Georgia Okeefe Museum

Tenth and Taos: art inspired by New Mexico

Patrons who rarely miss this event anxiously await this year’s collection of original paintings masterminded by nine artists who chose Taos, N.M. as this year’s painting-on-location destination. Over the last decade Austin Miller’s group of artists have travelled to Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Montana, Florida, Colorado, Michigan and Maryland. Taos and its immediate environs was chosen for its extraordinary light and rich palette of color typical of New Mexico’s canyons, deserts and mountains; the same dramatic landscape that influenced one of America’s greatest painters, Georgia O’Keefe . The seven-day workshop was held on April 20-27 at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, an adobe-style home converted into a studio/retreat for artists and writers such as Georgia O’Keefe, DH Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Frank Waters. Taking occasional breaks from their 10-hour daily workshops, the artists took volumes of digital photographs capturing the local landscapes, flora, fauna and architecture, and then painted these images in watercolor and/or acrylic. The extraordinary landscape of the Southwest, the same desert/canyon landscape that profoundly inspired O’Keefe, was perceived as spirit-moving and magical by the artists. They also took the time to tour O’Keefe’s residence called Ghost Ranch and started their workshop by visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. “The Mabel Dodge Luhan House with its wonderful workshop area is nestled within Taos yet it is a timeless, secluded adobe compound. Since 1918, decades of artists and writers-in-residence remain almost palpable guardians of the place. The iconic house itself was a fun subject to paint,” Orozco added. “Not only was the Mabel Dodge Luhan a fantastic retreat, but the way the first Christian churches stood out against the landscape was another inspiration. And…….the Taos pueblo dogs have a personality that’s hard to resist as subject matter, too.” “The afternoon we drove through the canyon’s of Abiquiuinto Ghost Ranch, we were gifted their magnificence by the sun’s light. It was a spellbinding experience,” Kartarik said.  “I didn’t think I had the canyons in me to do them justice, but after being so awestruck by their beauty, I couldn’t ‘not’ paint them.

Robert Henri & Ireland: From New York to Corrymore | Georgia O ...

Is a major loan exhibition organized by the Mint Museum of Art and opening there in May 2011 before touring to two additional venues in 2011 and 2012. Long celebrated as the leader of the urban realists group known as “the Ashcan School,” Henri’ art has received less attention than one might expect. The few museum exhibitions that have focused solely on Henri include those organized by the Delaware Art Museum in 1984 and the Orlando Museum of Art in 1994 were retrospective in nature.  Robert Henri and Ireland is the first to explore a particular component of Henri’s work, and it will make a significant contribution to scholarship in general also expand upon revisionist scholarship on the Ashcan School that was featured in Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2008 and Leaving for the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, in 2003.

Robert Henri and Ireland is the first exhibition to present one of the most significant group of works that Henri produced: those inspired by his travels to Ireland. By bringing approximately 50 paintings of Irish subject matter drawn from public and private collections, co-curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Valerie Leeds will clarify the nature and significance of the contribution Henri made to American art as a result of his being and painting in Ireland.

The appealing images of Irish people in the exhibition, and in particular Irish children, provide new information on a genre in which Henri excelled: portraiture.  But they also provide a means of determining the development of his handling of paint, and his understanding of composition and color theories, and demonstrating that the paintings he produced in Ireland were among his most accomplished.