Art and the great outdoors
Dirk Herrman paintings at Taos Country Club
THE JOY OF visual vistas captivates Dirk Herrman, as his paintings so dramatically announce. But specifically, the legendary lands of Taos — the all-encompassing, seemingly neverending expanse of soulful expression that is ever changing, yet ever the same — and ever creative. Well-known for decades throughout Taos, Herrman and wife Lucy Herrman (popular Taos News food journalist and visual artist as well), just finished hanging 19 oils on canvas at Taos Country Club, in what strikes the viewer as a building specifically designed to exhibit his work.
“It was so easy and gracious,” Herrman said of hanging the exhibit at club house, newly reopened for the season April 6, requiring the staff’s dedicated effort.
“Everybody’s cheerful out there — it’s such a beautiful setting. We hung the whole entryway, the recessed areas
GALLERY GLIDER By Virginia Clark
and nichos. It’s just gorgeous.”
The vast vistas of the golf course resoundingly magnify the viewer’s experience of Dirk Herrman’s contemporary stylized landscapes. You peer through Dirk’s eyes and inner consciousness at otherworldly, expressive Taos clouds bursting through deepest Taos blue skies. Red, yellow and orange cliffs and squared-off mesas stand majestically, welcoming the viewer to venture — and all this by neither mere accident nor meanly calculated design — it’s Herrman’s pure joy and delight to share his experience of these lands he loves.
“I have titled the show at the Taos Country Club, ‘Time Standing Still,’” he said in April, “as an extension of my show at Magpie Gallery,” which represents both Lucy and Dirk Herrman. According to Magpie gallerist Georgia Gersh on Facebook, the country club setting is a must-see.
“Time Standing Still” expresses “the ‘relaxing pause’ that the viewer experiences when looking at my paintings,”
Dirk explains. “These works embody the timelessness of the Taos panorama. I liken this to the dramatic first view of the Río Grande Gorge one sees when emerging from the canyon, or the first glimpse of majestic Taos Mountain when traveling just north of town.
“While my paintings have a surreal quality,” he continues, “they are true to our vistas and skies. Each painting emerges from a reference photograph which I have taken (yes, there really are clouds like those here), but the mountains, hills and perfect blue skies are ubiquitous. They fill our eyes and senses every day. As an artist, I have brought them into my work and uniquely styled them, but they are real.”
A grouping of five paintings grace one wall and the orange-red oils are like a visual echo. Dirk says he used only two hues, red and blue, with varying tonality to create the series.
“The Orange Sky ‘Dreamscape’ paintings are a sub-series within ‘Time Standing Still,’” he explained. “They are limited-palette paintings, meaning the paintings are created using only a few colors — in this instance, two; vermillion and French ultramarine.
The images in these paintings happen real-time on the canvas, using no photos or drawings. The mountains and foregrounds reveal themselves as I paint the blue into the still-wet orange. They reflect the images that live in my unconscious and channel themselves through my brush. ‘Dreamscapes,’ yes, but still true to the landscapes in which we live.”
While he uses his own photographs as source material, particularly the cloud paintings, many of his landscapes “are created from my own visual memory file. Those paintings are true to the way things are, without being literal translations of a specific view. They are almost super-real in their powerful clarity, compositional directness and intense color palette. My goal is to create an image that captures and holds a moment in time that is simultaneously compelling and soothing for the viewer.”
For more, see Taos Country Club, 54 Golf Course Drive, Ranchos de Taos, 575-758-7300; Magpie Gallery, 218 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos, 781-2480166, magpietaos.com; or dirkandlucy. com.