Seasons greetings! As we prepare for the upcoming holidays and the close of 2012, we reflect on the highlights of this past year. The gallery celebrated its 25th anniversary on Canyon Road with a gathering of friends and colleagues who have helped to make our lives and work continually rewarding. Certainly an exhibition highlight was the Thomas and Peter Moran show, "West by Southwest," that opened last October. We extend particular kudos to David Wright, author of the definitive book on Peter Moran, who gave a stellar presentation on the artist's work during our opening reception. And we congratulate former ZLG staff member, Stacia Lewandowski, on winning the award for best first book for  her "Light, Landscape and the Creative Quest: Early Artists of Santa Fe" from the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards for 2012.

We're coming to the close of the centennial year in New Mexico, 1912-2012. For our part, over the course of the year each issue of this journal has shined a light on New Mexico's historical artists--those who visited the newly opened Territory prior to statehood--such as Joseph Horace Eaton, Edward S. Curtis, and the Moran brothers, Peter and Thomas. For this issue, we've moved the timeline up to the founding of New Mexico's two major art colonies, Taos and Santa Fe, in the days shortly before statehood.

Keeping to this theme, our online exhibition, "Divergent Views," features the early artists of Taos and Santa Fe. In addition, you'll see selected works from the gallery's new acquisitions, listings for what's happening in Santa Fe and notable museum exhibits around the country. And as always, please remember to stop by and visit us whenever you are in Santa Fe.

In the early days, as artists began to work in Taos and Santa Fe, they came to be called collectively, "the Taos - Santa Fe Art Colony," as that was how they were identified in the early articles of the Museum of New Mexico's periodical, El Palacio. But a closer look reveals that the artists in these two locales were quite distinct from one another and were drawn by differing circumstances. The following comments made by two of the early artists illuminate their clearly disparate points of view. The first:

"Never shall I forget the first powerful impressions, my own impressions direct from a new land through my own eyes. The great naked anatomy of a majestic landscape once tortured, now calm; the fitness of adobe houses to their tawny surroundings; the vastness and overwhelming beauty of skies; terrible drama of storms; peace of night . . . all in beauty of color, vigorous form, everchanging light . . ."

And now the other:
"I am likely to have to stay in this desolate [spot] for a year or two and may not get off as easy as that. . . . There is nothing in this place to paint and no one to buy pictures. . . . The wild sunflower is the only flower that seems to grow naturally here and even they look as if they were sorry they came."

The first impression is from the Taos artist Ernest Blumenschein who was recalling many years later how profoundly affected he was upon his first sight of Taos and the region surrounding it. He was on foot and carrying the broken wagon wheel which had famously, and perhaps fortuitously, broken about 20 miles north of Taos, during a painting excursion with Bert Geer Phillips in 1898.

Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953)
"Rabbit Tail-Shoshone"

Oil on canvas

18 x 12 inches
Signed lower center

 
The region seemed to be imbued with all of the raw material . . . to continue,  click here.

William Robinson Leigh (1866-1955)