“I
remember very distinctly the day when I became, at least in my mind,
a committed artist. I was a junior in college at Miami
University of Ohio. It was a cold, damp forlorn weekend in late
winter, 1987. I was in the studio exasperated over my latest painting
assignment. My professor, though an accomplished artist, lacked the
spark of an inspiring teacher. We had been focusing all semester on
painting portraits, still lives and interiors, and I was bored out
of my mind with the subject matter. That weekend we had to produce
a new painting of a theme of our choosing and submit it on Monday
for a grade. I was at my wit’s end as to what to paint.
Additionally, I was feeling desperately homesick for Philmont.
It had been almost two years since I had been back to the Ranch, as
I had opted to study in France the previous summer. With the tease
of spring in the air, the Sangre
de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico were fiercely calling
me, and I could feel the tug like an ache in every millimeter of my
body and soul.
That morning I had been struggling with a couple of paintings of studies
of fabric—folds and ripples—very dull. I was exasperated.
Then an exhilarating moment of challenge came over me.
I took down and put away the fabric studies, and set up a new, large,
blank canvas. From my bag I retrieved my journal, from which I extracted
a familiar photograph: a view from the top of Baldy
Mountain, looking southwest to Eagle
Nest Lake across the Moreno
Valley to Taos Canyon and beyond. I had taken the picture five
years earlier, in 1982, during my Philmont
Rayado trek, and had been carrying it around with me ever since
as a source of inspiration and connection with that place and those
people in New Mexico whom I admired so much.
I held the picture in my hand, and stared at the large white canvas
before me.
I began to paint.
Lost in memory and concentration, I felt utterly peaceful and joyful
as I worked at recreating before me that landscape that was so dear
to me. The painting evolved quickly and effortlessly, as I mixed and
loaded my brush with familiar colors of the southwest: ochre and russet,
turquoise and sage, cerulean and ultramarine, umber, viridian, sienna,
vermilion....I dabbed the final brush stroke and stepped back; there
before me were the mountains of Philmont
and the Moreno
Valley.
It was then that I came to an essential realization: That if one is
to be a serious artist, one must paint what one is most passionate
about.
For me, it is the land; nature. These have been—since my epiphany
that cold March day twenty years ago—the greatest source of
artistic inspiration. Through the years, other passions have come
to fuel my muse. But the land remains and speaks to me always—Especially
a certain tract of about 214 square miles in Colfax County, New
Mexico.”
