Cultural tourism
Five-artist show
Tom Perkinson calls northern New Mexico “a magic place. I always feel energetic here… I feel creative.” He was first awed by the region when he visited at the age of 6. He returned for graduate school and now lives between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, considering himself a “regional painter.” His watercolor and mixed media painting Freight Train West, Near Gallup captures the dramatic light and the landscape that attracted him as a boy.
The first passenger train came to New Mexico in 1879, opening the area to tourists and eventual residents.
Manitou Galleries in Santa Fe is hosting the exhibition, Cultural Tourism, March 6 through 30, honoring the region’s history and traditions. It notes, “More than a million tourists come each year in search of the Southwestern aesthetic. The Santa Fe style has drawn tourists and artists alike since its inception. The purpose of this show is to highlight Santa Fe’s regional identity and why we remain an exotic travel destination. Architecture, landscape
and its people are crucial focal points for this exhibition.”
The exhibition features work by Perkinson, PJ Garoutte, Alvin Gill-tapia, Bryan Haynes, David Jonason and Fran Larsen.
Haynes builds on the traditions of American regionalism of the 1930s in dramatic, stylized paintings of the West’s Native people, settlers and animal life. In A Storytelling of Sandhill Cranes he depicts the winter migration of the cranes to the middle Rio Grande Valley south of Albuquerque. They fly along the river above a herd of horses nearly lost against the late fall foliage of cottonwood trees.
Jonason says, “I’ve always liked images that are stylized and streamlined...for me as a painter, it’s all about volume and shape, a reductive and simplifying process of finding the natural geometries in nature. And that’s no different than the way Navajo weavers or
Pueblo potters portrayed the natural world through geometric series of zigzags, curves or other patterns.” He depicts the iconic church at Ranchos de Taos as an assemblage of geometric shapes beneath geometric stars in the moonlight.