What Robert Motherwell Said…

This is the tenth and final in a series of posts taking you back through a history of my work, from its very realistic roots to my abstraction.

I set out walking—there is no other way to put it. I walked and walked, absorbing this new place I called home. It was a form of moving meditation that soothed something deep inside me and filled me with a profound sense of place and heritage.

The landscape connected me to those who came before: the ancients who lived high on the mountain above the timberline; the Comanche crossing from the plains over the peaks, traversing the very pass I see from my windows; and the Spanish colonists who carved their village out of this forbidding soil using nothing more than fire-hardened wooden tools. Everywhere, I saw evidence of their lives—piles of rock winnowed from their fields, collapsing adobe structures, and the occasional pottery sherd or tool.

I saw their fences—many of them very old—patched and repaired so many times they’d become their own art form. This photo illustrates perfectly what I mean.

The boundary lines made of stick and barbed wire were often wrapped round with discarded bailing wire.

Fences changed this landscape forever and not necessarily for the good. Land that had been open grazing for centuries was carved up into ownership that no longer allowed all livestock to thrive. But I was visually drawn to them even so.

And I was captivated by the stalks of red willow rising up through them, cutting their strong verticals.

All of these elements of the land and its history were beautiful to me. Spiraled fencing wire became the inspiration for one of my earlier pieces titled Life’s Yearning.

Then, springing from all those walks out on the llano, something very new rose up in me.

I took in the fences.

I watched the grasses.

I witnessed the sun casting linear shadows.

I absorbed the majesty and mystery of the land itself, the utter distances, the sweeping perspectives that were entirely missing from my previous life in the Pacific Northwest.

All of this came together in one painting. It was the kind of creative act where we watch the brush in our hands, moving across the canvas, making marks we had no idea of. As Robert Motherwell famously said, “In the brush doing what it’s doing, it will stumble on what one couldn’t do by oneself.” It was like that.

This piece gave birth to an extensive body of work that I call my Gray and Whites.

Bill Franke, who represents me at Hand Artes Gallery here in Truchas, refers to them Truchas Modernism.

I could never call my own work anything quite so grand, but I rather like it, so am grateful to Bill who does.

These paintings not only represent the grasses and fences against the snow, they are also meant to convey the bright New Mexico sunlight that bleaches color from the fields leaving only contrast, only shadow and light.

It is this same intense bright light, casting its long, deep shadows, turning the pastures into flat stretches of white even in the summer, that has washed the color out of my work. I’m not sure if it will ever return. Only time will tell.

The following three pieces, meant to illustrate that sun shining on buckskin grasses, also bring in the element of irrigation. Here in New Mexico the villagers have brought water to their crops through a system of acequias, or ditches, for centuries. The acequias in Truchas were dug in the mid 1700s and have been maintained over the years by the whole town coming together in the spring to clean and repair them. The use of this water is managed by a mayordomo who dictates when and for how long the water may be used. When a farmer is granted permission to open his gates, the fields are flooded with a flat lake of water.

These paintings represent the sun shining on flooded fields, creating a sort of reflecting mirror to the bright sky. Transitional pieces, they are announcing that there is something new waiting to be born. I don’t know what it is yet but I look forward to finding out.

Love to you all,

Jeane