Noël Hudson: Ornamental Abstraction Rio Bravo Fine Art 110 north BroadWay street, truth or consequences 

THE TRIP TO TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES BEGINS WITH A PERUSAL OF the Rio Bravo Fine Art website. The discovery of Noël Hudson’s exhibition, Ornamental Abstraction, which fell on the town’s second Saturday art walk, is quickly followed by the wrangling up of a willing travel companion and a call to Riverbend Hot Springs to book a quiet, private soak overlooking the Rio Grande. 

Truth or Consequences is no idyllic destination. It’s run down; it’s bare bones. The sun-bleached, peeling paint that pervades downtown rings with the city’s emptiness like a long, sighing exhale. However, underneath the fallen-on•hard-times crust is an eccentric hardiness and happenstance charm that is relished by some, lost on others. 

Fortunately, my travel companion and I, like so many who find themselves in New Mexico, prefer the gritty crunch of crumbling sidewalks to the click of heels on pavement, and so we are rather undeterred passing by empty storefront after empty storefront. This place does not, cannot, pretend to be anything else. This place wears its heart on its sleeve. For those willing to look under the skin of things, Truth or Consequences offers a special kind of romance involving eccentric charms and gravity. Truth and Consequences sounds more appropriate. 

However, in the midst of this economic slump there are distinct, buzzing points of light. Seeking them out necessitates meandering, so we meander. We leave the dusty, coffee-scented shelves of Black Cat Books and Coffee with arms full of used books. At Passion Pie Cafe we order brunch: flaky croissant, fresh fruit, and the show-stopping pear, feta, and walnut waffle sandwich. The Geronimo Springs Museum offers a cobbled-together take on local history (we spend most of our time here looking at the photographs of every graduating class of Hot Springs High since 1939. We contemplate personalities, probable fates, with whom we would have gone to the prom... We soak up healing waters and sunbeams at Riverbend Hot Springs. Overlooking the Rio Grande, this rustic retreat feels like another world. A quick nap on a chaise in sun-speckled shade helps us transition back to life. 

Rejuvenated, we head out for the Second Saturday Art Hop. We see small groups join in on the meandering to which we’ve adapted so well, but locate most of the crowd at Rio Bravo Fine Art. The gallery, a sprawling, multilevel space, was founded by the artist Harold Joe Waldrum in 2000. The gallery has been owned and directed by Eduardo Alicea since Waldrum’s death in 2003, and represents a handful of local New Mexico artists. Several gallery artists have work on display throughout the building, including Delmas Howe, Dave Barnett, Joel Smith, and Waldrum himself. 

The main first-floor gallery is filled with the colorful, exuberant abstract works of Santa Fe–based artist Noël Hudson. Ranging from collage and acrylics to monoprints and monotypes, Hudson’s works capture an energetic impulse that feels of a piece with—and makes sense in—the milieu of Truth or Consequences. Her paintings, cathartic and frenetic gestures of color, vibrate like exercises in dissipating the muddle of the everyday. They seem to represent a clearing, or transitional experience. In contrast, her collaged squares offer up a sense of order and calm by collecting and holding pattern together with organic papers and handmade prints and paintings. 

The artist’s paintings on paper and monotypes reflect an overriding concern for emotion and expressionistic gesture. The prints are identified in series with titles including Refraction, Reflection, and Infusion, suggesting an alchemy involving explorations in spontaneity of gesture and a curiosity about the play of two-dimensional forms. 

More compelling is Hudson’s Fragment series of collages. These diminutive squares are comprised of collaged papers and prints, as well as prints and paintings made by the artist. On each floating panel, expressionistic gesture is confronted with and tempered by pattern and fields of color. Each square feels like an experiment with—or meditative contemplation of—the materials at hand. When the artist hits on that alchemical moment (such as in Snowing in Moonlight and Bamboo in Mist) the results are sweet and serene. In some pieces, that moment gets lost in the flurry of process and competing media. 

The artist cites influences from disparate times and places, reflecting a wide variety of references that unite along a central conceptual thread. From Japanese printmaking and kimono to medieval Islamic vegetal abstraction and the Nabis school of Post-Impressionist painters, these influences show up in Hudson’s work through a driving concern for pattern, surface, and the powerful confluence of palette, form, and texture. 

Emerging from Rio Bravo Fine Art is like leaving an oasis, but we decide to continue our newfound love of meandering, this time in the direction of dinner. Tomorrow is filled with more plans for soaking in hot springs and embracing the unwinding sensation incurred by this quirky place, augmented by Hudson’s world of contemplative ornament. —Lauren Tresp 

Noël Hudson, Bamboo in Mist, collage on panel, 6” x 6” [, year?] 


APRIL 2015 the magazine | 53 

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.”