About the artwork

The River Wild is part of my Southwestern Landscape series. The series embellishes on the visually abstract nature of primordial terrains: the forms of the rocks, rivers, and bushes, the unparalleled palettes, and the various surfaces, from scruffy to lush, craggy to velvety, gushing to billowy.   The subject matter naturally lends itself to being expressed via contemporary abstract art techniques of color, geometry, texture, shape, line, form, and pattern. As the old can look new to the discerning eye, the series easily falls under the umbrella theme of my works, Ancient is Modern, Modern is Ancient.   The River Wild is my abstracted interpretation of the vista of the Rio Chama, a tributary of the Rio Grande, from Highway 84 in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The diverse textures of the arresting high desert of northern New Mexico are fiercely raised up via a bold impasto style created with a palette knife. The technique facilitated the formation of angles and blocks of the craggy mesa and thick mountain forest. The irregular shapes of the scrubby pinions and junipers. The grittiness of the sand. The frothiness of the rapids and fluid lines of the flowing river. I also brightened and deepened the area’s natural earth colors in keeping with this untamed statement of an untamed land.