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.

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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

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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

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Hello world!

Amazing that I should be here in this tiny mountain village of around 850 people, and at the same time in touch with potentially millions of people all over in the world!! It is astonishing that you will be able to view my paintings on this site and on our Cardona-Hine Gallery website (www.cardonahinegallery.com). For twenty years now, we–my husband and I–have exhibited our work at our own gallery here and in other galleries in different parts of the United States. And now this!

So welcome! Bienvenue! Willkommen! Bienvenidos! I plan to be posting here at least once or twice a week, possibly more. And please, do, visit our website where a lot more of both our paintings and prints ave viewable. www.cardonahinegallery.com

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