Painting in New Mexico
A quick little landscape study I paintED at the view from Ghost Ranch
Traveling from my very green and mountainous home of Tennessee to the rocky rainbow desert land of New Mexico will always be a core memory I draw inspiration from. It taught me many things - like to apply and reapply sunscreen religiously because the elevation is ten times higher here. Yep. I didn't know elevation was a thing and got a third degree burn (gnarly bubbles and all) on my second day painting in the sun.
After seeing this dusty wonderland in person now, I can say that those pictures of the desert on the internet that seem edited to woodland-accustomed eyes are not. They don't even do them justice and that is the bane of the artist’s existence! The tools we have can come close but will never completely capture that feeling, magic, and raw beauty you can only perceive in all its glory by being there in that moment observing the details. My hope is to capture a fraction of that in a painting someday. I have so many photos that I look back on frequently for inspiration wishing I had painted even more than I did from life.
In the workshop, I met some incredible artists with an infectious enthusiasm for life. I learned about the planes of light, new color mixtures, and how to adjust to the extreme values and sunlight of painting in conditions that were so different than I was used to back at home.
Admittedly, this was such a spontaneous, minimally-researched trip I took after learning about the wild beauty of Georgia O'Keefe's untamed haven for artists called "Ghost Ranch". There was a desert painting workshop happening there within the next month. So I dropped everything, packed my car with a ton of art supplies, and drove all the way from Nashville, Tennessee through Oklahoma (if you have not visited Wichita Wildlife Refuge there it is a hidden gem), Texas (the worst part. Nothing but tumbleweeds and mind-numbing brown everywhere), and finally through the colorful land of New Mexico. The first night I stayed in Santa Fe and loved it. It is overflowing with good food and art. The hotel I stayed in had terrible service and was very overpriced like most places there so I would recommend staying at an Airbnb instead. It is worth spending a day there just wandering through shops and galleries.
I hope to return for more adventures and painting inspiration this fall but perhaps I’ll try staying Taos this time near the River Gorge.
Here’s a gallery of some beautiful scenes from my time in New Mexico.
