Ten Ways to Look at the High Desert, My Six Week Residency, Gallery 408/Twelfth Street, April and May 2008

  I’m a painter and draftsman of the northeast forest known for portraits of my woods, a hardwood forest.  Drawings, lithographs, and green paintings with small patches of cerulean and cobalt as sky.  I came to the residency looking for transformation:  How I see and feel and the graphic and painting language I use to describe what I experience in front of the motif. 

Joan Malkerson, the guiding light of Twelfth Street, and I had joked – dead serious – that New Mexico had transformed Richard Diebenkorn (in Albuquerque in the early 1950s).  New Mexico could transform our work, too.  (We weren’t ignoring the long list of other artists like Higgins, Jonsard, Martin, Bell, an incomplete list.)

Despite a handsome studio overlooking the train yard and the veterinarian’s clinic, and working plein air and walking miles of malpais and grasslands beneath Mt. Carrizo, the paintings didn’t come.  I finished two green paintings of the NE forest, both strong.  I did a number of drawings and oil sketches; the economy and description of space pleased me.  I took hundreds of photographs from which I edited Ten Ways. 

As I considered the work I realized I was moving toward lithographs, different scales, drawn from these sketches and photos.  Images that were some equivalent of this experience of geologic time and close-toned palette of the high desert surrounding Carrizozo.   A portrait of place.  I finished my residency with a visit to Tamarind Institute at UNM to talk with master printer, Bill Lagattuta, about what I’m thinking to call the ‘Zozo Suite, three to six large lithographs, some in color. 

Instead of maple, blackberry, and fern I’ll be drawing soaptree yucca, sotol, chollas, beavertail and pancake prickly pear.  A vet looking at a horse in a lot near the train yard.  Mesquite, saltbush and sage in the Valley of Fires lava flow.  Carrizo peak.  The Sacramento range at dusk.
Richard Kathmann, Saphouse Studio, June 2008