Jeane George Weigel’s Opening!

Yes, my opening. It’s finally happening and here’s the press release. I’m sharing it with you because some of you don’t know this part of my story. But there’s more after it so keep on reading:

Jeane George Weigel came to Truchas for the first time nearly ten years ago and the place changed her art forever. Beatrice Mandelman, one of the early Taos Moderns said that, “The land of the southwest makes it possible to be an abstractionist.” Weigel found that it made it impossible to be anything but.

A realist painter for her entire career before that, something about Truchas turned her to abstraction. And before knowing anything about the Taos Moderns, she began to emulate them.

“This land demands something of me,” Weigel says, “I’m not allowed to be passive on it.” And so the land she lives on, in the village of Truchas, has found its way into her paintings.

Unlike the Taos Moderns before her who worked hard to avoid any kind of representation, Weigel doesn’t shy away from it. In fact she endeavors to capture the essence of the land she has come to know and respect in her paintings. Stick fences that stitch across the landscape she sees from her porch have become a recurring theme, along with the mountains and the Espanola Valley.

“My experience of Truchas hasn’t been easy. I’ve been both compelled and repelled by it. It is my hope that my art reflects that kind of push-pull; that it represents what has been, for me, the real life of living in a small Spanish land grant village in northern New Mexico.”

We’re having an opening on August 2 from 3PM to 5PM at Hand Artes Gallery here in Truchas and I hope some of you will be able to come. But if you can’t attend the opening and have plans to visit the area soon, the show will be up until September 26th.

Those of you who have read the blog from its inception know something about what I mean when I say my experience of Truchas hasn’t been easy. I came here pretty unprepared for the place. It was presumptuous of me, really, to buy land, build a house and move here when I knew nothing about its heritage, its history. And Truchas is marked by its history. It colors everything here. The day to day strivings of all of us are tinged by that.

But I came. And I came at a time of loss, when my life had folded into itself and collapsed. I know, now, that I came here to heal, to be healed, to be embraced and sheltered and nurtured by this tough place. Because this place knows something of grief. And it also knows about compassion.

So this land and I limped along together. We rose and fell and rose and fell again.

And that’s what my show is about. It’s about a person, in a place, finding self and being made whole again. It’s a portrait of the land that has held me, comforted me, a land that has known its own pain and struggle and hardship.

Hope to see you there.

Hand Artes Gallery, County Road 75, #137, Truchas, NM, handartesgallery.com, 505-689-2443

Love to you all,
Jeane