By Trevor Burrowes
Can there be a memoir of and art tour? One dictionary definition of memoir is, "a record of events based on the writer's personal knowledge." My background and training is in visual art, which means that I have more ability to discuss this field than, say, crafts. So I want to write about the Pojoaque River Art Tour (PRAT) based on my own artistic preoccupations. Other words, a memoir.
Five PRAT artists resonate with my own experience. Among the qualities in their art that I share are: recycling in art, a sense of place, focus on the local environment, political activism, paper and graphics in art, assemblage, and passion for the PRAT. (Some of these qualities are well represented beyond this group).
JEFF SMITH: Along with painter-sculptor Marianne Hornbuckle, metal artist Jeff Smith was actively involved with the inception of the PRAT and is one of its chief sources of inspiration. His demeanor is casual. While his parents worked in Los Alamos, he grew up in this area, eventually raising a family and running a hugely successful metal studio on his Pojoaque property.
I get the impression that his metal four-poster beds--tree beds--are his most popular products, although I've only seen his similarly ornate metal chairs that charm through the window of their marketer Simply Santa Fe on the Plaza. As he describes it, the beds' four posters almost converge to form a leafy canopy. They and his other functional metal furniture are sought-after items that can be produced in black, silver or rust.
Outside his studio are fanciful sculptures made from rusty metal. A gigantic Dragonfly is full of life and oddly delicate, while Junkyard Dogs, a large Head and Hockey Mom take on a fiercer aspect. Inside, the workshop looks like something out of Dickens, with large black hundred year-old metalwork machines. He collects metal scrap, among which are numerous "water tanks." These cylindrical objects resemble gas canisters pivoting on a flat base. They will be distributed to several tour artists to become tour "mascots" which they decorate and embellish to bring public attention to their sites.
Jeff takes walks in the dry bed of the Pojoaque River, but is sanguine about the urban thrust of the Pojoaque Business District built by the Pojoaque Pueblo. "The Pueblo has always been supportive of the tour," he says. "I like the convenience of shopping at the supermarket, and at True Value, especially."
I see this reconciliation of urban and rural as key to the character of the PRAT.
MARIANNE HORNBUCKLE : My introduction to Pojoaque artists (referred to in the tour guide as "nesting species") came through Marianne Hornbuckle. She is the soul of the Pojoaque River Art Tour, which she co-founded seventeen years ago, and directed along with other artists. A tall, plainspoken Texas native, she and husband Bill Preston have lived for 27 years on what is now County Road 84.
Marianne's home was my first visit to a PRAT artist, and there I met husband Bill, a retiring man and sumi-e painter. He wore a T-shirt decorated with praying manti images that he had painted. He paints cactus flowers, one of which I saw and loved. It was dashing and assured. Marianne sculpts lovely miniature clay nudes, but her abstract paintings are of precise rectangular forms that contain and are surrounded by painterly atmospherics. She and Bill display work in Artistas de Santa Fe, a cooperative gallery in the city.
The front wall of their property has an Aztec feeling - adobe brick walls with rectangular cut-out openings. The front yard slopes gently down, past a cattle grate and massive, graceful Honey Locus and Rosa Rugosa trees, to their house. All around the house is their no-fuss, low-maintenance garden, despite which, the whitest ever iceberg roses bloom near a fence. Behind the back yard, an old apple orchard was cleared and is, it seems, a de facto part of their property. The house is 127 years old, and they keep it going through ingenuity and an ethic of radical conservation that goes something like this: if it ain't broke, don't mess with it.
T. C. WILLIAMS: I checked out T.C. Williams' home/studio on a quick break during the 2009 tour. An exuberant ex-Marine, he's extremely knowledgeable about the international art world. He refers to some of his large canvasses as "political cartoon murals."
In a congested, dust-colored section of County Road 84 lies the small lot where T. C. Williams lives and works. Apart from a narrow dirt driveway along its edge, the lot feels devoid of any space other than what is built on it. In a corner to the rear is the quaint Old Roybal Shop, an historic landmark. Across from that is a shed. Everything else is the building, half outdoor walled terrace studio, half enclosed flat, mostly used as studio, where horror vacui prevails. Walls are chock full of photos, posters, and just about anything that can hang while also espousing progressive social and political ideas.
Outside, the same theme continues with more durable materials, such as canvas murals, bumper stickers and handpainted slogans that emblazon every available nook and cranny. My favorite of the slogans is One Nation Undereducated. As an environmentalist, I'm also partial to the street-facing mural on canvas, Got Water?, which appropriates a popular milk advertisement. Under the large letters of the title is a skeleton wearing a dunce cap and holding out an empty tumbler. Beside that figure is a giggling cactus. Large red and white drops of liquid pour down without utility. Another landmark, next to the road, is a large hand painted sign saying 25 MPH.
T. C. also does easel painting. He showed me a large commissioned landscape that was surprisingly realistic. In a tarp-covered section between the parking area and Old Roybal Shop painted images of John Kennedy and Van Gogh self portrait are cut out, becoming painted flat-sculpture.
RICHARD KRASIN: In 2008 I had the privilege of sharing with Richard Krasin the well-located exhibition setting at the Bread and Breakfast, Las Barrancas. Krasin's modest and quiet demeanor belies the steely rigor of his work process, much of it being digital photo imagery, including scanned objects - mostly plants - that are then digitized. The way he stores and displays his work also tells a lot about him.
Uniform, crisply edged sheets of cardboard protect his art pieces on both sides when stored. With precision worthy of the computer engineer that he was, Richard Krasin attaches fishing wire in the middle of the tops of his pieces. There being not the slightest imbalance between the weight of either side, his large pictures hang perfectly straight from these single lines. His frames are simple, with a quality of modernist minimalism. He is preoccupied with the physical setting along the Pojoaque River, which forms the major spine of the tour area.
With partner Marianne, he walks the dog each day - dogs, since neighbors' dogs often join the fray - along the Pojoaque River and often in the river bed itself when it's dry. He loves the natural setting around his Jacona home. These walks factor into his art, for this is when he photographs scenes for his work and finds natural objects to scan. Since they lack depth of field, the scanned plants are uniformly in sharp focus. His "Morning Glory" - crumpled and torn flower, long tendrils, still unopened buds, gently curving leaves against a black ground -- exude the sap of life. His diptych, 'Wild Strawberries' transcends realism and becomes exquisite abstraction. Tendrils of the strawberry plant in each panel loop and connect. Earth at the roots splatter like stars across the blue and black, platen-derived background. Despite being wiped clean, the platen produces brushed-on-looking imagery, and sharp vertical edges from serial placements of picture segments further provide a painterly element. The work has the energy of abstract expressionism.
His landscapes are not captured through a single exposure from a camera; instead, in a modernist approach also used by the famous David Hockney, he assembles many shots of a scene. Their rectangular formats fall where they may, while being juxtaposed in such a way as to make the photographed scene flow continuously. Nowhere does it work better than in "Pojoaque River #3." The way the scene segments are put together give a feeling of turbulent motion that contrasts with the dryness of the river, where the movement of water is only visible as a ghost in the mud.
SUZANNE VILMAIN: Suzanne Vilmain does a number of things on and with paper: origami, marbled paper, posters, book art. Her letterpress is a central interest, and the source of her posters.
She lives with husband Steve at the far western edge of the tour, and immediately adjacent to San Ildefonso Pueblo. Their property is oddly juxtaposed to Highway 502, and you have to look for a yellow truck in the yard, or you might drive past it. Steve is the builder. He has assembled a number of simple, box-like sheds that provide discreet studio spaces for varied genres of work. The inspiration for these forms is Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. A hammock is tethered to a large tree in the yard. Rugged open spaces around the house lead down to the river. Trees that lightning has sheared appear as if permanently electrified. Suzanne and Steve try to live with the natural order of their land and not impose rigid control over it. The bosque forms a backdrop for this scene.
Book-art forms the hub of her creative endeavors. Books are very carefully constructed; at the same time, the imagery of the pages is of ever surprising randomness and variety: collage, suminagashi, letterpress pressure prints, and folding only hint at the diversity.
CONCLUSION: The tour is the backbone of community identity and empowerment. There may not be another place in New Mexico with more potential to harmonize powerful urban, rural and wilderness landscape qualities that are immediately juxtaposed, and interconnected.
As time draws near for the tour, press releases get sent out. This recent one by Marianne Hornbuckle conveys the reverence in which the PRAT artists hold their landscape:
It's September. The light changes and the air turns cool and crisp. Northern New Mexico's aspens reveal their brilliant golden treasure against an autumn-azure sky. And local artists once again share their prolific gifts with local art lovers, offering two days of color, beauty, inspiration, humor and an intimate glimpse into their creative environments.
The Pojoaque River Art Tour, known for its tri-cultural nature, professionalism and the quality, freshness, and variety of its exhibitors, includes thirty-four artists and artisans. The tour welcomes increased participation by artists of Pojoaque Pueblo, and includes sculptors, jewelers, ceramicists, painters, weavers and photographers as well as mosaics, stained glass and tin work. This is a feast for the eyes and not to be missed. Located approximately sixteen miles north of Santa Fe, the tour takes visitors through artists' creative havens in the Pueblo of Pojoaque, along County Road 84 (parallels Hwy 502 to Los Alamos) and through the traditional communities of Pojoaque, Jacona, Jaconita and El Rancho. Visitors travel through the eclectic and lovely old farming community of Pojoaque, as well as Nambé, a wonderful opportunity for a bike or auto adventure on a fall weekend.
The 2010 PRAT takes place on September 18 and 19.