traditional landscape paintings by dawn chandler

the new mexico paintings

“I have seen so much light, so much violent color, so many fires, that my mind is exhausted with the recording of it. I am touched with ocher, rose, shimmering gold; with silver of the moon, the flanks of stone mountains washed with a shade of apricot so unreal no painter would dare attempt reproduction.”

          — Jane Candia Coleman, Shadows in My Hands: A Southwestern Odyssey

Few regions of our country inspire me as much northern New Mexico. My love affair with the 47th state began in the summer of 1980 when I backpacked with friends at the Philmont Ranch near Cimarron, in Colfax County. After that experience, my dreams were filled with memories of astonishingly blue skies and dramatic clouds; of the most fragrant rain I have ever known; of endless expanses of silver-green sagebrush and dark pinon dotted against warm colors of desert earth. Despite Coleman’s quote above, I just had to attempt to capture those colors, those vistas. Indeed, for many years before moving to New Mexico permanently, painting scenes of New Mexico was a way for me to escape here. It was inevitable that I would eventually make New Mexico my home — and continue to try to capture the enchantment of the land in my paintings.

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