Show Preview | Taos 6

This story was featured in the December 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

ART-HISTORICAL, geographic, and practical reasons lie behind the group show entitled Taos 6, which opens on Friday, November 16, with a reception from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at Manitou Galleries on Canyon Road. Historically, the title evokes the original six founders of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. But no works from those six are part of the current show. Instead, it focuses on the half-dozen artists in the gallery’s stable who live and paint in Taos today. However, proximity does not in any way lead to similarity among the richly varied works of PJ Garoutte, Don Brackett, Jeff Cochran, Miguel Martinez, JD Challenger, and Jerry Jordan.

Brackett and Garoutte—husband and wife for 42 years—both paint the northern New Mexico landscape in oils, though in distinctively different styles. Hers is an intimate, impressionistic approach with bravura brushwork, while his portrays broader vistas often bathed in fiery sunset light. Both artists, notes Manitou associate director Cyndi Hall, keep consistently creating outstanding, always interesting work. “I don’t know many artists who can continually change and adapt as well as they do,” she says.Cochran, an Indiana native who settled in Taos some 20 years ago, also paints the northern New Mexican landscape, but from a very different perspective. “He’s also an organic farmer,” says Hall, “which gives him a connection to the land literally in his hands.” Scenes of furrowed fields, acequias, and windbreaks of lofty trees speak to those elemental ties.

Connections of a more human sort feature in virtually every painting by Martinez, a third-generation Taoseño. For four decades now, he’s celebrated Southwestern women in often large-scale oils on canvas. His venerable influences include the native style and bold colors of Mexican masters like Tamayo and Zúñiga, as well as the simplified, stylized forms and brilliant hues of 20th-century European greats like Modigliani and the pre-cubist Picasso. Even when a Southwestern landscape, a country church, or a cat sneaks in, says Martinez, a woman has to be the main subject, “or the painting would be missing that human quality it needs.”

An evocative human quality also pervades Challenger’s contemporary works, which have long been admired for their depiction of Native Americans in ceremonial dress and face paint. His latest, dramatic works, points out Hall, represent these same subjects literally “coming up from the land, like spirit figures.”

Last but certainly not least, Jordan stands indisputably as Manitou’s “most collected artist,” says Hall. Recently billed as a “Taos treasure” in a talk he gave at the Taos Art Museum, 74-year-old Jordan—who visited the city in 1963 at the age of 19, lived there briefly in 1965, and moved there permanently in 1985—continues to draw inspiration from the original Taos masters whose works he first saw 55 years ago. “I tend to interpret any scene in the approach of whichever member of the Taos founders would have painted it,” he says.

Each of today’s Taos 6 is, in his or her own distinctive way, a worthy heir to the local artistic forebears. “We feel,” says Hall, “that they’re all legacy artists whose works will hang and be cherished in museums and family homes a hundred and fifty years from now.” —Norman Kolpas

contact information505.986.9833www.manitougalleries.com

This story was featured in the December 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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