Mr. Berning, a resident of Santa Fe since 1981, is a well known artist, author, teacher, and former gallery owner . His works have been exhibited in such diverse locations as San Francisco, Paris, and New York’s Lincoln Center. In 2005 his paintings became the focus of the film OFF THE MAP starring Joan Allen and Sam Elliott. Also in 2005 he began a year long journey up the west coast of North America. Experiences during this time became the foundation for his memoir about art, which was written over the next three years.
Evocative of the New Mexico landscape with its sweeping vistas and ever changing light, these most recent oil, egg tempera, and watercolor paintings are the result of a fifteen year process described in the entry “A Figurative Derivation”.
Artist Statement:
Being a painter, I was born in 1951 already an antique. After a lifetime of creating images in this post modern world I have come to champion no ism’s. Taking to heart my eighty year old friend’s reminder that his generation made sure everything had been done, I have proceeded to do everything in each painting. The resulting fifteen oil paintings, though inevitably stamped with my distinctive aesthetic voice, travel freely through various fields of contemporary exploration. Accepting that the act of working in paint will result in the echo of vaguely familiar imagery from past painters has released me from the tyrannical demand for newness and, ironically, opened the process to a multitude of possibilities embodied in each individual painting. If it has all been done before there is no territory worth defending. One either stands on shifting sands, or swims.
Many of the paintings completed in this series have sold making viewing of the remaining images difficult. This entry of only available work will update regularly.
All paintings are 18″ x 24″ on 24″ x 30″ paper unless otherwise noted.
Begun two years ago as a project for the Santa Fe Monothon, these intagliotype images are the end result. Each image is 18″ x 24″. Printed in limited editions of ten, using a hand-inked etching and monotype process, each print in its edition is similar yet unique.
Jemez Complex / Winter Dressed / View South, West, North
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The Jemez Complex is an extinct super volcano. It was created one million years ago in a series of massive explosions. What remains is a mountain of remarkably varied topography. Here, seen from Lower Pacheco Canyon, 20 miles away, the mountain range presents itself in its greatest majesty. These paintings were completed late in the afternoon on consecutive days.
While each panel stands well on its own, I am fascinated by how they speak to each other, lending a transcendent layer of complexity to the whole; this while its palette captures perfectly this blue-steel, mid-winter light.
Jemez Complex / Winter Dressed / View South
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Jemez Complex / Winter Dressed / View West
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Jemez Complex / Winter Dressed / View North
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Bright Winter / Sangre de Cristo Range
This winter sun, under clear skies, reflected off snow covered mountains can be blinding.
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Metallic Sunset / Pena Blanca
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This view, looks out over agricultural fields which end in a tree line where the Rio Grande River runs through. The foothills of the southern end of the Jemez Range rise in the distance. Done the day before a snow storm, bands of high clouds were moving in from the west.
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Long View / St Peters Dome
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“Long View / St Peters Dome” is another painting from the Cochiti Village paint site. Cliffs of blasted earth have been smoothed by a million years into these powerful undulating forms. They were too distant to truly be capture in this painting. Still, I managed to find some of their magnitude.
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Dome Wilderness / South Gate
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I try not to be sentimental. As an artist, it is a mistake to place too much emotional or psychic meaning into these places I visit. It simply does not help with the work. While painting this view from Cochiti Village a thought kept needling my brain. ‘This is not just a distant view of the plateaus from which the Rio Grande River emerges from the Jemez Range, but rather there is some portal here’. I was delighted then to later discover its name: Dome Wilderness / South Gate.
