MANY YEARS AGO I concluded that painting representational landscapes of New Mexico was a fool’s errand.  Those vistas would always overwhelm any attempt to be captured with such a measly medium as paint on canvas.  Also, there are so many artists in New Mexico that have made a life’s work of the subject and are capable of doing a much better job of it than me.  Still, sometimes we simply have to do the work for the nourishment of our spirit.  And, to be honest, I have never done a thing that did not contain the stamp of my personal aesthetic.  
AND SO, with the heat of summer underway, I find myself venturing outside with my sketch tools and watercolors to paint from life.  This ‘on location’ work has been keeping me engaged.  With the pandemic having removed many of the common signposts of daily life, this return to observational painting and the landscape I’ve loved for the last 40 years has been emotionally grounding. 
AT THE MOMENT I am thinking of this work as an intermission.  A time to grab a popcorn and coke, and a smoke on the sidewalk outside the theater, before the next act.  

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“Black Mesa”

‘BLACK MESA’ STARTED all this plein air work. It was completed over a three day period with me working out the back of our Honda CRV while Meg collected trash along side the road or read her book. Later we would have a picnic dinner before driving home in the dark; three perfect pandemic evenings.

I drove by this spirit-place four times a day for several years. This was 40 years ago when I had just moved to New Mexico. It is a personal touchstone and a place I’ve always wanted to paint.

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“Overlook Park / North, East, South View”

THIS SECOND THREE panel painting has taken several weeks to complete and involved repeated visits to the site. This view, from a mesa 800 feet above the valley floor, looks north to the Colorado border, east to the Sangre de Cristo range, and south into White Rock Canyon through which the Rio Grande River flows on its way to Cochiti Reservoir. This place has always stunned me into silent humility.

Daring to attempt this vista is a testament to my painterly ambitions and an illustration of just how foolhardy an endeavor this attempt to capture the spaces of New Mexico can be. Still, I like the results.

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“Long View North / Abiquiu Lake”

“Long View North / Abiquiu Lake” is the result of two mornings’ attempts to paint the lake, which lies at the northern edge of the Jemez Complex. From my vantage point well above the water I had a large view of the lake and its surrounding typography which included the western edge of Ghost Ranch several miles distant. Several failed attempts offered busy, illustrative renderings with little sense of the actual space and light.

Finally, by narrowing my attention to the furthest range visible in the morning light, I was able to pare this image down to its bare essentials. This, to me, is what the Zen of watercolor is all about.

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“Morning After / Monsoon”

I HAD LEFT MY HOUSE in Santa Fe at 5:30 AM in a light drizzle. I thought, after a night of steady rains, the cloud banks that inevitably follow an overnight storm would be worth pursuing. But, instead, they pursued me. Attempting to get out from under the rain I drove north, had a breakfast burrito at Bode’s in Abiquiu, and decided to head back south. Just south of Black Mesa the ground clouds parted and an extraordinary light landed on the wet earth and trees, sparking and shimmering against the lifting cloud bank.

I turned the car around, found a spot well out of the traffic lanes (but on top of an ant hill) and did this watercolor. The pinons really were black and there really was that vibrating pristine light.

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Dusk / Canejos Canyon

WE TOOK A FISHING and painting trip to Chama this week. I came away with two paintings but no fish. This canyon is just across the New Mexico boarder and is considered one of the most remote wilderness areas in Colorado. Meg said, “Oh, let’s stop here and read the ‘Interpretive Panels!” A term I’ve never heard before, her ‘interpretive panels’ had me chuckling to myself for the next hour. Winds were blowing and the air was dense with moisture as I did this painting. The distances are truly hard to describe.

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Vista Looking West / Highway 64

A FAVORITE DRIVE, highway 64 runs east and west through some very pretty northern New Mexico country. This painting was done from a pullout near Chama.

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Three Hills / South, East, North

THESE HILLS I’ve been painting have no name. They are a minor feature of a much greater, windblown and eroded region which tumbles down from the volcanic Jemez Range. Endlessly varied dunes and cliffs go on for miles. If you could set up a time laps camera to record this area over many millions of years it would appear as a great ocean of sand rippling and changing, much like the waves of the Pacific.

They stand alongside the road leading to Abiquiu. Every time I have rounded the bend to lay eyes on these conical forms my heart has leapt to their symmetry and grace. I made studies of three views from the south, east, and north.

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Fire Season

FIRES ARE RAGING in California, Colorado, Arizona and now New Mexico. I have been returning to a location just north of Black Mesa to study the sunrise looking east. With the Rio Grande River in the foreground, I have watched the Sangre de Cristo range, 20 miles distant, slowly emerge through the smoke haze as the sun rises — a perfect red sphere.

These dense, complex, and ever changing grays have been an extraordinary challenge that has gotten me up and out the door at 6 AM almost every morning for the last two weeks.

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Lot 32

THREE WEEKS AGO I was tossed from my paint site along highway 285 by the Tesuque Tribal Police!  A week later I discovered Lot 32, a building lot in a new housing development just north of town near the Santa Fe Opera where I have done several studies for this triptych.  
SANTA FE IS NESTLED in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains which form the southernmost tip of the Rocky Mountain chain.  Often people will fly into Albuquerque, drive up to Santa Fe for a vacation, then leave days later without ever discovering that just three miles to the north, just over the top of a small rise, lie some of the most beautiful vistas in New Mexico.  This would be their first view from the top of that small rise, looking east.

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Route 14

ROUTE 14, ‘The Back Road,’ runs south and east, passing through the Manzano Mountains on its way to Los Cerrillos, Madrid, and eventually Albuquerque.  I lived for a time off Bonanza Creek Road near The Lone Butte General Store.  Situated on a high plateau, this once hard-grazing ranch country covered in thin forests of chola and prickly pear cacti, has been subdivided into ten and twenty acre lots.  Far from water, wells are drilled quite deep with no guarantees.  Living there, I always felt the keenness of being far from water.  What beauty this austere and understated land conveys is found either in the distant geological vignettes which rise from the ruler-sharp horizon or in the intimate knowledge of one’s particular piece of land.  I called Liz out one evening to watch the sunset.  For 15 minutes, as we stood still and silent in our driveway. A shower approached with rainbow attached.  We delighted as a covey of quail moved about our feet on their way to their night’s resting place.  A rabbit stopped just feet away to observe our still forms in the warm glow of the setting sun.  I was struck by all this life in a seemingly barren patch of land.
Out to paint the sunset from my vantage point alongside the highway, I found the sky again consumed with smoke from the California fires which continue to rage.  And so these two paintings have become part of the ‘Fire Season’ series, with the sky somehow as solid as the earth, the setting sun losing its light ten minutes early behind a gray-white wall of high-altitude smoke.

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Chama

I have always found paintings of the fall aspens to be cliche and overly sentimental, yet here I was, for four days, in the Chama River Valley, painting the changing aspen! I came away with just three tolerable paintings and a “Yellow Headache.”

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And now come these three vistas just before our first snowfall. Each the result of a haze of high altitude smoke, they appear predictive of an early snow.

November 2020: I have purchased a 14-passenger bus and converted it into a paint studio so that I might continue this series of plein air paintings through the winter. This triptych is the first painting completed from the comfort of my van/bus/studio. One passes by these cliffs located just five miles north of Santa Fe on I-285 when on the way to Taos and parts north.

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ART BOX
and
Stan Berning Studios
Santa Fe, NM
928-460-2611
stan@stanberning.com
http://www.artboxatrunkshow.com/2018/11/15/welcome-to-art-box-a-trunk-show/

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