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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us July 9, 2005 rethinking Southwest art Display at Davis & Cline isn’t just adobe buildings By Vickie Aldous Ashland Daily Tidings Etcetera front page, printed version Mention Southwest art to most Northwesterners, and images of adobe dwellings and mesa-dominated landscapes usually come to mind. But references to the Southwest are far more subtle — and rich — than those clichés in the paintings of Joe Ramiro Garcia and Tina Fuentes. Their works are on display through July 31 in the exhibit “Voices of the New Southwest” at Davis & Cline Galleries, 552 A St. Fuentes’ earlier work as a printmaker influenced her current palette, which is dominated by hovering fields and broad brush strokes of black, with accents of white. In this exhibit, she enters new territory by adding contrasting ochre, turquoise, yellow and splashes of red, creating a rich play of light and dark in her abstract expressionist paintings. She said the landscape around her home in Lubbock, Texas, inspired her to delve into an exploration of light and space. “You can stand out in a cotton field and feel like you can see 50 miles,” she said. “I think it’s one of the largest, flattest parts of the country. It’s up on a plateau. There’s a spaciousness to the sky and constant light coming in from the crack of dawn to night.” Complementing the bold brush strokes are aggressive sketches referencing Mayan pyramids and the planks that some Mexicans place on the ground in cemeteries to provide symbolic doorways into the underworld. Images gleaned from Fuentes’ trips to Mexico and study of Mayan culture and its clash with Spanish conquistadors are subtly sprinkled throughout the paintings. She has long had a special interest in the significance of crosses in both cultures. “The Mayans would build giant crosses, 30 feet tall. During the Spanish conquest, they tore down so much of Mayan culture, but the Spaniards thought they were Christian crosses,” she said. “But they represented the tree of life. At the top were scallops that were symbolic of growth.” Fuentes has brought back tangible mementos from her trips in the form of sand, clay and soil. “I was just so enamored of all the different colors in the strata of the landscape,” she said. For Santa Fe, N.M., artist Garcia, the land, literally, is also an inspiration. “Paint is really made of dirt. Minerals are the things we see as color in paint. It is stone — or chemically inspired by minerals,” he said. Garcia frequently uses a palette knife to apply paint to canvas, in moves he likens to troweling on stucco. Both exterior and interior surfaces of human habitations inform the layered, aged-looking paintings. He said the paintings remind him of crumbling walls, stained and burnt linoleum or the inside of houses filled with children who, over the years, leave a low-level line of grime as they trail their hands along the walls. Whether his paintings are dominated by a vast expanse of red or scuffed, dirty pastels, the most vivid and fundamental images of life — those which come from childhood — populate the works. Sock monkeys, cartoon characters, snowmen and balloons are pared with cryptic messages such as, “I wish I was Deaf,” and bizarre sadomasochistic cartoons of a man dressed papoose-style in a seal pup outfit while a woman stands over him wielding a club. Garcia said he is fascinated by the magical quality of animals and everyday objects as he experienced them as a small child. Raised along the Gulf of Mexico, he was fishing with his grandfather, who pulled up a young hammerhead shark. Sharks now are frequent icons in his paintings. “I remember being really scared of the shark. At the same time, I thought, ‘Wow!’ Here was this magical little shark,” he said. “Bears and sharks are judged by their nature. But they’re not being wicked. They’re just being their natural selves.” Now 38 years old, Garcia said he is at that point in life when he is able to look back on his childhood while also understanding that, like his grandfather, he, too, will age. “I’m at a place now where the creative act is like condensing a lifetime of experience onto a surface,” he said. “If you’ve ever been really close to someone who is much older and is nearing the time they may pass, you start seeing that person as a child. You realize that child never left, it just gets covered up. It’s not that I’m reverting to that part of life. I never left. It’s not reverting, it’s exposing.” Staff writer Vickie Aldous can be reached at 482-3456 x 3018 or [email protected]. 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