Snips of time, here and now
This story was featured in the November 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
TAKE A GLANCE through the oeuvre of Tamara Rymer and you’ll find subjects ranging from southwestern scenery to cowgirls to horses to the Hawaiian coast. Diverse as they may be, the artist’s oil paintings each tell a story about Rymer’s own life from her vantage point, wherever she happens to travel. Even in her ongoing series featuring teepees beneath blazing sunsets and expansive desert skies, the artist’s structures are situated where she herself stood and looked out at the world at one point in time. “I paint what I see, what’s around me, and what I’ve experienced,” says Rymer. “I’m recording snips of time, right then and there.”
Road trips between her residences in Santa Fe, NM, and Austin, TX, have inspired some of the artist’s latest landscape works, including striking atmospheric scenes like THE CITY OF DUST, a piece earmarked to appear in the Cowgirl Up! exhibition and sale in Wickenburg, AZ, next spring. The painting—depicting a mauve-tinged sky stretching over the small town of Encino, NM, at dusk—typifies the simple backgrounds Rymer creates to lead viewers into her scenes, guiding their focus to the evocative elements that caught her eye. “I really want to hit my subjects hard, where the background is nonexistent or washed out,” she explains. “Maybe there’s a cloud or a sunset. I want you to see what struck me at that moment.”
Though Rymer defines her style as contemporary realism, the self-described history buff has gleaned inspiration from colorful family stories about her Texas ranching roots and also from her Native American heritage. Her interest in portraying teepees, for example, emerged while she was conducting exhaustive research into her Cheraw ancestry. In her paintings, the teepee has come to symbolize the artist’s native lineage and her ancestors’ important achievements in history. Even more importantly, she says, “It represents family, and a place of being for family.”
For the most part, however, Rymer says she’s depicting “what’s happening now,” be it one of her routine visits to Hawaii, storm clouds gathering over Santa Fe, or a friend dressed in contemporary western attire. “I paint what is current because I want people, years from now, to look back at these paintings and think, ‘Oh, wow, that’s how that looked back then,’” says Rymer. “They will be historical snapshots for someone in the future.” —Kim Agricola
representationSorrel Sky Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; www.tamararymer.com.
This story was featured in the November 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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