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Item Ships From: New Mexico
Tulle no. 38, Mendocino, California
By Thomas Jackson
Located in Sante Fe, NM
The hovering installations featured in this ongoing series of photographs are inspired by self-organizing, "emergent" systems in nature such as termite mounds, swarming locusts, scho...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Columbia Basin
By Adam Jahiel
Located in Sante Fe, NM
For years, Jahiel has been photographing the cowboys of the Great Basin–perhaps one of the most inhospitable regions of the already rugged West. These people represent one of the ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Ghost Ranch Encantado 7
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Ghost Ranch Encantado 22 x 22" image size watercolor, unframed. Shrink-wrapped on poster board. I document the essence of the landscape everyday. I am interested in those untouched...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Watercolor

Winter Red
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
black gray white red I document the essence of the landscape everyday. I am interested in those untouched views of our landscape - the best parts of why we all come to New Mexico: ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Potter, oil on canvas, Pueblo Indian Potter Gay Betts, American Indian
By Grace (Gay) Betts
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Potter, oil on canvas, Pueblo Indian Potter Gay Betts Born and raised in New York City, Grace (Gay) Betts (1883-1978) became a peripatetic painter of Western and Southwest landscapes and Indians, and her subjects included Yosemite National Park and Arizona tribal members. She was also a muralist who did backdrops for animal displays...
Category

1960s New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

November Sage
By Martha Mans
Located in Santa Fe, NM
oil on panel MARTHA MANS A master realist painter, she was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she attended Carlow University and received a degree in art and art education. Later she studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the University of Southern California. At the beginning of her career she worked as an art teacher and art department head in Maryland and California. After becoming a full-time artist she taught watercolor and oil painting workshops in the United States and abroad. After moving to Colorado she became a master instructor for a branch of the Art Student’s League in Colorado Springs and then set up her own classes in her studio where she presently teaches on a weekly basis. She was director for many years of large adventure workshops combining painting and exploring. Some of these adventures include Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keefe painted, a yearly excursion on a Clipper Ship in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas stopping at many ports to paint and an exciting workshop in Salvador, Brazil, painting the colorful region and people there. It was due to these painting trips on which the artists had to carry around all their painting equipment that she put together a compact painting travel kit that she marketed and that many plein air artists use as they travel to their many painting locations. Martha’s work has been featured in many art publications such as: Southwest Art Magazine, Artist’s Magazine, Watercolor Artist’s Magazine and Art Collector’s Magazine. Her work has been used in several books on painting; “Making Your Watercolors Look Professional,” by Carole Katchen, The Best of Watercolor Series, Rockport, Press, “How to Paint Better Watercolor Paintings,” by Jerald Brommer and Jerald Brommer’s Art Education Posters for High Schools. Her work has received many awards in national juried competitions including numerous best of shows awards. Western Federation of Watercolor Societies, New Mexico Watercolor Society, Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, Rocky Mountain Watercolor Society, Pikes Peak Watercolor...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Land New Mexico - Art

Materials

Oil, Panel

Low Tide
By Cynthia Young
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Blue, green, navy, white, teal 12 x 12" oil painting on canvas Inspired by the drama of nature and light, Cynthia creates abstracted landscapes with oil on canvas.
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Wood

Cafe 1
By Mary Long
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Brown, Orange, Blue, Pink, Green, Yellow, Red Mary was born in Ohio and has lived in Memphis, Tennessee since the mid-1990s. Following studies in graphic design and painting, she be...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric New Mexico - Art

Materials

Mixed Media, Encaustic

Inch, Co. Kerry, Ireland (Landscape ocean and cliffs)
By Pentti Sammallahti
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Pentti Sammallahti is a benchmark figure in contemporary Finnish photography. His works depict nature eroded and broken down by civilization, but h...
Category

1970s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Lavender Rhythms II
By Martha Mans
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Martha Mans lavender gray white blue green yellow peach brown orange framed in brown frame The painting process has been an evolving experience for me from the time I was very young...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Le Jardin à Vaux" circa 1920s Raymond Thibesart (France, 1874-1968) Pastel
By Raymond Thibesart
Located in SANTA FE, NM
"Le Jardin à Vaux"  Raymond Thibesart (France, 1874-1968) Pastel on paper, circa 1920s Stamp of studio on reverse: INV Nbr. 823 9 1/2 x 12 (17 1/2 x 14 framed) inches Raymond Thibes...
Category

1920s Post-Impressionist New Mexico - Art

Materials

Pastel, Paper

"Snapshot, the 50th State", Abstract Landscape, Hawaii, Flag, Black, Print, 2020
By Patty deGrandpre
Located in Natick, MA
Patty deGrandpre’s “Snapshot, The 50th State” is an unique abstract inkjet print with four distinct 4.5 x 6.5 “snapshots” representing the 50th United State of Hawaii represented on...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Color, Digital

Amanda, Smoke
By Siri Kaur
Located in Sante Fe, NM
In SHE TELLS ALL, Kaur engages questions of identity performance by exploring an ever-present and wildly diverse American identity: the modern American witch. Witches are contemporar...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Lavender Glow
By Martha Mans
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Martha Mans lavender gray white blue green yellow peach brown orange framed in brown frame The painting process has been an evolving experience for me from the time I was very young...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Morning Along Cypress Creek, February 2, 2013, 7:28 AM, Wimberley, Texas
By David H. Gibson
Located in Sante Fe, NM
In a world entrenched in societal division and ecological turmoil, it can be refreshing to step back and enjoy the quiet beauty of the natural world. Dallas photographer David H. Gib...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Sunspots Artifact Fourteen
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
33 x 41" framed, acrylic on canvas yellow black gray I document the essence of the landscape everyday. I am interested in those untouched views of our landscape - the best parts of ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

Bone Mallet
Located in Sante Fe, NM
"The Beauty of the Uncommon Tools" is from Tony Chirinos' project entitled, "The Precipice", - also released as a book project by Gnomic Book in 2021 - which serves as a photographic...
Category

2010s Minimalist New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Rib Shears
Located in Sante Fe, NM
"The Beauty of the Uncommon Tools" is from Tony Chirinos' project entitled, "The Precipice", - also released as a book project by Gnomic Book in 2021 - which serves as a photographic...
Category

2010s Minimalist New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Ethereal Couple
By Karin Rosenthal
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Coming from an earlier interest in portraits and street photography, my Nudes in Water are less about eroticism and more about body as the human vessel for our multi-faceted but brie...
Category

1990s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

As One Would Expect
By Maggie Taylor
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Print comes with a 16x16" mat.
Category

21st Century and Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Slate
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
black gray white I document the essence of the landscape everyday. I am interested in those untouched views of our landscape - the best parts of why we all come to New Mexico: the ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic

"A Colorful Crowd, Yugoslavia"  Jacques Martin-Ferrières (1893-1972)
By Jacques Martin-Ferrières
Located in SANTA FE, NM
"A Colorful Crowd, Yugoslavia" Jacques Martin-Ferrières (1893-1972) Circa 1930s Oil on panel 17 1/8 x 13 3/4 (frame) inches A painter remarkable for his highly personal portraits a...
Category

1920s New Mexico - Art

Materials

Oil, Wood Panel

Pink Place
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Pink Place peach pink blue yellow I document the essence of the landscape everyday. I am interested in those untouched views of our landscape - the best parts of why we all come to ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Cottonwood Wash
Located in Santa Fe, NM
acrylic, mixed media on canvas In his current body of work, Tim uses large gestural drawings to create energetic abstractions. The layered process of his pieces creates a rich textu...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil Crayon, Acrylic

Rembrandt Series
By Carla van de Puttelaar
Located in Sante Fe, NM
I cherish a the Dutch Old Masters. As a contemporary artist, I work with the female nude and portraiture, so I was enthusiastic when the Rembrandt House approached me to create a new...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Night Fall From Studio, John Hogan, Santa Fe landscape rose blue yellow etching
By John Hogan (American)
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Night Fall From Studio, John Hogan, Santa Fe landscape rose blue yellow etching hand pulled 7 color etching edition 50 22 x 30 paper size 17.5 x 2...
Category

1990s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Etching

Skyline, Dubai, Study 3, United Arab Emirates, 2009
By Michael Kenna
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Michael Kenna is master of contemporary photography. Known for clean compositions, long exposures and minimalist aesthetics, Kenna’s signature style remains highly influential among ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Once in a Vermillion
Located in Santa Fe, NM
acrylic, ink, mixed media on panel In his current body of work, Tim uses large gestural drawings to create energetic abstractions. The layered process of his pieces creates a rich t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Acrylic, Wood Panel

The Wanderer
By Maggie Taylor
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Maggie Taylor creates what she calls “dreamlike worlds inhabited by everyday objects.” To make her intricate compositions, Taylor collages a variety of images using digital technology. She begins with small pastel drawings to use as backgrounds, then scans each additional element into the computer and combines them using Photoshop, arranging figures much in the same way she creates still lifes in the studio. Finding inspiration in 19th-century photographs, taxidermy specimens, mounted insects, vintage toys, sea shells, feathers, and other artifacts she finds at flea markets, online auctions, and in her own backyard, Taylor creates surreal pigmented digital prints that call to mind tintype photographs...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Sunrise Sequence, August 27, 2016, 8:37:53 AM Eagle Nest Lake New Mexico
By David H. Gibson
Located in Sante Fe, NM
David Gibson is primarily a self-taught photographer. Years of developing and refining his photographic technique have afforded him much recognition. He has also photographed extensi...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Beach Rocks, Gageo-do, Shinan, South Korea.
By Michael Kenna
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Michael Kenna is master of contemporary photography. Known for clean compositions, long exposures and minimalist aesthetics, Kenna’s signature style remains highly influential ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Leaf No. 7C1
By Edward Bateman
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Our world is immersed in light, but its physical essence is chemical. Digital photographic processes can record that illumination, but they cannot touch the wet, chemical essence whi...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

April is the Cruelest Month
By Maggie Taylor
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Maggie Taylor creates what she calls “dreamlike worlds inhabited by everyday objects.” To make her intricate compositions, Taylor collages a variety of images using digital technology. She begins with small pastel drawings to use as backgrounds, then scans each additional element into the computer and combines them using Photoshop, arranging figures much in the same way she creates still lifes in the studio. Finding inspiration in 19th-century photographs, taxidermy specimens, mounted insects...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Gravity Blues
Located in Santa Fe, NM
acrylic, mixed media on panel In his current body of work, Tim uses large gestural drawings to create energetic abstractions. The layered process of his pieces creates a rich textur...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Acrylic, Wood Panel

Welcome to my office
By Maggie Taylor
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Maggie Taylor creates what she calls “dreamlike worlds inhabited by everyday objects.” To make her intricate compositions, Taylor collages a variety of images using digital technolog...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

"The Long Part of the Drive", Abstract Landscape, Blue, Yellow, Monoprint, 2021
By Patty deGrandpre
Located in Natick, MA
Patty deGrandpre’s “The Long Part of the Drive” is a predominately blue, yellow, and gold unique contemporary abstract landscape represented on a 16 x 20 x 2 inch “Ampersand Claybord...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Paper, Color, Monoprint, Mixed Media, Inkjet

Tactile Light
By Carla van de Puttelaar
Located in Sante Fe, NM
The photography of Carla van de Puttelaar allows the eye to touch the skin on many different levels. Through her lens, she makes the viewer aware of the sensitivity and the sensualit...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Windblown Clouds
By Martha Mans
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Martha Mans 7 x 7 image size and 16 x 16 matted and shrink-wrapped The painting process has been an evolving experience for me from the time I was very young and first started paint...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Watercolor

Wildwood 2
By Thomas Slate
Located in Santa Fe, NM
acrylic, sumi ink on canvas black white red yellow Thomas Slate uses large gestural drawings to create energetic abstractions. The layered process of his pieces creates a rich textu...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil Crayon, Acrylic

Beauty and a Beast, May 14, 2015
By Alan Friedman
Located in Sante Fe, NM
My photographs comprise a solar diary, portraits of a moment in the life of our local star.
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

Cloud No. 4446/4447
By Laurie Tümer
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Artwork is a diptych composed of two 12 x 18-inch prints places in an 18 x 44-inch mat. CLOUDS “This series began lying in bed lazily photographing the clouds tripping along the ho...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

"Are We There Yet? (a bit of Colorado & a lot of Texas)", Abstract Print, 2021
By Patty deGrandpre
Located in Natick, MA
Patty deGrandpre’s “Are We There Yet? (a bit of Colorado & a lot of Texas)” is a 4.5 x 14.375 inch unique abstract inkjet print represented on 11 x 16.5 inch Awagami Bamboo Japanese paper embracing both the art of digital printmaking, minimalism, and creative photography. A green hue gradates over a photo of a snow capped mountain range taken along the iconic Independence Pass in Colorado and begins the progression of images in this striking abstract landscape. A thin dark pink bar sits horizontally within the snow complimenting the format of the artwork. Two distinct depictions of blue cactus...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Paper, Color, Digital

Along the Rio Grande
By Elaine Holien
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Along the Rio Grande 22 x 30" image size watercolor, 32 x 40" framed in a whitewash profile with museum quality glass red, green blue I document the essenc...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Watercolor

Basket, Panama, Rainforest, Wounaan Tribe, Mamina Chemorra, red, blue, purple
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Basket, Panama, Rainforest, Wounaan Tribe, Mamina Chemorra, red, blue, purple geometric diamond design silk weave extremely fine Darien Rainforest palm fiber and vegetal dyes handwo...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Organic Material

Tirana, Albania, 2012
By Pentti Sammallahti
Located in Sante Fe, NM
Pentti Sammallahti is a benchmark figure in contemporary Finnish photography. His works depict nature eroded and broken down by civilization, but he does not put man and the environm...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Silver Gelatin

Chords XVI
By Robert Kelly
Located in Los Angeles, CA
This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 25. Paper size is 36"h x 82"w with an image size of 20"h x 66"w. Rob...
Category

2010s Abstract New Mexico - Art

Materials

Pigment

18th Century European Portrait of Saint John the Baptist as a Child.
Located in SANTA FE, NM
18th Century European Portrait of a Child Saint John the Baptist Oil on Canvas 19 x 14 1/4 inches This lovely and sensitively painting has been examined by a professional restorer w...
Category

18th Century Old Masters New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Nocturne Grande V
By Robert Kelly
Located in Los Angeles, CA
This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 50. Paper size is 35"h x 44"w with an image size of 24.5"h x 35"w. R...
Category

2010s Abstract New Mexico - Art

Materials

Pigment

"Kauai, Deserted", Abstract, Architecture, Magenta, Green, Black, Print, 2019
By Patty deGrandpre
Located in Natick, MA
Patty deGrandpre’s “Kauai, Deserted” is an 8 x 10 inch unique abstract inkjet print represented on 16.5 x 11.5 inch Awagami Washi paper and is part of her “Pieces and Pictures” serie...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Digital, Color

Esperanza (Hope), Eduardo Oropeza Day of the Dead, serigraph, birds, skeletons
By Eduardo Oropeza
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Esperanza (Hope), Eduardo Oropeza Day of the Dead, serigraph, birds, skeletons Esperanza (Hope), Day of the Dead, serigraph, blue, yellow, birds, skel...
Category

1990s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Screen

Fantasy, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, titled
By Toko Shinoda
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Fantasy, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, titled Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...
Category

1990s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Lithograph

Orfeo II
By Robert Kelly
Located in Los Angeles, CA
This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print printed on natural cotton rag paper by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 30 that is available as a single ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract New Mexico - Art

Materials

Pigment

“Olive Trees and Farm, Cannes” Raymond Thibesart Raymond Thibesart (1874-1968)
By Raymond Thibesart
Located in SANTA FE, NM
Olive Trees and Farm, Cannes (Ferme dans le Oliviers, Cannes” Raymond Thibesart (France, 1874-1968) Oil on canvas, circa 1920s Signed ;lower right 19 1/2 x 24 1/2 (26 1/2 x 31 1/2 f...
Category

1920s Post-Impressionist New Mexico - Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

French Expressionism "A Vase of Flowers" Gen Paul (French, 1895-1975)
By Gen Paul
Located in SANTA FE, NM
"A Vase of Flowers" Eugene Paul aka Gen Paul (French, 1895-1975) Oil crayon on paper 20 1/2 x 14 (28 x 21 1/2 frame) inches "Gen Paul is undoubtedly the greatest representative, and...
Category

1960s Expressionist New Mexico - Art

Materials

Paper, Oil Crayon

Butterfly Basket, Wounaan Tribe, Panama, Rainforest, black, red, green, white
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Butterfly Basket, Wounaan Tribe, Panama, Rainforest, black, red, green, white The baskets are made by the Wounaan and Embera Indians from the Darien ...
Category

1990s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Organic Material

Orfeo I
By Robert Kelly
Located in Los Angeles, CA
This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print printed on natural cotton rag paper by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 30 that is available as a single ...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract New Mexico - Art

Materials

Pigment

Talavie, by Dan Namingha, Hopi desert landscape, village scene, blues, reds
By Dan Namingha
Located in Santa Fe, NM
Talavie, Hopi desert landscape, village scene, blues, reds, by Dan Namingha hand pulled limited edition lithograph signed and numbered by the artist
Category

1980s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Lithograph

Rembrandt Series
By Carla van de Puttelaar
Located in Sante Fe, NM
I cherish a the Dutch Old Masters. As a contemporary artist, I work with the female nude and portraiture, so I was enthusiastic when the Rembrandt House approached me to create a new...
Category

2010s Contemporary New Mexico - Art

Materials

Archival Pigment

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