Nathanael Volckening | Land Reflections

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

Although the expansive skies, rolling clouds and rugged landforms of his native New Mexico have been engrained in his identity from the start, Nathanael Volckening paints them with a sense of wonder that continues to permeate his mind and soul even after spending decades enamored by their magic. Channeling influences as varied as the mannerists of the Italian Renaissance, 19th-century revolutionaries Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, and heralded Western painters Nicolai Fechin and Ernest L. Blumenschein, Volckening presents vast, atmospheric spaces as intimate and personal. By distilling complex subject matter down to elemental yet powerful shapes, lines and colors, he reveals beauty in structure, nuance in shadow and what he refers to as the corporeal features of the objects.

His work contains a spiritual component as well, wherein he seeks to convey the sublime effects of the American Southwest. “I approach painting as a form of meditation, an attentive practice of observing light, form and atmosphere with my whole mind and body,” says Volckening. “Within the shapes I perceive in the landscape, I strive to articulate archetypal forms that act as a bridge between the outer world and our inner awareness, offering a way to experience the land through both body and spirit.” He has been honing this multifaceted, dynamic approach his whole life.

Born in 1988, Volckening spent his formative years in Taos, New Mexico, before moving to Colorado when he was in high school. His time spent in New Mexico as a boy awakened and later cemented his passion for art making and the natural world. The progeny of maternal grandparents and a mother who were all artists, Volckening discovered his love of drawing as soon as he could hold a crayon. He also spent a lot of time outdoors as a child, playing in the shadows of the region’s expansive, mountainous terrain or exploring deserts on road trips throughout the Southwest.

By the time he reached middle school, Volckening had become a self-described “art kid,” hanging out with his likeminded best friend studying art books and visiting the Fechin House in Taos. There, Volckening could examine Fechin’s art up close. “To me, it’s like the punk rock of oil painting,” says Volckening of Fechin’s paintings. “It’s this distortion of texture and clashing hues that create something new from a distance.”

Volckening’s lineage and early experiences informed his creative point of view. He has carried them into his current art practice as he seeks to achieve in his paintings the same feelings of the sublime he first encountered as a child in New Mexico.

Volckening took several art courses in community college but never found his creative niche there. After leaving, he started his own figure drawing group and continued to draw and paint on his own, studying the works of artists he admired and securing the occasional commissioned portrait. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit in 2020 that Volckening decided to put his ideas into practice and explore art as a full-time endeavor.

Sequestered in his bedroom, surrounded by books containing images by his historic mentors, Volckening considered what his own perspective on the Western landscape might look like and started to develop his unique voice as a painter. Chief among his driving forces were the memories of the enchanting geography and ethereal atmosphere that surrounded him in Taos.

As his intention changed from casual painting to a desire to define and realize his creative vision, Volckening couched his exploration of the land, in part, as a formal study of interactions among shapes and interplay between light and shadow. He pared down his color palette to maintain cohesion and intimacy within a composition. “There’s something really satisfying about a whole cosmos being able to emerge from that narrow limitation,” he says. At the same time, Volckening sought to harness the dreamlike, transcendental characteristics inherent in the New Mexico vistas. In layering both paint and concept, the artist created a collection of archetypal paintings referencing the general brilliance of the Southwest but also provoking a personal emotional response. “The rest is history,” he says.

Each of Volckening’s paintings manifests as a fusion of naturalistic representation, stylized forms and emotions wrapped in memory. He paints the landscape not as a direct reflection, but a refraction of visual elements rooted in his experiences with the vast spaces, dramatic displays of sunlight, and majestic land formations he grew up with and still visits as an adult.

Volckening imbues his work with elements of modernism, striving to push forward, to take the tenets of academic painting, reduce the noise and view his subjects through the lens of their fundamental building blocks. He enjoys experimenting with how far he can push without losing too much naturalism. Volckening says, “The way that I compose paintings is in a way like one might compose a tapestry. There’s a playing with flatness, the stacking of shapes, and also the materials being naturally sourced and echoing the landscape.”

ASCENSION highlights Volckening’s ability to commingle delicate light patterns and organic movement with spatial compression and reduction in detail to create a scene that is at once dynamic and anchored, allowing the viewer to become immersed in the color and rhythm of the heady shapes and lines. Here, the disparate spaces of sky and earth seem to collide gently, creating visual harmony throughout the scene.

While he often collects reference material from photographs and plein air sketches made on his regular return trips to New Mexico, Volckening avoids pinpointing singular scenes or landmarks as his subject matter. Instead, the artist interprets his content through a conceptual internal filter, coalescing the landscape’s physical and metaphysical attributes. In doing so, he creates compositions that read as archetypal, or universal, as they exhibit the essence of place, the power of atmosphere, and invite any viewer from any place to make a visual and emotional journey through the colors, lines and forms interacting within the picture plane.

Volckening’s profound connection to the Southwestern topography emerges as both personal and professional. “Personally, the land is my sanctuary, my teacher, my spiritual anchor,” says the artist. “Being in nature attunes me to rhythms of light, form and atmosphere, offering a quiet space for reflection and presence. Professionally, the land is my subject, my medium and my collaborator. As a subject, the landscape provides an opportunity to develop and refine my craft. Through careful observation, deliberate technique and thoughtful layering of paint, I translate these experiences into compositions that convey the landscape’s mood, structure and subtle emotional resonance.”

In the painting HEART STORM, the light washes down from the sky, blanketing the terrain below in cool and warm hues to create a dance between light and dark, progression and regression. The rock and cloud shapes are austere and robust, their tactility emerging in deft brushstrokes and layers of pigment. Meanwhile, wisps of dreamy color and luminescence in the background give the composition the ethereal quality Volckening strives to capture in his work.

Volckening begins each painting with a loose sketch to map out its composition and arrange values. Next, the artist increases the scale, working on a toned panel or linen canvas. He often employs armatures to ensure that “key elements align with harmonic divisions of the canvas.” Then, he establishes dark areas to ground the subject matter before creating luminescent areas, mixing lead white with other minerals and using earth pigments for halftones. Building on this underpainting, he applies additional colors via scumbling and glazing, balancing warm and cool, thick and thin, and adding texture, form and gradations of hues.

He remarks, “In some ways, a painting is never truly finished in my eyes but exists as part of a developing continuum, inspiring future iterations of related compositions.” Ultimately, that is how Volckening continues to push the envelope as he finds ever-engaging ways to capture the aesthetic and spiritual allure of his childhood in Taos.

Elizabeth L. Delaney is a freelance arts writer and editor.

contact informationvolckeningfineart.com

representationParsons Gallery of the West, Taos, NM, parsonsart.com.Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Pasadena, CA, maxwellalexandergallery.com

upcoming showsNathanael Volckening, Dan Stovall and George G. Redden, Maxwell Alexander Gallery, opens February 7.La Luz de Taos, The Lunder Research Center at Couse-Sharp Historic Site, June 5-6.Summer Small Works Show, Maxwell Alexander Gallery, July 2026.Big Summer Show, Parsons Gallery of the West, August 2026.

This story appeared in the February/March 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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