Reunion

In early June, I went back to New Haven, to my alma mater, Albertus Magnus College, for our class 50th year reunion. Albertus was a liberal arts college for women only when I attended. Now it is co-ed and expanded in other directions as well. I had not been back, nor in touch with more than one former classmate for years. I had never gone to a reunion.

I was enticed to attend by an old friend who asked me specifically to come, the reason being that, though I had been in the class of 1960 for my first three years at Albertus, I took my senior year off, went to teach for nine months in Rovaniemi, Finland, then travelled in Europe for two months. So I ended up graduating in 1961. I never felt I was part of that class, so was delighted when Lynn Farrell invited me. My old roommate, Anne Shaugnessy, agreed to attend as well, and another old friend, Genevieve Hine, would also be there. As it turned out, many old friends and acquaintances were there and I had more than a grand time.

But more than that, I regained memories of a whole part of my life that had virtually evaporated. Having left Connecticut right after graduating from Albertus, and then having all of my family also leave in the next few years, I lost contact with almost everyone as I settled into a whole new life. Others hold us in their memories; they know us as we once were. Without them to remind me of that person I had been, she had just disappeared.

It was both moving and entertaining to recover both that self and my friendships and acquaintances from that time. We all laughed a great deal and though all of us can easily be called old women now, not a one of us showed any signs of debility. White hair, wrinkles, sagging body parts, yes, of course, but within hours, we all saw each other as the young women we had been and still were within. It was like jumping into a very deep and clear pond, refreshing and cleansing.

Prior to the reunion, I visited with friends in St. Paul since my plane was connecting there. That was also a warm and loving time. I came back to Truchas feeling like a cloud soaring high in a very blue sky. I am so grateful for all the people in my life.

Next Step on Unnamed Winter Day

Okay. The painting was just too black and white. I liked the simplicity and the forms, the emptiness of the lower half and upper third, also the feeling of the day and weather. BUT too much of the same, so I added a dark green to the two forested mountains in the foreground. Here it is.

Unnamed Winter Day, Version 2, McCauley 40 x 30

The greens here are not quite what they are in the painting. They are a lighter green here, but when I tried to show them as they are in the painting, they looked too much like the first version. At any rate, I also had painted in some parchment white in the snowy fields of the foreground with the idea of providing some contrast.This did not work at all, so I overpainted it with pure titanium white.  Also this version is overall greyer than the painting. There is a lot more white in the whole piece than what this image shows.

Now I feel the forested hills are too strongly painted and will add a white wash over them to soften and distance them. I believe that will probably do it. I want the atmosphere of a cloudy, somewhat misty, winter day, the kind you can dream in.

Back to Painting

I started my third mountain painting today, a wintry one, since we have been inundated with constant snow for about two weeks now. (If you would like to see the first two, visit our gallery blog–cardonahinegallery.wordpress.com.) So far it consists of different tones of greys and whites. Even so, it captures the feeling of the winter up here, the mountains that almost disapppear into the sky at times. And most times they do disappear into the snow filled clouds that descend over them. I will probably add some dark greens to the lower slopes covered with evergreens, but right now it is a very simple painting. A good beginning. But only that. Perhaps with this one, I can share the process as I go along. We will see how it goes.

Unnamed Winter Day

Guilt, guilt, guilt

Well I have never claimed to be a good correspondent, but I guess I thought I might be better than this!

I am, however, writing now pretty often on our gallery blog. To read of us, both Alvaro and me, the gallery, our work, news, et cetera, please go to www.cardonahinegallery.com and click on the Gallery Blog icon on the right side of the site pages.

I have started a new series of mountain paintings which I have written about there. I would love you to see the two new pieces I have done and which I have posted there. I will occasionally write here when it is something I really want to say about just me. How narcissistic eh?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF OUR PATRONS AND FRIENDS WITH VERY BEST WISHES FOR THE COMING NEW YEAR!

This year, I’m afraid, we will not be sending out our regular Holiday card due to a lack of time and, I confess, also energy. In some ways, it’s been a rough year, mostly in terms of health issues which have, thankfully, now fallen back into oblivion, but which, at the time, took a lot of energy and extra work. So, apologies for not getting ourselves worked up into the holiday frenzy of cards!

We will also be leaving within a few weeks for a three month stay in Todos Santos, Baja Sur, Mexico, a small and lovely fishing town one hour north of Cabo San Lucas, so it’s packing and planning time on top of everything else. The time there is spent working: I will be painting, studying Spanish, reading, writing, doing yoga, walking the beach, watching the whales, resting  and just dreaming off into the distance. I get my best work done down there and hope to come  back with about 25 to 30 new works.

I doubt that I’ll be blogging while down there, but I’ll see. Next year, I will try to be a better blogger than what I’ve been here this year!

Late Spring at 8,000 Feet

June 5, 2008. Imagine. When I awakened this morning, this was the view into our patio just outside the kitchen door. Humph! Except it was excellent to get the moisture. It meant I didn’t need to spend my time watering all the new planting I have been doing to beautify our yard. But it’s hard to believe it’s nearly summertime when a gust of cold air smacks your face when you open the door to let the cat go out.

the young apricots

jaunty in their snow white hats

this fifth day of june

For me, it is impossible NOT to be creative in the summer months, but creative during summer means just about anything at all. Certainly it doesn’t necessarily mean painting or writing. It means sitting beguiled by the beauty all around, the dandelions like butter in the huge lawn, the trees still opening up to what will later be a deeper green, the mountains across the valley below, mauve in the distance. It means listening to the birdsong, watching the ravens ride the high winds, then swoop, doing somersaults as they go, down into the steep canyon just across the road. It means enduring the snarl of the dirt bike one of the kids up here rides every beautiful weekend day, waiting for its enervated voice to die away, back into the silence of crickets and birds, the breeze. Summer is the feast. No time to paint! But this is where the painting starts. This is its source.

New Figure Paintings

While in Mexico during the first 3 months of 2007, toward the end of that stay, I was having some problems with a landscape I was working on. (The time my husband and I stay in Mexico is a working vacation; we rent a lovely small home with a very large painting studio which we share.) It was the edges of the piece; I was very happy with all of the work I’d done on it, but couldn’t find the way to finish it off around all the edges. So Alvaro and I sat down that evening and just looked at it. Finally, he turned it horizontally and we looked at it some more. Suddenly, I saw a woman’s face looking out at me. There seemed to be smoke from a fireplace beyond her. The next day I looked for her. It was not a clearly defined face, but the eyes were there and so was the look. I decided to drop the landscape and take the gift she seemed to be presenting me. The result is the painting below, called “Woman in Smoke”. She is very odd, but I feel such a gratitude toward her, that she turned me in a new direction.

I was so intrigued by the appearance of this woman that I decided to just paint very freely, then see if somewhere in that freedom another figure would emerge. Here is a second figure. This one actually reminds me of myself as a young mother. I was both intimidated and fascinated by my gorgeous daughter, by this new young life. I’d love to hear from anyone coming to this blog, whatever you feel about my work.

Finally, one more that I just recently finished. I call this one “The Housewife’s Dream”. She looks and feels very Russian somehow. Woman in Smoke is 41″ x 31″; The Housewife’s Dream is 40″ x 30″ and Young Mother is 38″ x 22″.

20th Anniversary of our gallery….

In May, 1988, Alvaro Cardona-Hine and I opened our gallery here where we still live in Truchas, NM. Everyone thought we were nuts because Santa Fe and Taos, each about a one hour drive from Truchas in opposite directions, were the art centers of New Mexico. They thought we were nuts to begin with just moving up here into a small village at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But we had seen the direction Santa Fe was taking, heading a bit towards chi-chi, with adobe building look-alikes and a more commercially aimed art market. We wanted to live in an authentic place with authentic people. Besides we had fallen in love with this village and its wonderful Hispanic inhabitants.

We also just wanted to change our lives. Moving to a city, even one so different from St. Paul, MN, as Santa Fe, meant a very similar lifestyle to what we’d been living, only with new friends. We wanted to deepen our lives and our art, just change our lives totally.

When we bought our little adobe house with 2 sets of garages, we had no plan to open a gallery. Alvaro had had shows in two Santa Fe galleries and we figured we’d wrest out a living that way. We wanted to simply work: paint, write and be.

We quickly discovered that there are literally thousands of artists in this area, so competition is keen. Also, Alvaro’s work was hardly edgy, but definitely contemporary, and there were few good galleries carrying that genre. So once the funds we’d brought with us from the sale of our house in St. Paul were gone fixing up this little old adobe, we realized we needed to do something and fast.

We transformed the front 2 room garage, also adobe, into showrooms. We took down the garage doors, filled in the spaces with adobe bricks, put tile down on the dirt floor and got the walls plastered inside. We added a narrow window, an entry door, track lights, and put up our sign which Alvaro made himself. By now, we were broke.

In the next six months we transformed the back, four car, garage into Alvaro’s studio, put a rock path over the old driveway, planted trees and built a wall and arch to contain our new world. We opened in mid to late May, 1988. It took close to two months before we had a sale, but it was (for us at that time) a big one and we celebrated like crazy.

Hard to believe that was twenty years ago! It has been quite a journey. And so we want to celebrate this moment as well. 20 years deserves something to offer our wonderful collectors and friends. So we are giving 20% off of all of our paintings and prints during the months of May and June. 20 for 20. We like the sound of that. We haven’t changed our prices–that would take too much time–so the prices on our website and here at the gallery are the regular ones; you just take 20% off. Visit cardonahinegallery.com and help us celebrate like crazy all over again!

Here we are twenty years ago in our newly opened gallery showroom.

More New Work from Mexico, 2007: Mexican Beach

Every afternoon, after painting, I would walk about one block down a narrow dirt road lined with adobe walled gardens overhung with bougainvilleas of varying hues: pinks, deep red, white, yellow. Mourning doves perched on the electrical wires overhead and kept one round eye on my passage, accompanying me with their soft calls. Fabulous? You bet!

The houses ended and the the road became a path across sandy fields filled with scrubby plants and lined with barbed wire fences on old wooden posts, most of the fencing decrepit and half down. Ahead of me was the top of the last large dune, beyond that the endless Pacific Ocean. When I got to the top of the dune, the view opened up to the one you see in this painting: the wide, almost empty, beach, the ocean beyond, the distant hills, a tiny stretch of the palm gardens, the surf sometimes gentle, sometimes wildly crashing on the steep shore.

What you don’t see in the painting and the main reason I walked down here every day are the grey whales, many of them, all over in every direction, spouting way out on the horizon and all the way in to within about fifteen feet of shore. For me, it was a privilege to just come down and sit in their company. Often one would pop up, holding its head above the water to have a look at those of us gathered in small groups on the beach, just as we were there having a look ourselves.

See more new and older work at www.cardonahinegallery.com

Mexican Beach, 31″ x 41″, Acrylic

New Work from Todos Santos, Mexico, 2007

Baja, Mexico, 41″ x 31″, Acrylic

In the winter of 2007, my husband, Alvaro, and I spent three deliciously warm and green months in Todos Santos (All Saints), Baja, Mexico, about one hour north of Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific Ocean. We rented a house that friends built from the couple who had bought it from them, and this was our third stay at the house with its lovely gardens and, best of all, a large painting studio both of us could share with music, wine and our bulldogs, both now passed on.

Todos Santos is a small fishing village, an oasis in the desert landscape of southern Baja. This painting captures the feeling of some of the neighborhoods in the village, with the agave plants, palms and dry, dusty earth. It also reminds me of parts of Los Angeles, where I lived for about fourteen years. I don’t know why, but from the moment I finished this, I felt it was very authentic, both in subject and execution. It is one of my favorites.

To purchase this painting, go to www.cardonahinegallery.com