"Along the Rio Puerco" egg tempera, 2024
24" x 34"
The Rio Puerco of
New Mexico winds through an amazing field of volcanic "throats", on its
way from the Nacimientos near Cuba, NM, flowing around Albuquerque,
finally joining the Rio Grande near highway 60 to the south. I made
many trips into the area, made numerous watercolor sketches
and videos. The volcanic throat on the left in my painting is
Cerro de Santa Clara, and the horned throat beyond is Cerro de
Guadalupe. From the opposite side, the lower horn of Guadalupe closely
resembles the silhouette of a mother and child, therefore the name of
the Virgin Mother.
The area is obviously harsh, dry and dusty. The shapes and colors are
other-worldly. As an artist, it is difficult to paint something totally
out of the ordinary, where nature pushes color or geology to the limits
of our senses. People will just say, "Oh, well he must have used
artistic license making that earth so red, or that hill so
symmetrical..." So the artist is usually better off painting more
conventional subject matter, and leaving freakish extremes of nature to
photography. This area pushes those extremes. The dramatic shapes and
colors become a changing tapestry with moving cloud shadows
silhouetting the diabolical shapes... It leaves a mere mortal painter
in awe to the point of wondering if he should have gone into plumbing
instead! In this painting I didn't use cloud shadows because I wanted
to get the intensity of the mid-day light, and I needed those shadows
on the sand in the foreground. I have been on those roads in the
distance, looked back at the little beach I was standing on, painting.
I worked from some video stills, but I try to create my own human
perspective, compensating for the distortion of distant objects and
rounding of edges that happens with a camera lens. It is dangerous to
copy photos directly. I always try to at least draw a quick sketch of
my landscape directly from life. My great uncle Andy Wyeth and my
grandfather Peter Hurd never used photos unless unavoidable. Andy
forbade photos, and would give me a hard time if he thought something
looked copied. Among many natural mineral pigments in this
painting, I used a special and appropriate pigment from my grandfather,
labeled in Spanish as always, "Violeta Mars". The process of tempera is
ancient and slow. This took more than 6 months of dedicated daily work
in the studio. No shortcuts. I stay humble, and God takes over, I don't
lose interest or hope, even when the painting looks like a hopeless
mess for months. What a privilege life is, and what better celebration
of that privilege than to create?
SHORT INTRODUCTION TO EGG TEMPERA
By Peter de La Fuente
CLICK LINK HERE