Special Exhibition: Blue Room
Featuring Paintings by Noël Hudson
From Her Cactus and Palm Series
Recollections: Images Through Time and Place
October 13, 2018 – August 9, 2019
Cactus and Palm Series
In the early 1980s, when I moved from southern California to Taos, NM to focus on
painting, I became fascinated by the various plant species that I encountered in this
high desert landscape, particularly Cactus. In California, I had been a ceramic artist for
many years and the sculptural shapes and forms of the cactus plants resonated with
my previous three-dimensional work. However, many cacti grow more abundantly at
lower altitudes and, thus, I found more varieties to use as subjects in botanical gardens
in both Arizona and California than in New Mexico.
The Palm paintings, part of my ongoing series entitled Patterns of Nature, began in the
early 2000s. My husband and I had enjoyed a wonderful vacation on the island of
Kauai in 1985 and, while there, I had photographed an endless variety of colorful,
patterned, tropical plants and palms. In 2003, I saw a retrospective exhibition of
the highly patterned landscape and figurative paintings of the Mexican artist, Alfredo
Arreguin, at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, and I was so completely
impressed and awe-struck by his work that it inspired me to begin to incorporate
patterns, abstractly, into my nature-inspired paintings, which I continue do to this day.
In the early 1980s, when I moved from southern California to Taos, NM to focus on
painting, I became fascinated by the various plant species that I encountered in this
high desert landscape, particularly Cactus. In California, I had been a ceramic artist for
many years and the sculptural shapes and forms of the cactus plants resonated with
my previous three-dimensional work. However, many cacti grow more abundantly at
lower altitudes and, thus, I found more varieties to use as subjects in botanical gardens
in both Arizona and California than in New Mexico.
The Palm paintings, part of my ongoing series entitled Patterns of Nature, began in the
early 2000s. My husband and I had enjoyed a wonderful vacation on the island of
Kauai in 1985 and, while there, I had photographed an endless variety of colorful,
patterned, tropical plants and palms. In 2003, I saw a retrospective exhibition of
the highly patterned landscape and figurative paintings of the Mexican artist, Alfredo
Arreguin, at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, and I was so completely
impressed and awe-struck by his work that it inspired me to begin to incorporate
patterns, abstractly, into my nature-inspired paintings, which I continue do to this day.
Cactus Paintings
Palm Paintings
