Holiday Showcase 2022

HOLIDAY SHOWCASE

Holiday SHowcaSe

Ben Aronson

Bill

Barrett

Woody

Gwyn

Jivan Lee Forrest Moses John Nieto Elias Rivera cover: John Nieto, Coyote, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com

Ben Aronson

Ben Aronson is recognized as one of America's most respected and evocative painters of the contemporary urban landscape. Aronson’s cityscapes demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity to convey—in masterful combinations of impressionistic atmosphere, color and light— the sensory experience of a captured moment in the life of a city. Aronson's signature synthesis of realism and abstraction expressively translates the everyday reality of metropolitan forms and life – rooftops, skyscrapers, streets, stop signs, and sidewalks – into tableaux of urban geometry and motion, light, and shadow that uniquely compresses the spirit of a place. The artist’s expressive painterly style is characterized by fluid, yet restrained brushwork. “The main objective is not merely to capture physical likeness,” Aronson says, “but rather to aim for the most concentrated form of a powerful visual experience.”

Art historian Joanna Fink, in 2006, wrote: “Aronson creates a continuum that begins at the turn of the 20th century and ends at the tip of his brush. But while he carries with him the accumulation of his study of the art of the past, it is ultimately Aronson’s own experience, his own hand which guides the brush.” In 2007, arts writer George Tysh noted Aronson’s firm place in art history –positioning him with Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Fairfield Porter: "[All four are] realists whose compositions express an acute awareness of underlying geometries and forms, and who never forgot about the paint in painting."

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Ben Aronson Hollywood Hills, 2022

Oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches

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Paris Morning, Left Bank, 2022

Oil on panel, 40.13 x 40 inches

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Ben Aronson

Ben Aronson Strada di Roma, 2022 Oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches

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Bill Barrett

Bill Barrett’s sculptures of fabricated aluminum, bronze or steel address the interplay between positive and negative space with grace, elegance and exquisite balance. His works call to mind the fluid effortlessness of calligraphic strokes and betray a positivism to which many viewers feel drawn. Others have said that Barrett’s sculptures are distinctly American in their directness and lightness. His sophisticated constructions, through a delicate balance of form and content, transcend the starker aesthetics of minimalism with a warmth and humanity.

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New York State of Mind, 2005 Fabricated bronze, 60 x 54 x 30 inches

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Bill Barrett

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Bill Barrett Mirages, 2002

Fabricated steel, 47 x 44 x 28 inches

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Woody Gwyn

One of America’s foremost contemporary landscape painters, Woody Gwyn captures the crystalline light and vast expanses of our changing American terrain. His work is characterized by dramatic angles, panoramic formats, startling color, aggressive cropping, and an acute contrast between the natural and manmade. Whether depicting monumental Western mesas, tranquil wooded clearings, or shimmering oceanic vistas, the results offer new ways of seeing a world he reveres.

Departing from the increasingly conceptual protocols of contemporary art, Gwyn emphasizes that landscape is not merely a construct shaped by human ideologies and cultural policies— that, in fact, it continuously moves and shapes us. As landscape painting marks the state of our conception of nature, Gwyn familiarizes us to shifts in our contemporary vision. The breadth of his strikingly horizontal panoramas slowly leads the eye through sensuous ribbons of scenery that resist immediate comprehensibility.

Gwyn’s art embraces landscape as something greater than us; the spaces it depicts are at once the subjects of abstract contemplations and, like our bodies themselves, the very framework of our complex material reality. Confronting the fragmentation that defines our era while eschewing the conventions that defined the past, he offers visually persuasive renderings of points at which cultural history and contemporary society converge.

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Woody Gwyn Azul, 2018-19 Oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches

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Woody Gwyn Mora Grove, 2001 Oil on panel, 48 x 120 inches

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Oil on panel, 60 x 86 inches

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Woody Gwyn Road Cut, 1986

Jivan Lee

Jivan Lee’s oil paintings explore the raw material of paint to create images and emotional response. Based in Santa Fe and Taos, Lee is inspired by the landscape and artists of the southwest. He works on-site from direct observation and response to the physicality of the natural environment. His work is distinguished by thick brush strokes and a tactile, sculptural quality, applying paint with spatulas, brushes paper towels, bare hands, and even dirt. The resulting pieces move between abstract fields of color, topographical planes, and recognizable imagery. Up close they celebrate paint for paint’s sake – luscious, colorful, moldable. When viewed at distance, the paintings collect into studies of light, architecture, recognizable figures, and landscapes – a transformation that highlights the relationships between raw material and familiar image, inviting visceral contemplation.

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Clouds Over the Farm, 2022 Oil on panel, 60 x 40 inches

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Jivan Lee

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The House in the Sage - Sunset, 2022 Oil on panel, 36 x 48 inches

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Jivan Lee

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Jivan Lee Midday Storm at the Big View, 2022 Oil on panel, 72 x 48 inches

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Riverbends - Spring Morning, 2022 Oil on linen, 52 x 142 inches

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Jivan Lee

With a distinguished career of more than 54 years, Forrest Moses paints graceful visual responses to place through distinctive and complex rhythms of color, lines and form that reveal the sudden transcendent quality of the simple experience of being in nature. Quiet and meditative, his work is thought of as an art of intimation rather than disclosure. Changing seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, carefully balanced compositions include only the essentials for evocation, and a painterly fluidity informs each brushstroke.

Establishing a dynamic tension between abstraction and representation, Forrest Moses’s masterful depictions of serene woodlands and placid bodies of water emphasize both the tranquility of their subject matter and the eloquence of understated gestures. He presents an art of intimation rather than disclosure, where seasons are suggested by subtle color harmonies, expertly balanced compositions include no more than is necessary in the service of evocation, and a uniquely refined and fluid elegance informs each and every brushstroke.

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Forrest Moses

Forrest Moses Bosque Grasslands, 2003 Oil on canvas, 40 x 96 inches

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Iron Eagle, 2014

Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

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John Nieto

John Nieto

John Nieto is a leading figure in American contemporary art, celebrated for his emotionally resonant paintings of Western and Indigenous subjects that he rendered in heightened, expressive color. Inspired by his New Mexican and Native American roots, Nieto painted a wide range of figures from Southwestern culture and lore—both contemporary and historical—with an intensely fauvist palette and powerful brushwork. Known as a brilliant colorist, Nieto conveyed his images of Indigenous and Hispanic leaders, artists, craftspeople, dancers, and wildlife using vivid, powerful hues that express the artist’s intention that these figures be worthy of honor by all.

In his art, Nieto was inspired by both his own heritage as well as his deep study of the history and culture throughout the Southwest. Today, he is renowned for his richly modulated images of Indigenous fancy dancers, plains archers, basket weavers, and chieftains, as well as his portraits of other cultural and historical icons of the Southwest, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Kit Carson, and Maria Benitez. In all of these works, Nieto’s use of color is raw, expressive, and intuitive. “We are born with a genetic memory or consciousness of color, and everyone’s choice of color is personal,” Nieto stated.

Applying this highly personal, emotional treatment of color to a wide range of subjects, Nieto’s art mirrors the complicated heritage of the Southwest as well as the intertwining threads of his own ancestry. He believed that, through his powerful colorations, he might help his audience to understand the nobility, dignity, pride, and hurt of Native Americans that many of his paintings quietly carry. In the rich interaction of his colors, he created images that are worthy of study and act as enduring totems of times and events in the nation’s history that he felt must never be forgotten.

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Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

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John Nieto Coyote, 1988

John Nieto Crow Eagle, 2007

Acrylic on canvas, 22 x 28 inches

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John Nieto Spotted Horse, 1989

Acrylic on canvas, 44 x 40 inches

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Elias Rivera

With a successful career spanning more than half a century, Elias Rivera is a renowned Santa Febased painter. In his vibrant works inspired by Dutch and Spanish Old Master paintings, Rivera chronicles vivid scenes of urban life in New Mexico, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Eloquently distilling the essence of daily life in these Indigenous communities, Rivera’s striking canvases are brimming with groups of figures bathed in radiant light and color. Capturing moments in time, almost cinematically, Rivera skillfully documents bustling markets and the unique customs of these diverse peoples in his exquisite, classical compositions.

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Untitled (Mother at Market), n.d. Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

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Elias Rivera

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Elias Rivera Flowers of the Mind #5, 2002 Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches

Fritz Scholder

Fritz Scholder’s frank depictions of American Indians made him the most successful and highly regarded painter of Native Americans in U.S. history. Arguably the genre’s most influential figure, Scholder revitalized and reconfigured "Indian art," forging a unique amalgamation of Expressionism, Color Field, and Pop art to convey his singular take on the experience of the modern American Indian, about which one critic said he “broke the mold.”

Scholder was one-quarter Luiseño, a California Mission tribe, but he said he grew up "non-Indian."

Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, Scholder spent his childhood across the Midwest, where he developed a passion for drawing and painting. When the family settled in Sacramento in the late 1950s, Scholder studied at Sacramento City College with the celebrated Bay Area artist Wayne Thiebaud, who exposed him to the Pop art movement and also arranged his first solo exhibition. At a time when Native American art was dominated by romantic portrayals of the stoic and invariably head-dressed Indian Brave, Scholder imagined the Native American subjects of his paintings with cigarettes, beer cans, and dark glasses, in pickup trucks and blue jeans. In turns elegant and radical, Scholder explored Native American identity with poignancy and bravery. His palette of lime greens, blazing oranges, and moody blues masterfully evokes quintessentially American feelings of discovery and rebirth.

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Fritz Scholder Cat Mask, 1984

Acrylic on canvas, 79.25 x 67.25 inches