Art: Visions of the Southwest

Land of color

By F. Andrew Taylor

I spend a lot of time these days pondering the why of art. I've grown weary of people creating beautiful, intense or even startling images just because they can. How well something was painted seems secondary to why it was painted. I don't need to know exactly what the thought process was behind a piece, I just need to recognize that there was a thought process.

That being said, at first blush there's no reason for me to enjoy the current exhibit at the Spring Mountain Library, Visions of the Southwest, by Jane Marquez. The show includes paintings in acrylic and oil as well as pastel drawings of Southwest landscapes. The artist has captured the dramatic light, astounding form and intense color that typifies such places as Red Rock Canyon, Valley of Fire and Utah's color country. The brushwork is bold and dynamic, rarely playing with fussy little linear strokes when a well-crafted block of color is called for. She has managed to reproduce the Southwest palette with its blazing oranges, cool purple shades and the silvery green of our foliage.

It can be very easy, given those elements, to lapse into a formula, creating variations of a fantasy Western landscape. For examples, go to any store where you buy art to match your sofa and see the same four sunsets with the same six cactuses and perhaps a silhouette of a coyote to round it out. What Marquez has made are well-observed paintings that are expertly composed and show the soul and majesty of our little corner of the planet. Because of the small size and immediacy of the work, I would not be surprised to learn that these were painted on site. If they are from photos, she has somehow miraculously managed paint with human eyes instead of the camera's translation of reality.

All that being said, there is no reason I should enjoy these works as much as I do. The technique is marvelous, but what I enjoy is not the technique per se, but the vision that the technique brings forth. There is a true joy in place and time here. There is revelry in the moment, celebration of our unique environment. I can't say for sure what the artist was thinking at the time, but I can hazard a guess. We are here, this is now and we would be fools not to slow down a bit and soak it all in. Stop and smell the sagebrush. That's enough why for anyone.