Finding Artistic Inspiration in Santa Fe

My wife and I recently had an impromptu getaway to Santa Fe. It was first and foremost a holiday for the two of us to spend some much needed "just us" time, and Santa Fe is a special, meaningful place for us. Not to mention it also has our favorite cuisine and an apparently is a nearly bottomless source of good variations of margaritas. There was secondary purpose that emerged during this trip as well, which is actually the subject of this post - I re-energized some of my artistic, creative side, finding inspiration in several areas which will hopefully continue now that I'm back home.

Music

The last thing I loaded into the car, almost on a whim, was my little Luna traveler guitar. I was hoping to have some time just to keep my fingers warm. It turned out much better than that.  While sitting in our little casita strumming, a new acoustic piece came to me, nearly composed (at least in draft form) as fast as I could play it.  In a matter of minutes I had an outline for a completely new song, and something that has a different feel than most of my other compositions.  The working title is "Santa Fe Solstice".  If that weren't enough, two days later, again just practicing while Catherine was getting ready to head out, another tune came nearly unbidden to me.  This second tune has a more distinctive spanish-influenced vibe. It coincided with our driving down to Albuquerque's Frontier Restaurant to get our favorite breakfast burritos and a few dozen tortillas to bring home to the family.  The working title of this tune is "Tortilla Run". I'm planning on flushing out both of these compositions and recording them in the next week or so.

Added into the mix, we ended up getting to see and hear live music nearly every night while we were on this trip.  We heard a mariachi band with great harmonies at the Bell Tower in La Fonda, a 29-year-old local that has been regularly playing at the Cowgirl since he was sixteen, and an angelically-voiced singer-songwriter, Eryn Bent, who plays in a style echoing Jewel and Sarah McLaughlin. She is worth checking out and she seems to come through New Mexico and Colorado fairly regularly.

Photography

Santa Fe is always a visual inspiration.  I took a few phone camera snapshots at sunset that came out nicely. One morning I got up early and walked the grounds of La Posada and a neighborhood skirting the Plaza with the "good camera" and I ended up getting a few shots that are worth a look.

Drawing and Painting

I've dabbled a little over the years in digital art, with varying results and satisfaction. I recently purchased the new Windows Surface Pro laptop, which has a really nice "active stylus" that I'm hopeful will provide a new digital drawing experience for me. I am just barely scratching the surface (ha!) here so far, and my first two sketches are very rudimentary, but they were fun to do. The first I did in a program called Leonardo. I used one of the sunset pictures above as an inspiration, but I did the sketch from memory, not looking at the photo at all.  I'm thinking I will redo this one soon, but here was the first draft.

Next, I did a simulated pencil sketch just using the built-in Windows Ink workspace. The cool thing that I was experimenting with in this drawing was the Surface Pro's ability to detect pen angle.  As I would tilt the pen, the width of the line would change in real time. It was really cool! On the other hand, the blending of the pencil strokes was pretty unintuitive; I ended up going with the flow and letting the strokes drive the style of the sketch. This was a sketch of the view outside our casita. 

Beyond my own humble work, we had the opportunity to take our time visiting several galleries along Canyon Road. I discovered a couple of artists of which I was previously unaware.  The level of talent and beauty of some of the pieces that we saw was both inspiring and daunting.  The new (to me) artists that really had an impact on me:

• Ernest "Darcy" Chiriacka - a 20th century immensely talented artist who started in illustration and eventually became famous for western/cowboy related fine art. He was featured at Casweck Galleries.
• Vladimir Kush - Heralded sometimes as the Russian Dali, this artist is only 4 years older than me. His work is beautiful, intelligent, thought-provoking.  Wow. I can't believe I hadn't across his work before. He is featured at The Longworth Gallery. As an aside, we had a wonderful conversation with the owner, Lisa Rodgers, who effortlessly demonstrated her facility with dialog and language, just as you might expect of one whom originally hails from Oxford, England.
• Roger Montoya - another artist featured at Casweck, this local artist had a beautiful, unique style that just jumps off the page in rich, dynamic southwestern color.  Apparently he is a renaissance man who was a professional dancer in NY earlier in his life, and now resides in New Mexico. His art was also at the Casweck Galleries.

These in turn reminded me of a couple of other favorites always worth turning to for inspiration:

• Michael Whelan - Upon returning from Santa Fe, I went to his website.  In 2016 he challenged himself to publish a work every week based on his "leftovers" that he has always been in the habit of doing throughout his career.  His capricious sketches and "throwaway" art that he does just on leftover palettes just for fun are for me a testament to the immense talent and creativity of the man. Truly a master of his art. Check this out! It was so successful, he is doing a variation again this year.
• Michael Parkes - Some reproductions of his most famous works are featured at the Longworth Gallery. It was nice to see them at original scale. For me, his style, although of amazingly high quality like the other artists here, comes from more of a pencil/drawing perspective which is easier for me to relate to as an artist.  Some of the stuff that Whelan, or Darcy, or Kush does just seems so far beyond where my abilities would ever be...but Parkes' work seems a little closer to attainable because his style seems more rooted in drawing.
• Frank Frazetta - I can't not mention Frazetta. He is just awesome. Let's also not forget Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.

I realize that my taste in art tends toward the fantastic/surreal/magical realism styles.  After all, I think my first real inspirations artistically were Michael Whelan's covers of Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series.  But, hey, I can appreciate the lauded masters as well! There is also a temporary exhibit of several masterworks that are housed at the Prado, and have been reproduced for an outdoor presentation on the grounds of the Loretto chapel. It was nice to see works by Velasquez and Rubens, Titian, and Sorolla.  I was particularly impressed by Rubens' "The Taking of Europa", which he had actually copied from an earlier Titian work. It is interesting to see them at the same time:

 TitianRubens

I also was just so impressed by the confidence and mastery of the brush stroke to imply form in Sorolla's "Chicos en la Playa". Look at the top-most boy's left foot closely, for example.

In Conclusion

Well, this little blog entry took me about three times longer than I was anticipating. Now that I've put in the images of some of these masters, my little digital sketches seem a bit ridiculous.  Thanks to Santa Fe, and of course to my wife and muse Catherine, for the refueled inspiration!