New Mexico Art Adventure - 2011 - Printmaking

Blue skies, snow-topped mountains, pronghorns, and chili peppers greeted and delighted the WV and Ohio artists attending the 2011 New Mexico Art Adventure sponsored by Shrew'd Arts and led by artist Amy Flowers.  This year's theme was exploring the printer's art, with inspiration from the work of New Mexico's master printer, Gustave Baumann.

Our first day was spent in Santa Fe, where we visited the Governor's Palace Print Shop that features a reproduction of Baumann's studio with his actual furnishings, equipment and supplies.  The wall with his arranged pigments is an artwork in itself.

The curator explained the process Baumann used for his woodcut prints and showed us other printing presses and examples of books and other material printed there.  We went on to the NM Museum of History which currently has an exhibit of pages from the St. John's Bible.  The gorgeous artwork and calligraphy of Donald Jackson and his colleagues almost took my breath away.

For the rest of the week, we went on North to Cimarron, where we were inspired by the beauty of the mountains and worked on our art at the Casa del Gavilan. With guidance from Amy, we began carving rubber blocks and making monotype prints.  We also spent one day in Taos where we visited a print maker and watched a chine colle' in progress.

We used Golden Open Acrylic paints as our "ink" because it is slow-drying and mixes well with other media.




Here are some of the prints I made using different techniques and papers.  

Remembrance of New Mexico Adventure

A mixed media canvas that I started in October is finally finished!!  One of the great things about using acrylics is that you can paint over them if you don't like how it looks.  One of the bad things about acrylics is that you can do it many times :) 

I started this painting by laying down some tissue papers and some garnet paste on this 12x12 canvas.  The resulting lines and forms reminded me of the mesas and left-over volcanic formations that we saw as we trekked around northern New Mexico on our Art Adventure last fall.  I tried to make this painting more abstract, but my Virgoian traits just don't seem to let me leave things alone.  The final step was putting in the travelers and "Big Blue".

More Catching Up - October Nature Journal Page

Over the holidays, I finished my October page in my nature journal.  It took me a while to identify some of the beautiful fall plants that I saw when I attended the New Mexico Art Adventure in Cimarron, NM.  The back meadow of Casa del Gavilan was fascinating to this WV girl.  Some of the plants were familiar because they were relatives of Eastern species (as in the case of the pine, oak and juniper trees), or because I've seen them in little dish gardens (as in the case of the pincushion cactus).  But the grasses and other flowering plants were quite different from our plants and were most difficult to identify because they had passed the flowering stage and were left with dried flowers and seedpods.  The field guide that I purchased while in New Mexico only showed the flowering stage, and most web sites didn't have photographs of the seed stage either.  I finally gave up on some of the most interesting plants and drew in my nature journal the plants and animals that I was certain of.

As a background to my New Mexico page, I drew a front view of the Casa del Gavilan with its scenic backdrop of the "Tooth of Time".

October: Art Adventure in New Mexico

Here it is November, and I haven't posted yet about my art adventure the second week of October.  As I knew it would be, the week was full of fun, learning about Southwestern Modernist painters, practicing new art techniques, and experiencing a new and amazing environment.   The "New Mexico Art Adventures" are led by Amy Flowers, a mixed media painter from Columbus, Ohio.  Information about her art and the classes she teaches can be found at her web site, ShrewdArts.   

Upon arriving in Albuquerque, our group was taken to a hotel in Santa Fe for the first night, so that we could spend all of the next day visiting the New Mexico Museum of Art, galleries and shops there before heading up into the mountains for the rest of the week.   Of course, we spent some time admiring the jewelry made by the Native American vendors in the Governor's Palace plaza. A big surprise was finding that a West Virginia artist, Lynn Boggess, was opening an exhibition at a Santa Fe gallery that week.

Our ultimate destination was the Casa del Gavilan, a bed and breakfast lodge near the town of Cimarron, in Northeast New Mexico.  This is cowboy country, lots of wide, open spaces, where the deer and the antelope play.  It's also at a high altitude, which brought me some lightheadedness in the first few days, but also made the air crisp and invigorating.

 This location was so picturesque that I wanted to get up early to catch the morning light on the "Tooth of Time" -- the white mountaintop behind the casa that is a landmark for miles around.  

Our art group had full access to the lodge and its surrounding property for the rest of the week.  Amy gave us art projects and instruction each day, and we also took short trips and hikes to break up the days. 

 

 

In mid-week, we got up early and drove over the mountains to Taos, the artists' mecca.

The scenery was awesome in the mountains where the cottonwood trees were showing their fall colors.

In Taos, we went to the Harwood Museum and saw art by the Taos Modernists, including Dasburg, Marin and O'Keefe. 

Back at the Casa, we experimented with new paint - Golden Open Acrylics, and new techniques, including using digital ground to print on fabric. 

What a wonderful, artful, week it was!  I can totally understand why Georgia O'Keefe and other artists were drawn to that environment with its fresh air, big sky and wonderful light.  And I am already planning my trip back there next year.

P.S.  Yes, that's masking tape headgear I'm wearing - a new kind of flypaper.