Hello from Santa Fe

Hi everyone,

I am visiting Santa Fe for the first time this week. I am here to take a Nancy Reyner acrylic workshop at the Santa Fe Art Institute but arrived on Saturday so I could spend the day today exploring galleries. This small city has 250 art galleries. I parked the rental car at the bottom of Canyon Road this morning and walked the 1 mile or so road up and back until the last gallery closed at 5:00pm. I have no idea how many I visited but I must say it was a feast for the eyes!

The variety of work was wonderful. I have visited a few other gallery communities in the past (we won't name them here) and been disappointed as all the galleries seemed to be appealing to the same tastes, and not very sophisticated tastes at that! Not here. I found a wide variety of abstract and representational art in every style, and loads of sculpture. In most communities oil dominates, but here I found every medium even watercolor.

I found my friend Melissa Chandon's paintings in Selbyfleetwood Gallery and they looked wonderful and very luminous. My favorite was the VW bus. I also found work by other artists that I had seen in Southwest Art mag and American Art Collector Mag and was impressed that they looked so much more wonderful in real life than on the printed page. Creg Kosak was one artist who' work surprised me as the depth and complexity of his paintings just does not show up in a photo on the printed page. I saw some wonderful encaustics at GiacobbeFritz by an artist named MaryAyline Thomas. I may have spelled her middle name wrong.

Anyway my feet are tired and my brain is overloaded but it was a wonderful day and I wanted to share it with all of you.