rich natures. The demand put upon materials to hold form, and the hope that a human presence will emerge with a unique identity, is for me the fascinating part of creating sculpture about the human body.”

The human presence emerges in her sculpture Flora II at Evoke. She is titled Flora II because the first Flora collapsed in the kiln--one of the hazards of clay firing. The figure was inspired by Renaissance portraiture, especially profiles and the line of the edge of the figure.

“The edge tells me if it’s right or not,” Judith explains. “You can see the muscle, how the back curves to buttocks and the hips. The construction of the human form is amazing. When people look at a sculpture, they usually look at the center and identify it. That’s good enough for most people. I’d like them to see the form at the edge--off the shoulder to the elbow to the wrist. If the sculpture is displayed on a rotating pedestal, the edge changes. You see the full beauty of the line.

“The essence of Flora’s pose is her repose,” she continues. “She is quiet fully occupied with holding the flower and being quiet.” The word repose has its roots in the Greek and Latin words for pause and rest. Flora, herself, is the Roman goddess of flowers and spring.

My own response to Judith’s sculpture is one of calm, similar to settling into a state of meditation. She is a physical presence in her natural nudity, united with the rest of Nature as she holds a simple flower. Judith comments that the tulip-shaped flower “echoes the uprightness of the torso. I didn’t set out to do a figure that’s quiet. I was fully occupied with the shape of the torso and the line of the back. I don’t know if I was aware of the quietness at the time.

“A feeling for calmness comes from my admiration for the sculpture of the Greek Charioteer at Delphi. There’s a subtle little twist to his body. He’s totally self-possessed, ‘I’m internal.’ He has presence. It’s like observing people when they don’t know their being watched. They’re quietly being themselves.”

A reference to Greek sculpture also occurs in her sculpture Large Oracle. “I liked the clay study of this pose so much that I had it scanned and enlarged in foam that I dressed out from there in plaster.” The draped figure recalls the caryatids who support the porch roof of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens. This one has decided to take a rest.

Oracle, Arizona, is where Judith lives, in the Rancho Linda Vista Arts Community. She had traveled through Arizona when her father worked in the oil fields and remembered the area “the purple shadows and the feel of the desert.” Looking to move from Florida she visited a friend in Tucson and visited the office of the local arts council where she was told to visit Rancho Linda Vista. “I saw a woman coming out of the post office,” she relates, “and since she looked like an artist I followed her and asked her about arts opportunities. She told me she knew the woman running the guest artist program at Rancho Linda Vista. When I met her, she signed me up. I came here in 1991and I knew I wanted to stay. Art is the center of the community and I’m surrounded by other artists. It’s my forever home.

In Oracle, she came upon a vintage photo of a local woman dressed in jeans and a checked shirt and holding a snake. “It said something about a strong woman,” she relates. “I took it to the next level.”

Girl Holding a Snake is an example of her constructed figures and her fending off realism. “I don’t want to fake that I’m trying for super realism,” she says. “She has arms that are stuck together. I want people to also admire the material”. On a whim she decided to paint the girl’s hair with red acrylic and to highlight the texture of the snake in blue.

Her experiments with color carried into Flora 3 in which a color wash highlights the pattern of the lace she pressed into the surface of the wet clay before it was fired. The nudity of Flora is softened by the lace, removing it from being seen as possibly prurient nakedness. “I wondered how to protect the figure and not make it sexualized,” she comments. “The lace is a boundary to the invasive idea. “I have an empathy for the female form. I know it very well. The essence of the feminine is built into the form. I want people to get enjoyment from the beautiful lines and everything the female figure contains.”

Thomas Vigil grew up in a devout Catholic family in northern New Mexico. Attending Mass, however, he was more interested in the paintings and sculpture by local artists than in the sermons delivered from the pulpit.

“My parents were about church and going to church and following the Bible,” he says. “In church, I loved looking at the artwork. We have so many amazing santeros that donated their art to the church, like full stations of the cross. It's something that I benefited from, because I got to go to church and look at these images all the time.”

Among the other artistic influences was graffiti that he saw all over his hometown of Española. Visiting his brother in Los Angeles, however, he saw that graffiti was a much bigger phenomenon. “I’ve always had an eye for graphic arts,” he says. “Graffiti changed the definition of ART for me. I developed an addiction for art in public spaces at a young age. I indulged in my fair share of unlawful expression. It was in the streets that I received an education that I would have never found at any conventional art school.”

Today, when he visits other cities he asks friends, “’What’s a good street to check out?’ and I'll go and I'll explore and take photographs of graffiti. It’s just continued inspiration. That's the art I love.” Today, his own art is a rich combination of his early fascination with iconic religious images painted with intricately-cut stencils on mundane supports like street signs and license plates. The free application of often dripping spray paint from his days as a street artist contrasts with his subtle control of the spray to create his posterized portraits.

In the posterization process, he reduces the full tonal range of an image to fewer tones that result in an abrupt change from one tone to the next. One of his many skills is applying the paint with his stencils and spray cans so that there isn’t an overlap of tones or, worse, a gap between them.

The layers of imagery in works like Know Way, Know Truth, Know Life--street sign, a posterized interpretation of a classic image of Jesus, and freely-sprayed graffiti tags, are inspired by his love for the layered graffiti on the streets. “It's just something that strikes me when you see just random graffiti everywhere. It's beautiful. And then a street artist will come up and throw an image over it, whether it be iconic or otherwise. And that's great. you get this kind of overlay of graffiti on top of this image.”

The transition of street art to the gallery setting isn’t an easy one. Thomas relates that people would be attracted to the bright colors of his work in his booth at Contemporary Hispanic Market. “As a graffiti writer,” he says, “I know how to use contrasting colors and complementary colors. That's what we do to create a striking image that is visible from a far distance.” Sometimes, however, when he would explain to his visitors that the paintings are created with spray paint they would turn around and walk out.

In the early 90s when I was beginning to develop the Re-presenting Representation exhibitions at the Arnot Art Museum, I sought imagery that spanned from nearly abstract to photorealistic and declared that the sculptures, drawings and paintings only needed to portray “stuff you can recognize”. I also sought different ways of using media. It was bad enough that I had chosen to promote contemporary realism which my museum peers thought was even more passé than passé, but I also included images painted with an air brush rather than animal hairs at the end of a stick.

Air brush is simply a more controlled application of paint than spraying from a can and has become more accepted among painting purists. Spraying directly from the can, not so much.

“What I love to see out there in the streets is what I'm trying to incorporate in my fine art,” Thomas explains. “I want to have that authentic street feeling but still be aesthetically pleasing to the general collector. It's a really hard balance. I don't know that I've bridged that gap yet. I think there are some people that are very enthralled by what I'm doing and then other people that are just like, well, ‘That’s messy.’ I know it in my heart that Kathrine and Elan at Evoke have taken a huge chance on me as a young artist especially among their collection of artists. Some of those people are international artists, very, very well known. It's intimidating for me to have my artwork hanging next to theirs. But at the same time, it's motivating.”

Know Way, Know Truth, Know Life bears tags, the stylized monograms of graffiti writers. Thomas explains, “I repeat a lot of the tags in my backgrounds. I use “shake”, my former graffiti name, the words ‘peace’ and ‘2maro’ (as in tomorrow). These symbolize a hope for a better tomorrow.”

When I told him that I first read in my mind, “No Way….” He explained that the title has several interpretations, among them his hope that those with no way, no truth and no life will come to know them.

He has done a series of paintings of Lost Prophets that Evoke exhibited last year.

“This is the most in depth meaning that I've tried to put into any of my work. It was circulated around an issue that had been eating at me for years. I've lost several friends and family members to drug addiction and suicide and other mental health issues. When fentanyl hit Española we didn't know what was going to happen the next time the phone rang. Many of my friends was just falling victim to this and it was something that was bothering me quite a bit. Just like the homeless crisis in Española. People were more irritated about the fact that they had to deal with this crisis than having sympathy towards the people that were going through it. These people were my friends and family members, so I was sympathetic because when I see people, I see people. Everybody's a person, and I guarantee everybody in this world has made bad choices. Maybe some of them worse than others. That doesn't dictate who they are.”

One of the paintings in Lost Prophets (which references the iconic saints and prophets in many of his paintings) is Mad Max, painted, prophetically, on a speed limit sign. Thomas wrote the following to accompany the painting:

When I met Max he was talking to himself and singing songs. As I approached him he was very inviting, asking me to sit down, offering me a cigarette, and even some tortillas. Max has the type of face that can change from completely happy and full of life to completely lost in a moment. Max is 27 and says he's lived on the streets most of his life. He lived with his brother a few years back in Santa Fe, but was kicked out after a physical altercation that left his brother hospitalized. I asked him if he had any other family. His mom lives in California, but he hasn't seen her since he was an adolescent. He left home in his teens to pursue "girls, music, and drugs:' He left home for the music and girls, but stayed for the drugs. Max is addicted to Methamphetamines and "blues" (blues referring to an illegally manufactured pill form of Fentanyl flooding the Española Valley.)….

Despite his situation, Max is hopeful. He doesn't feel like his life is over. He believes he can find a job and a home. I asked him if he could go back, what he would do differently. He answers quickly with a smirk. "I wouldn't do anything different. You have to accept who you are in life:” His smile grows. "I'm single, wild, and free. I accept who I am!"

Thomas is married with two children and has a full-time job at Los Alamos National Labs where he manages a nuclear waste facility. “I am very, very structured at work. I am very much about rules and regulations and I'm strict about it. I want that facility to be safe and compliant and everybody to do as they're told all the time. It’s necessary because what we do is important and dangerous, not just for the workers but for the environment and the public.”

Then there is the 38-year-old rebel and the rule breaker who transcends the preconceptions about street art to create colorful, complex and meaningful works of fine art.

Prominent on his arm, among other religious tattoos is Exodus 3:14. “This is one of the most relatable scriptures that I could think of from the Bible,” he relates. “Moses asked God, ‘Who do I tell people you are?’ and God answered, “I am who I am.” I’ve always felt that way. I'm unapologetically me.”

View work by Thomas Vigil   ►

Nicholas Herrera is a man of the land—land that his family has worked since the 1820's. “My family came from Extremadura, Spain, through the Canary Islands then to Mexico. They came into New Mexico in 1598 with the earliest Spanish settlers and then some came later with de Vargas.”

Those earliest Spanish settlers crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso and claimed the land to the north for Spain which became the New Spain territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Diego de Vargas came about 100 years later and became its governor.

“So these people, when they came, there was nothing here,” Nicholas explains. “They had to clean up all these lands, they had to plow it and you know, take all the rock out and dig all the ditches.” The ditches, or acequias, are gravity-fed channels that bring water to the fields and gardens. He still maintains them today.

When I visited him recently in El Rito, north of Santa Fe, I met his horses, dogs, a very noisy rooster and ate peaches from his orchard. The land is flat beneath the El Rito Mountains where his ancestors grew potatoes. “The first settlers that were up there were killed by the Comanches. One of my great, great, great grandfathers decided to reclaim it. He started planting potatoes and he knew how to make vodka.”

He says, “You know, I'm always in the mountains alone and I pray to God and I do my thing. You know what I mean? I try to be nice to people because before that, I wasn't that nice. Before that wreck. You know, everything changed. Because you realize that life is too short.”

The “wreck” was a car accident when he was in his early 20s that left him in a coma in the hospital. His life as a rebel came to an end and he emerged with a vision to become a santero, a saint maker. The vision was of a muerte, a death figure, carved by his great uncle José Inés Herrera known as the Santero de la Muerte (Saint-maker of Death) because he specialized in carving death carts and death figures. His Death Cart, carved at the beginning of the last century, is in the collection of the Denver Museum of Art.

On September 21, the Harwood Museum in Taos will open Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero, his first solo museum exhibition. The museum notes, “As a modern santero, Herrera creates bultos, retablos, and large-scale mixed media works, many of which detail rich and often challenging chapters in his storied life. Through varied mediums, this exhibition surveys Herrera’s personal identity, family history, relationship to place, and political ideology. Still a ‘village artist,’ Herrera continues to reside, regenerate, and create on the land of his family.”

Self-taught and carrying his youthful rebellion into his art, Nicholas found himself among the great santeros with works in the Smithsonian and major museums across the country.

“There's a lot of sophisticated artists that were well educated at the university,” he says. “They went to art schools. I’m the bandido, that came from the mountains. You know what I mean? It's like I'm competing with big time artists, but you know, I'm my own deal. I got my own thing going.

“I was just doing art that I liked. My mom used to work for people. There was this woman called Eleanor Haas and her husband Lez Haas and they were artists. There were all these artists and my mom would go clean their homes and they became friends. And I would sometimes go with my mom. They give me brushes and canvases, so I just got into it.”

While getting into art he also got into trouble, ending up in jail in Los Alamos for a few months. While there, a guard admired his drawings and he started trading them for cigarettes.

“He was a really cool guy, Native American. When I was gonna get out, he says, well, my wife's a curator at the Fuller Lodge and she wants you to have a show. So, it's like the good Lord put everything in place for me. Like, you have a chance now do it. If not, that's going to be the end. So that's when I went all the way with my art. I just started hustling with my art. Just going to museums. Some of them laughed at my work and wanted nothing to do with it. They were all freaked out, like it's a little too crazy.”

In the early aughts I was a novice in the world of the art of the American West and what is referred to as contemporary Spanish Colonial art. My friend Stuart Chase was executive director of the then Rockwell Museum of Western art in Corning, NY, where I lived, and introduced me to the best of the best. He always said, “You’d love Santa Fe!” to which I always responded, “Who the hell wants to go to Santa Fe?” Having lived here for 17 years now, I can attest to this being not only the “Land of Enchantment” but the “Land of Entrapment.” Stuart and his wife, Julie, now live in nearby Chimayó.

I first came to the area at the invitation of Michael Bergt whose work I had shown in an exhibition. I kept coming back and on one visit went to a gallery on Palace Avenue and saw a piece by one Nicholas Herrera. It wasn’t work I expected to see from a santero.

La Virgin Nos Guia Pro el Camino (The Virgin Guides Us Down the Road) was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe behind an old car grill and two headlights (one lit and one unlit) above a rusty license plate and a car bumper.

Nicholas explains, “It was inspired by an event in my own life that happened when I was in my 20’s. I remember going down the road one night back, all drunk. I was seeing three roads in front of me and I knew I might not get home. I prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe to get me home safely. Then I closed one eye and saw just one road and I was able to follow that. So that is way just one of the lights is working and why I carved and placed the Virgin behind the grill.

The car parts come from a pile of “collectibles” he has brought home since he first went with his father to what we used to call “the dump”. Walking into the field of accumulated stuff I saw a rusted car that was still recognizable as a Studebaker--minus the bumper that I had seen in the sculpture.

Some of the stuff composes sculpture placed around the property, including La Corona, inspired by COVID-19, the Coronavirus.

“To me,” he says, “this sculpture is a reminder that this virus is real and happening all around us – it represents the Angel de la Muerte or Angel of Death, who can come for any of us at any time. She holds the scales of heaven and hell, weighing your sins. She is made of recycled vintage car and tractor parts – the main body is a hood from a 1947 Chevy Master Deluxe, the ribcage is a Case tractor from the 1940’s, the bumper is from a 1930’s Chevy and the head is formed from a headlight from a 1929 Dodge. The hair is made from snow chains and the crown is an old chamber pot or pail. The head of the raven on her arm is an auto horn from the 1920’s and the feathers are cut from an old 1920’s Dodge hood. She holds a scythe from the 1800’s.”

When I referred to Nicholas as a man of the land, I was thinking of a smaller, carved and polychromed bulto of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and rural communities. I live in Agua Fria Village, a Traditional Historic Community founded in 1640 and whose local church is dedicated to San Isidro. I often attend the traditional blessing of the fields and river on the saint’s feast day.

As a farm worker in Madrid, San Isidro would attend Mass in the morning while his fellow workers began their hard labors. They complained to the landowner that he was shirking his duties but they found that while he was at Mass, two angels had been doing his work in the fields.

San Isidro II depicts the saint with 2 angels carved in wood, polychromed, and mounted in front of a painting of a village church with its open doors and pews and stations of the cross visible inside. Generations of ancestors are buried in the churchyard.

I looked and saw a lot of art when visiting Nicholas in El Rito, but San Isidro II, in a way, sums him up—his faith, his dedication to the land and to those who came before, and his unique talent for creating art with roots in tradition that is capable, sometimes, of making people “all freaked out”.

“You know,” he says, “I do traditional art, but like I completely changed it--to my way.

It's a new time. It's a new era. You know my grandfather, my ancestors, did their thing in their time. Now it's my turn.”

When I referred to Nicholas as a man of the land, I was thinking of a smaller, carved and polychromed bulto of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and rural communities. I live in Agua Fria Village, a Traditional Historic Community founded in 1640 and whose local church is dedicated to San Isidro. I often attend the traditional blessing of the fields and river on the saint’s feast day.

As a farm worker in Madrid, San Isidro would attend Mass in the morning while his fellow workers began their hard labors. They complained to the landowner that he was shirking his duties but they found that while he was at Mass, two angels had been doing his work in the fields.

View work by Nicholas Herrera   ►

The art world is a small one. Within it, the world of representational art is even smaller.

The painting I’ve chosen for this week’s ramble is Brian Rego’s Faulkner’s Cabin. As I watched his videos and looked at his art, I kept asking myself “How do I know this guy?” I decided to run a search of my Dropbox folders for “American Art Collector” and, lo and behold, in May 2014, I had written an article on Perceptual Painters, an artists collective that Brian had founded with a group of friends and fellow artists.

At the time, Brian told me the artists paint from nature and the model, relishing “the kind of energy that exists working directly from the motif. We don’t work from photographs. I think there is an exchange between the motif, the painting, and the painter that only occurs working from life. That’s one of our core sensibilities.” As he has grown in his art and observational skills, that remains a core sensibility.

Back home, Brian painted Faulkner’s Cabin at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. He has often shared workshop teaching duties with his close friend Philip R. Jackson, Associate Professor of Art and Painting Area Head at the University of Mississippi Oxford. One of their frequent subjects is Rowan Oak.

I had met Philip in 2005 when he was an art instructor at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio when I was there to give a lecture on contemporary representational art.

Faulkner acquired the run-down property in 1930 and named it Rowan Oak after two trees: the rowan or mountain ash tree of Scotland, a symbol of peace and security, and the live oak of America, a symbol of strength and solitude. He used the 1840s log cabin to house his milk cow and lawn tools.

When Brian was studying for his MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), he felt the kind of art he and his friends were interested in wasn’t supported strongly enough. He explains, “There was a small faction of us who were thriving and Scott Noel was an advocate for what we were interested in. He introduced me to painters I had not been aware of and provided a space for us to explore. He was like our guiding light in that environment.”

Scott, who began teaching at PAFA in 1980, also figures in Brian’s Rowan Oak experience. He suggests that passages in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury were very poetic and his “observations were so painterly”. One of my favorite passages is “I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.”

Another painting Brian produced at Rowan Oak is Faulkner's House, the writer’s 1840s Greek Revival home. There is a photo of Brian painting it on site—before the addition of a figure that you can see in the finished painting.

The composition of Faulkner’s Cabin is complex. I like paint and was immediately drawn to the painting because it appears that Brian built the cabin out of paint applied in thick impasto. The fence rails, emerging from the lower right of the composition are nailed onto the finished logs of the cabin, forming a line that continues off the edge of the panel on the left. There is more activity in the space to the right of the juncture of the cabins side and front walls.

The solid space of the cabin and the air around it aren’t static, he explains. “Space cannot be inanimate. It’s completely animated. Forms in space are constantly moving, concealing and revealing. The shape of the space is constantly changing.”

Always hung up on narrative, I asked him if the figure in the painting is Faulkner working in his garden. “The figures emerge from the subconscious,” he replied. “They’re compositional. I always ask, ‘Where does this figure need to exist?’ In this painting, I wanted to compress the scale of the cabin. The role of the figure is not to establish a narrative but I Iove to hear the narratives people bring to the paintings.”

Brian’s orientation to nature is spiritual. “We sense a kinship with nature. It’s part of us and we’re part of it. On a physical level we come from it and we return to it. There’s beauty and unpredictability, order and disorder, reconstruction and reconstruction. There’s the intelligence of nature. There are visual phenomena and those that can be described by physics, and there is the metaphysical. I sense all that happening at once. It’s profound, both present and timeless. It’s the miracle of existing, the fact that it even exists and even seems to exist beyond itself.”

When I ran an architecture unit for the Western New York Institute for the Arts in Education for children from kindergarten through high school, I found fourth graders to be the most exciting. They had insights and the confidence to express them. A few years later, peer pressure and the constaints of culture discouraged their expression.

Brian has found the same situation working with students and observes, “It’s the rare older student who has that innocence.” In his own work, as he manipulates the physicality of the paint to express volume and space and to communicate symbolically something that exists beyond the observable subject, he maintains a sense of innocence and wonder, “going out into the landscape and finding something I didn’t anticipate."

View work by Brian Rego   ►

When I was a kid and rolled up sheets of newspaper and tied them into knots for kindling, little did I know that many decades later I would meet an artist who created portraits of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark with rolled newspaper. Gugger Petter has done just that and shows her current work at Evoke.

My parents bought what became our family home when I was 3. My mother had told her friends when she moved to Scituate, MA, that she would one day own that particular house. They laughed. After having married my father, had my brother and, 8 years later, me, my father charmed Annie Edson, the wonderful old Yankee lady who owned the house into selling it to them. Her stipulation was that she would live there until she died. She lived in the apartment on the second floor in the 1833 residence that she had run as an inn. Annie often took me by the hand and, carrying a basket, would have me pick up twigs in the yard that she would use for kindling in her fireplace.

My aunt would drop off the Sunday papers after early Mass and when we would later wander into the living room, Annie would be sitting there in my father’s chair reading the papers, dropping the pages around her on the floor. She taught me to roll the pages, make a knot, and she took them upstairs for additional kindling.

When Gugger moved to California 1986 she was intrigued by the way the sun yellowed newspapers and began to think about how she could use newspapers as a medium in her art. Its limited color palette and fragility posed a problem but she found if she rolled the paper into a tube and actually limited her palette to the colors available she had the building materials for making 3-D wall and floor sculptures.

She had learned basic tapestry weaving in Mexico and adapted it to her own unique way of weaving the newspaper roles on a metal frame and varnishing it to make nearly indestructible compositions. They are so indestructible, in fact, that several survived the total destruction of the Hard Rock Hotel in Biloxi, MS, in Hurricane Katrina. When she saw video of the aftermath, on top of one of the piles of rubble was one of her 4 panels of rock stars that had been installed days before the grand opening that would never take place. When the hotel was rebuilt, Hard Rock dedicated a private space in the attic for relics of the disaster, including two of Gugger’s panels. The other two had floated out to sea.

Lady Luck smiled on her after that, however, when, in 2007, her brother-in-law asked her to do a portrait of Barack Obama for his presidential campaign headquarters in Chicago. The ambassador of her native Denmark had seen the monumental portrait and asked later if he could borrow it for his official residence in Washington, DC. He kept asking for an extension of the loan and to thank her, invited her to lunch with Crown Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark. (The couple are now king and queen.)

The Danish Museum of National History and Portrait Gallery in Frederiksborg Castle, asked Gugger for the loan of the Obama portrait. She suggested to the museum that it would be nice to have another portrait to go with it, telling them she would like to produce one of Crown Princess Mary. In 2012, Mary unveiled the portrait at the museum.

I lived briefly in northern Denmark when I studied at a photography school that promptly went bankrupt. Gugger asked if I can still speak Danish. I told her there is no “still” about it since I lived out in the country where the people have a heavy accent (which she acknowledged). I would practice what I needed to say when I went to get milk and eggs and gas for the hot water heater, but was then dead in the water. The Danish people were warm, welcoming and supportive, however, and often wanted to practice their English—especially the kids. It’s no surprise to me that these open-minded people would welcome a portrait made of newspaper of their soon-to-be queen into a national museum and that she would unveil it herself.

Given the complexity of her raw material and its assembly, I’m amazed by the subtleties she realizes in her portraits, especially this one of Queen Mary. She decided to face her subject toward the left, gazing into the future, using Danish newspapers on the left and newspapers from Mary’s native Australia on the right. She looked everywhere for Australian newspapers and eventually had to call the Danish embassy there to send her some—which they did, after a lot of convincing.

“As a child I loved going to museums,” Gugger says, “and this was my favorite museum. I always dreamed about living there--and today I do (a little bit) with my Mary work in permanent collection.”

Gugger no longer makes personalized portraits, concentrating now on enigmatic figurative compositions of people and animals. She describes them as embodying a “tension between opposites.” She controls the tension between positive and negative space, dark colors and light colors, detail and empty space, even energizing the space between male and female figures. Describing the latter, she says, “It’s not just a daily scene in a daily material. There’s much more behind it.”

“I find the informative aspect of newspaper quite important, “she says. “Since each piece I create holds all the world/local news of that particular time frame, it becomes an historic piece within itself. All artists date their oeuvre with great importance—reflecting their moment in time. My works not only hold a date, they also represent an historic documentation of our lives. This information may not be of importance to the viewer, but for me each piece becomes a diary.”

In Dog with 3 People and Child, a dog in the foreground occupies a negative space with no detail, contemplating an unknown object in front of him. Little bits of shadow ground the dog and the figures in the nebulous space. Gugger says, “The shoes and legs are arranged on the vertical and the background is totally chaos.”

“My works are usually monumental,” she explains. Dog with 3 People and Child is 62 by 45 inches. “You can see the totality of the work form a distance. Close up it transforms in a wonderful way into an abstraction. It can be viewed both ways. There is always ambiguity in my work. The story needs to be informed by the viewer. The subjects are anonymous. I need freedom when I work and I set the subjects free. Here we don’t know what kind of dog it is. It wears a collar so it belongs to someone but maybe not the people nearby.”

Dog with 3 People and Child invites us to wander visually around its surface, looking for details in the colored areas, enjoying the patterns in areas with no detail, and making up stories about the people and the dog, adding psychological tensions to the visual tensions, and having fun in the process.

View work by Gugger Petter   ►

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri grew up in south Texas at the mouth of the Rio Grande. After a peripatetic lifetime of living everywhere from Central America to an off-grid home in Oregon to a lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Maine, she has settled in Santa Fe, in the Rio Grande Rift between the volcanic Jemez Mountains and the tectonic Sangre de Cristos. The valley and the mountains are full of the flora and fauna that have fascinated her since she was a child.

“Other than New York,” she says, “This is the first time I’ve lived in a town. We’d been living way out and I miss seeing wild animals in the back yard like bobcats and bears. She and her husband have favorite mountain trails and collect rocks, bones and plants on their hikes. They have even set up a trail cam with a motion sensor in a remote canyon in the mountains to observe the animals that visit its tiny spring. “You get to see who’s wandering unseen,” she observes. “The little spring of water is only the size of a plate but it’s a magnate for everything. They love it and so do we.”

When I first moved to Santa Fe 17 years ago, I went on hikes in both mountain ranges with Roshi Joan Halifax and folks from Upaya Zen Center. Naturalists in the group would point out things I, for one, didn’t see, including deer and coyote scat—their droppings along the trail. The only interest I had had in such things in the past had been avoiding cow flaps when we ran barefoot through the pastures on the New Hampshire farm where we vacationed each July. Identifying the scat on the trails and its age, is a helpful guide to who is sharing the environment with you.

When she was living in Oregon, looking and seeing as she hiked, Irene found several owl pellets, the coughed up, undigested bones, teeth and fur of the owl’s last meal. She relates, “One day we were at this incredible place called Fort Rock. There are giant cliffs and at the bottom of one there were all these owl pellets, hundreds of them. I was so excited. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what I was going to do with them, but I had a backpack and I started to fill it. My husband said, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I don't know, but I need them for something.’”

She explains, “It's all out there just waiting for us. It's like this incredible world of everything and anything that you want to learn about, be it a plant or an animal like a gila monster that you see for the first time. I like to read about it as much as I can and it just opens up a whole world of interest for me."

Back home, after collecting the owl pellets, she tried soaking them in water—which made a mess. In her research, she learned that she should sterilize the pellets by baking them in the oven at 300 degrees. After that, and airing out the house from the smell, she began dissecting them, sorting out the ribs, jaws and other bones with tweezers.

The bones have found their way into complex yet subtle compositions that appear from afar to be like sgraffito or the scratchboards we all made as kids.

One of those pieces, Encantada (Spanish for enchanted) will be shown at Evoke in her exhibition, Honey in the Desert, that opens August 30. Irene explains, “I thought I really want to make alluring figures out of the bones. So, from a distance you would think ‘Ah, there’s a very alluring woman.’ But she’s really made out of bones.”

Encantada is composed on a round copper tray. “I’ve had that tray for years,” she explains. “I think I got it at some antique store or junk store. I collect all kinds of stuff. I like round things and I wanted the piece to be very graceful and beautiful. I also thought I needed something that would be protective around the edges.”

When she was working on the figure, she came upon a recently deceased porcupine. “There was no blood and it was clean,” she explains. As she went through the arduous task of removing its quills, she did her research. She discovered “They have 30,000 quills with long soft quills on their underbelly. They have different shaped quills and different coloring. The quills are a pale creamy color and then they’re dark brown at the tip so you have these beautiful variations. It’s just so exciting. I thought, ‘I can make shadows with these. I can put them in with the bone pieces and I can make things so the dead porcupine can live on in my art.’”

The bones and quills are adhered to the copper tray with a special glue called PaleoBOND. “I love it,” she says. “It’s what paleontologists use on fossils.” The early reception of her bone pieces (which are only part of her output that includes complex paintings and assemblages) wasn’t always positive. “You know, most people don’t want to think about an owl coughing up something. Or, sometimes, they think it’s droppings. It’s not, but it turns people off. I feel people miss out on learning about something that’s really interesting and amazing.”

Exploring her house and gardens rising up in levels past a greenhouse to a guest casita at the top of a rise, everything is “interesting and amazing”. Sitting on the porch of the casita—which she is now using as her studio—I gazed into the tops of dried agave spikes. The sometimes 30-foot spikes with yellow blossoms are stunning in gardens and in the desert. These, however, were the beautiful, brown, expired spikes which she had seen in other people’s gardens, asked the owners to save them, and then strapped them on the top of her Jeep to take home.

Looking and seeing has the added element of conserving for Irene. Dead things come alive in her work. “I never have a lack of ideas,” she says. “I have a whole lot of things I want to do. I can’t wait to get to my studio. Some days I get so excited I feel like I’m just going to take off and fly. Literally. It’s a good feeling.”

View work by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri   ►

Camille Pissarro wrote “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” A few years earlier, Thoreau commented, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

When he was boiling water on his gas stove during a recent power outage at his home in Maine, Jeremy Miranda looked and thought “That blue flame is so beautiful.” Cooking (version 3) is his third rendering of the phenomenon of the blue gas flame heating a metal pot with steam rising from the boiling water. This continuing series of paintings is, he says, “an attempt to capture brief run-ins with the sublime that are buried in the everyday."

They’re also a sign to him that he is slowing down, a process he has been working on for many years. “The work is, in a way, an attempt to slow the world down and experience it with all the senses on a level that sort of feels otherworldly.”

The ethereal blue flame is a gaseous mixture of mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor which we’re not usually aware of in our brightly-lit kitchens. Jeremy was “steeped in the moment of the power outage” when the flame burned brightly in the dark. Slowing down and living in the moment is a focused experience which, he says, “in my brain is a space like a shelter with a confined set of sensory information.” “We don’t associate flame with textures,” he says. But, to interpret the insubstantial flame in this rendition of the subject, he used almost pure cobalt blue in parts of the flame and its reflection. In the process, he gave the flame a chunky presence on the panel. As the gas is transformed to flame and the water is transformed to steam, the acrylic pigment is transformed into a recognizable image on the panel. Jeremy likens the painting to 1,000 years of art history in which artists have worked to render light on metal (an ubiquitous still life subject), vapor (steam, clouds, mist), “all the senses and the textures of the materials.”

He captured the feeling of that moment in his powerless house and ignites our own memories of the beauty of a mundane gas stove.

We, as viewers, bring our own experiences and preconceptions to looking at a painting. One viewer asked Jeremy how he had a gas flame when the knobs of the stove are obviously turned off. The two knobs actually control the oven and broiler. In another painting in the Cooking exploration, he includes a gauge next to the knobs; in others, there are no knobs at all. As Jeremy slows down, pauses in the moment and simplifies his paintings, he continues his education in the elemental. Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote, “There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”

View work by Jeremy Miranda   ►