Sean Michael Chavez | Southwestern Spirit

By Norman Kolpas

The three portraits look uncannily like they might be artifacts from a century ago or longer. A viewer might almost imagine that a talented itinerant artist had loaded up his wagon with oils, brushes, and canvases, setting out across the ranchlands of New Mexico to paint the working vaqueros, descendants of the West’s original Hispanic cowboys. One of the men, sporting a distinguished gray mustache and a high-crowned hat with a wide brim that casts a deep shadow across the top half of his face, is clearly the leader of the trio. The other two, looking much younger, seem to be striving to strike manly poses against a backdrop of rugged mesas and outcroppings in the vast valley of the Rio Grande.

Of course, these paintings date not from the early 1900s but rather from the past few years; still, they are landmark works for another reason. The man who painted them, Sean Michael Chavez, is in fact exploring new territory in contemporary western art. He refers to these works as his Paisano Series, from the Spanish word for “countryman.” “I wasn’t seeing a lot of paintings of New Mexican vaqueros in galleries,” he says. “I felt like this was an opportunity to make a statement as an artist. I wanted to be true to myself and my heritage”—a family history in New Mexico that he has traced back at least as far as 1850.

Chavez cannot remember a time when he wasn’t making art in some way. He was born in Albuquerque, the only child of an Irish-American mother and a New Mexican father. “I could literally entertain myself just staring at a blank wall, drawing pictures in my mind from the textures on the wall or the shadows cast on it,” he says. Of course, he also made creative use of paper, pencils, pens, and crayons, sometimes rendering faithful images of his favorite Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man.

Soon after he started elementary school, that early love of drawing met with unexpected critical resistance. “I don’t remember specifically what kind of lesson it was, but it certainly wasn’t art,” he says of the class during which he was caught sketching a comic-book character in his notebook. “It was a really good drawing, in my opinion. My teacher tore it up, and the fact that someone destroyed my artwork like that was really hurtful.”

Later, at Highland High School, his talents received more-positive recognition. Even though he’d been focusing on music, playing guitar and drums in the school’s elite salsa band, “I was invited into college-based after-school art programs, including painting and advanced computer animation,” Chavez recalls. It was the first instruction he received “that could potentially lead to a career in the arts.”

With that possibility in mind, after graduation he headed across the country to Boston, joining friends who had already moved there. He supported himself for a time by working as a manager at the Harvard Square Urban Outfitters store, while sketching his fellow commuters on public transportation and creating paintings and collages inspired in part by the works of Jasper Johns, which he exhibited in local cafes. He also spent a considerable chunk of his spare time in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, studying the works of John Singer Sargent; he was transfixed by Sargent’s famed 84-foot-long, 23-foot-high murals on the third-floor walls and ceiling of the Boston Public Library. “The security guards totally got used to me lying on the floor to look up at the ceiling, and even falling asleep there,” he laughs.

After a year and a half on the East Coast, Chavez returned home briefly before heading to San Francisco, still with the goal of building an art career. Then, tragedy struck: His longtime girlfriend died suddenly in a freak accident. “I realized that life isn’t always going to treat you well, that our lives are really valuable, and that I couldn’t waste any more time,” he says.

Chavez left San Francisco in the mid-1990s, returned to Albuquerque, and enrolled in a graphic-arts college there. “I acknowledged that, with my personal dedication to art, maybe graphic design would bring me satisfaction,” he explains. He went on to graduate at the top of his class, was soon designing a performing-arts magazine, and eventually worked for boutique agencies “doing high-end packaging, branding, and marketing, with a fair amount of illustration.” Around 2000 he met his wife, Jody McKelvey, who always understood and supported the fact that, as Chavez puts it, his “pilot light was still always running for painting, and that at some point it was going to get fired back up.”

What made that happen, Chavez says, “was just being too comfortable” in his work and in the Albuquerque home that he and his wife shared. And then, during a summer trip to Santa Fe maybe 10 years ago, it struck him: “I was on Canyon Road, visiting galleries I’d visited in my youth with my mom and grandmother,” he explains. “And the activity in those galleries was so exciting. I realized it was like I was practically living next to Paris, and what an amazing resource New Mexico is.”

He began painting seriously again, starting with plein-air landscapes of his native state, which led to local gallery shows in 2017 and 2018. Gradually, he began adding the human figure to his work. And then the idea of those figures expressing the underrepresented New Mexican presence in the region’s art led him to imagine a body of work that might become “a sort of hidden history of the West.” Vaquero, after all, means “cowboy,” and in its Anglicized form it even gave the West the word “buckaroo.” He began delving deeper into his own heritage and into the history of vaqueros within and beyond his state, including the works of the late California-based historian Arnold R. Rojas, “learning about their tools and methods and their lives.”

At the same time, Chavez applied the strategies he’d learned through two decades working in the worlds of branding and marketing. “I had a strategy, and I gave myself a timeline of a year to create a portfolio of high-caliber work that would fit in amongst galleries I had in mind,” he says. Meanwhile, he gradually began to post his new vaquero paintings on his website.

That plan went delightfully awry a short while later. One of the target galleries he’d identified was Acosta-Strong Fine Art on Canyon Road. “I was already following the gallery’s Facebook account, and one day Facebook suggested that I follow the personal account of Carlos Acosta, one of the owners,” Chavez says. “So I hit ‘Follow,’ and then at that moment wondered, ‘Why did I do that? I don’t have any fresh work up on my page.’” Just about 15 minutes later, Acosta messaged him to say he liked the paintings he saw online and invited him to bring some into the gallery.

The next week, Chavez stopped by with seven or eight works and received a contract from the gallery. They sold one of the pieces the very next day. Later that same year, in 2019, they gave his figurative works a solo show. And last August, his second show—featuring more than 20 canvases—sold out and generated seven additional commissions.

It’s easy to understand why his paintings hold such appeal. They don’t just present a refreshing take on western and southwestern subjects; they do so in a style that simultaneously echoes the past and feels very much attuned to the present day. His compositions and paint application speak to all that time the artist spent studying the works of the greats in art history. He notes that one of the men in the Paisano Series is posed just as Da Vinci posed the MONA LISA; that his palette derives from the colors of the New Mexican landscape as he sees it and as Taos masters like W. Herbert Dunton portrayed it; and that he likes for the brownish-gray base coat he gives his canvases to show through just as Van Gogh liked to leave his canvas exposed in places. Even his beloved Sargent gets a nod in the accents of white paint straight from the tube that Chavez adds at the very end of his process as pops of brightness.

Despite his successes, the artist has no intention to stop learning. He’s already begun to think where his next paintings may lead him. New Mexican santos—carved and painted wooden folk-art figures of saints that have adorned the homes of Hispanic families for centuries—are likely to appear as future subjects. He also plans to explore nocturnes. In all such endeavors, Chavez never loses sight of his resolve to make the most of his life and talent. “I feel gratitude and joy,” he says, “to be able to do what I love and to have the opportunity to be introduced to all these amazing people along the way.”

representationAcosta-Strong Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; www.paintingsofthewest.com.

This story appeared in the February/March 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.

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