THE PLAY OF LIGHT ON WATER REPRESENTS THE MEETING OF TWO INVISIBLE elemental entities. Science, time and again, uses the movements of the most essential of liquids as a metaphor for light, while the brilliant, elusive beauty of H2O’s transparent, formless reflectivity is best grasped through means of illumination. Water captures and holds light (and heat) in ways that no other substance on earth does. Water is the main vehicle for our bodies. Fully fluid from birth to death, we deny our lack of solidity every bit as much as we pretend that we are rational rather than emotional creatures. Associated naturally with the conjoined psychic seas of creativity, procreativity, sexuality, and madness, water is the birthplace of the goddess of love, just as our mother’s inland ocean of embryonic fluid is for mere mortals. Water is our ontology and our destiny, evolutionarily, empirically, and metaphysically. Who and what we are, how we live, where we come from, where we’re going, how we’ll get there, and how we’ll feel, well over two-thirds of the answer is almost always water. 

DELMAS HOWE, UH HUH, THE GUY IN THE HISTORY BOOKS, is living large in his hometown of T or C, living and painting his truth, and thus not suffering the consequinkles of fuzzy falsehoods. That was how it appeared recently when Mayumi Nishida-Carver and I scrambled down past Belen to take some of the finest mineral waters this patient planet provides, courtesy of our favorite publisher and the lovely Blackstone Spa, and to pay a visit to the studio of the early postmodernist, championed in the nineteen-seventies by Brit critic Edward Lucie-Smith. That’s right, we’re talking the original pomo-homoeroticist extraordinaire, the painter of The Three Graces, shirtless in aviator glasses and hats as contemporary cowpokes, and large rodeo friezes reminiscent of the Villa dei Misteri murals, a courageous advancer of gay rights, of the naked and nude in art, of postmodern figuration, and of doing what makes you happy. Children, you should thank elder Delmas for his important role in this country’s sexual revolution. And for all those pictures of hot, hung dudes in chaps. 

Howe’s live-work space is a large old storefront full of eclectic art objects, antiques, and images arranged artfully across the walls, the largest of which holds an unfinished but beautifully drawn mural depicting the life of Delmas Howe. It serves as the perfect visual aid for our conversation, which begins with an exploration of the artist’s chronology. 

So much of what an artist does is doing it a zillion times. Mastery, says Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, comes after about ten years or 10,000 hours devoted to the thing. Nolan Winkler’s show at Rio Bravo Fine Art is way beyond the first decanting of ten-year-mastery.  She must have put ten years each into the separate elements of composition, touch/ texture and color and then another ten into mixing them into complex or simplified bouquets.

Here is young exuberance flashing into spring light. Here is wizened marshaled strength walking through dimmed winter. 

In a word, Nolan Winkler has range—a five-octave range--a cellar full of fine wine—a fleet of ships at her command.

Countless artists have said they do art to see what they and the world are about. They become as they do. These are the process and expressionist artists who do not intellectualize. They are the feelers and doers. They are also the hardest to write about, inciting adjectives and metaphors. 

Big flowers are New Mexico’s regional art signature. It has something to do with the drastic juxtaposition of polar opposites one finds in nature here--drought and flood, searing sun and shivering darkness. The crystal clear dry air makes the light resolve on objects with the strength of the Hubble Telescope. A bloom amid acres of brown becomes epic and wondrous.

Georgia O’Keeffe started it--monumental flower paintings. A second-generation American modernist just joined the club—David Barnett.

These close-up blow-ups are nearly a reversal of his usual depiction of flora.

For years, Barnett has depicted flora in its multitude, not its singularity. He sees and emphasizes the geometric pattern and distribution of branches, stems, leaves, buds and flowers. In this vast complexity there is order, making us feel part of a cosmos. Barnett shows us that the same spiral leaf placement on a stem is the same as our human chromosome placement on our DNA.  

Deborah Klezmer’s art, similar to Tiffany’s Art Nouveau pieces, is made of glass and metal carefully blended with proportions and interfaces that create dreamy pools, serpentine byways and vistas, which from farther off become of-a-piece biomorphic sculptures with an other-worldly glow.

Through technical processes, her prose and drawings are displayed within glass sleeves, as are photographic images, some of women that focus on the period from the 1880s-through-1920s.  She has scavenged and scoured for photographic plates and antique hardware. She discovered a cache of Tiffany glass and “jewels,” which she uses sparingly in these pieces.

Klezmer described her technical researches and trials and errors that went into making these amalgam pieces into wholes that are greater than their parts.

A sculptor for the last 13 years, Klezmer, trained from youth-to-young adult as a playwright and was an editor, researcher and writer on a project that produced a 17-volume history of women throughout the ages.  

Klezmer’s sculptures, besides giving us aesthetic pleasure, are intense one-act plays that give us setting, place, character and plot.  

H. Joe Waldrum is recognized as an avatar of the Truth or Consequences art scene. He is no longer alive, in the mundane sense, but his presence is palpable in his art, which is always displayed at Rio Bravo Fine Arts, once owned by him. Waldrum, opened his gallery July 31, 2001; provided an ‘anchor’ gallery and his own iconoclast presence, drawing other artists to the area. His gallery is located in the former Ace Hardware building which he acquired in a trade for several pieces of his artwork.

Waldrum’s life and by extension, art, is complex and contradictory. He did not eschew normalcy as much as he tried it and then rejected it as not suitable for him. In his book Ando en Cueros (I Walk Stark-naked), Waldrum describes his break with his religious indoctrination, academia, abstract expressionism, and exclusionary attitudes towards art.

He describes his post-graduate work at Fort Hays Kansas State College: “I felt as though the faculty was joking when they used "art-speak" in their lectures…later as a faculty member I could no longer feign student naiveté…They felt I should be more respectful; after all, they had allowed me into their inner circle. I felt bamboozled and I wanted out of the circle.”