Artist Barbara McCauley, originally from Connecticut, now lives and works in a small mountain village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. There, in Truchas, she and her husband, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, established the Cardona-Hine Gallery in 1988. For the first ten years, they exhibited Cardona-Hine’s paintings, along with the paintings and sculptures of fifteen artists whose work they admired. In the early 90’s, McCauley returned to painting after a hiatus of more than 30 years. During those years, she devoted herself to poetry and writing ,since marriage and the birth of her daughter, and a full-time job did not permit her the time or space needed to continue painting. Two books of her poetry have been published, as well as two commercial novels under a pseudonym, and four non-fiction books. In addition, an educational ESL television series, Pochtlan, of which she was the principal writer and creator, won an Emmy award in 1977. A memoir, Small Mercies, is also now in print. She is not to be confused with a writer with the same name of Silhouette romantic novels.
Returning to painting was a gradual process, taking several years before she began to hang her paintings in the gallery. And after building a small studio lit by the famed northern light, her palette began to change and deepen in intensity and hue. Her first paintings were abstractions, rather geometric. “They were just awful,” she says, “and I knew it. Oddly, this didn’t bother me in the least because I saw them as simply doors I had to walk through. After years of creative work with language in my poetry, I was fully alert to that inner critic who loves to destroy your confidence. One day, while painting, I actually heard this voice in my head saying: You don’t know what you’re doing. Who do you think you are? I put down my brush and said out loud: Oh shut up! I am 53 years old. I know about color. I have looked deeply at this world all these years and I know everything I need to know. And the rest I will learn. To my amazement I never heard that voice again. To this day, I remain fully confidant. Not that I’m perfect or that my painting is fulfilled. Just that I recognize I am where I am and I accept that fully. It’s very liberating.”
She was accepted into a Master class with California painter, Nathan Oliveira in about 1994. “He said very little to me, mostly just to keep going in an encouraging way. I was a bit frustrated because I was such a beginner and this was a class for advanced students. I guess I wanted technique, some things I could use. At the end of the month in the group, what I mostly learned was actually what I most needed: that I was in charge, that I just needed to keep painting and to paint what I most loved. That was very helpful.”
She began to paint the old adobe houses and barns and the scenery around Truchas over the next few years in a style that was both realistic in some ways and impressionistic, even expressionistic in others. In 1999 she did a series of 24 small paintings of women, entitled “Woman Alone.” Almost all of this early work is in private collections.
“I reached a point where I felt I had exhausted–at least for the time being– the landscape. I felt I was ’stuck’ with the horizon line and that I was beginning to repeat myself.” So she turned the canvasses vertically and began a more fluid and expressionistic use of paint, a style she continues to explore. But the subject of women returned a year ago, almost by accident when she and her husband were in Mexico. She was having difficulty with the edges of a vertical landscape. Discussing it with her husband, she turned the canvas horizontally and saw the face of a woman looking directly out of the canvas. The next day, she decided to pursue that face and a new series of women began.
This year, also while in Mexico where both artists go on a working vacation for as long as they can afford to be away, a new subject emerged, one that is freer and less defined. That subject has the artist engrossed at present. Several of these, together with the women, will be highlighted here on this blog, to be added to the gallery website after she has more fully explored both of these subjects.
