Four Painters

Taos Land Trust Benefit – Stables Gallery, August 21 – 23, 2009

By the time you very select and few readers read this, the opportunity to purchase some good art from local luminaries in the Taos art world and in turn, help the Taos Land Trust in their life-affirming quest to perpetually endow all of us citizens with nature’s art, will be gone. Too bad, too, as there was some great art on display in this modestly attended event over this past weekend. I went this morning (Sunday, August 23rd) and as of my visit, no red dots. Which is truly unfortunate. If you are a fan of this genre, these are some of the top painters around here and for such a good cause…well, humph.

Okay – first off, I didn’t see a clunker in the entire bunch. Not that I was enamored of every single piece of about forty or so, but the curator, Jan Mellor, persuaded the cream of local Taos regional painters to hang pieces. Ms. Mellor, as we all know, is Taos’s hardest working art displayer. Not that her gallery has the best art in town, but she works the hell out of it and that counts for something. It does, right? Right?

Anyway. I was struck in particular by four specific landscape painters and how their art starts with striking similarities and then through the force of their disparate personalities, diverts into painting styles and compositions that are worthy of comparison.

Let’s get the guessing out of the way. The four artists I want to talk about are: Alyce Frank, Inger Jirby, Mary Ann Warner, and Leigh Gusterson. Let me say this upfront, which may surprise some of you: I like all of these painters’ work.

As some of you Taos art fans know, Frank and Barbara Zaring painted side-by-side for a quarter century beginning in the 1970’s. Frank is beloved and for good reason and we’ll get to that. Inger Jirby, with her long lived gallery on LeDoux Street is also a local icon. I will venture to say that these two artists may not have the same fans. To which I will reply, too bad and take another look.

Each of these artists deliberately start a canvas by completely filling it with a solid color that later will peek through at otherwise unpainted spots and serves to unify the final painting with a palate theme of color that, appropriate to the technique, seems to emanates from within. This is something that Frank and Zaring staked successful careers on and almost always through those years, preparing their canvases with bright rose, reds, and pink oranges that added that bit of majesty and vibrant life to their dark purply black and grey mountains, lush green valleys and bright blue skies. Zaring went on to give painting classes and, in fact, Gusterson was, at one time, a participant.

Mary Ann Warner, 'On the Road to the Monestary', 16" square

What separates Leigh Gusterson and Mary Ann Warner from the scores of regional plein aire painters is their timing. Warner’s timing, which is likely illusory, relates to the compositional positioning of fauna in her paintings. The grazing cows are just so. The horses in the corral are posed so their legs are hit with a setting sun in just the right way. Of all four of the women examined here, Warner is by far the draughtswoman – just witness her signature. Her brushstrokes are keenly observational, straight and precise, thoughtfully executed and bring beautiful mellow contrasts of light and shadow into her work. She mixes her paints more muted than the other women, but sparks her pieces with bits of unexpected colors.

Leigh Gusterson, '5 in Couse Field', 24"x36"

Gusterson is next down the tight-to-loose paint handling scale. Her timing relates more to time of day. Her best works are those paintings that capture the sliver of glazing light that slides off the back of her ubiquitous horses at sunset. I am struck how over the years Gusterson has improved her eye for disarmingly simpler compositions allowing the long shadows of day’s end to tell her story. She has the paint handling skills but has churned out acres of very similar paintings. With this exhibit, it appears she is stretching her work beyond the canvases of which we are overly familiar and I like them very much.

Both Warner and Gusterson also use a painter’s technique to good advantage where they bring paint up just short of particular objects in the frame allowing bits of backpainted color to edge the object. Both clearly revere this place where we live. One feels, while observing their paintings, that any sudden movement by the viewer would interrupt the scene.

Inger Jirby, 'Sopyn's Peach Orchard'


Inger Jirby also backpaints her canvases frequently in a deep, dark pink and then builds up her pastoral scenes with thickly brushed oil. She dips her brush into more than one color at a time and allows the paint to mix in a thready way as she outlines the objects in her compositions perhaps unconsciously mimicking Van Gogh’s way of doing the very same. Jirby’s painting is the loosest among these four, but close observation by the viewer reveals that she is very careful and very intentional with her palate as she picks up the paint, although the end painting has a wonderfully casual final look. Not as studious about the play of light across her objects, Jirby instead chooses to bring exuberance to her work by deliberately avoiding the painterly techniques of Gusterson and Warner, resulting in fresh paintings full of movement and joy.

Alyce Frank, 'The Transparent Hondo River', oil on linen, 34" square

Alyce Frank is a brilliant painter. She does all of the technical things mentioned above and moreover, things of her own that I don’t begin to understand. And does them all without particularly drawing attention to these things as ‘technique’. And does them apparently without exuding any effort to do them. One way to appreciate her paintings is to get up close – within inches - to her paintings and look at how unbelievably and perfectly simple the placement of pigment is on the surface. And then take about seven long steps backward and see how that sublime effort completely disappears. At a distance, we find ourselves delightfully relieved of the detail and instead consumed with pleasure in the play of light over her running water or over her mountains full of grace or her Alaskan expanses of ice or almost anything she paints. Frank is masterful about disguising her draughting via a disarming ‘folk’ look. Whether this signature style was developed intentionally over her career or not is irrelevant. And that’s the point with Frank. Her genius is spectacularly revealed through her fearless and uncompromised ability to paint. She just paints like the way some people just are able to sing. She doesn’t paint as though she’s having to think about it. She paints as though it is as natural as breathing.

So, go see art and make up your own mind.