Some of the paintings here were created in the comfort of my studio in Cecil County, Maryland while looking through the window at the Elk River below. The New Mexico landscapes were painted from the portal of my Abiquiu casita, the driver’s seat of my truck, and along the roadsides in and around northern New Mexico. In most of my work the color is exaggerated and the forms are simplified; I’ve used the observed landscape as a point of departure for my personal creative process.

In northern New Mexico the brilliant light is harsh and focused. It accentuates the rock formations and raw earth that is punctuated with polka dots of juniper and piñon trees. The varieties of form and color change around each bend in the road, as do the layers of overlapping mountains in the distance. The sky is dynamic and the clouds move and change at a rapid rate. This drama is magnified when an isolated summer thunderstorm gathers in the distance and can be watched like a matinee that has been staged for an audience. I first became interested in visiting the areas around Santa Fe while studying artists of the early twentieth century who were among the many who were drawn to create work in the colorful mountains of northern New Mexico.

Looking at landscape and contemplating painting it is my favorite escapist activity. All views hold potential and all things seem possible until I actually try to set up and work out in nature. In this respect landscape painting has more in common with the sport of fishing than with art produced in the studio. Scouting out a potential spot that offers a desirable view is quickly followed by the hopeful but futile search for a little bit of shade. Schlepping materials through cacti and over rock ledges necessitates that water carried for drinking and painting soon become one. Of course, watching out for rattlesnakes and scorpions adds a sense of adventure, but more often than not, biting ants are the unavoidable reality. Finally, there is the constantly changing mountain weather. A painter can be alternately baked and burned, soaked and chilled all within an hour of thinking it’s a good day for painting outside. Trying to hang on to my work when a sudden wind threatens to blow it into an arroyo has left me feeling lucky if all I get is a dusting of sandy texture added to my paint surface.

I love the dramatic and bizarre look of the landscape in New Mexico. The tent rocks on the Cochiti Pueblo are a strange mixture of onion domes and processions of shrouded figures descending the hillsides with shapes like giant Hershey kisses accentuating the opposite ridge. The Plaza Blanca in Abiquiu is a moonscape of pure white hoodoos each with a little gray hat on top, and just down the road a few miles towards Ghost Ranch, the solemn exposed rocks reveal deep reds and yellows patterned with long horizontal streaks of gray and white.

I make no claims that my brush drawings and paintings capture the true grandeur or drama of the New Mexico earth/sky environment, but I love the thrill of making paintings in this context. ~ Belle Hollon