P.A. Nisbet: Atmospheres

P. A . N i s b e t At m o s p h e r e s

Meyer Gallery

P. A . N i s b e t At m o s p h e r e s

No vember 3 - 3 0, 202 3

Meyer Gallery

225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.983.1434 800.779.7387 www.meyergalleries.com

Meyer Gallery presents a solo exhibition for American landscape painter P.A. Nisbet, whose heroic painting style aims to capture the mystical presence of light on the western landscape. Atmospheres is a collection of nearly 20 paintings that reflect the artist’s masterful style, which he has honed over a forty-year painting career that has earned him many accolades including a career retrospective at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, as well as inclusion in The Western Sublime show at the Tucson Museum of Art, where his work hung alongside master painters such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. In this stage of his career, Nisbet is creating legacy paintings and making “final statements” on certain ideas or locales that he’s been exploring for decades. Atmospheres is a rare opportunity for collectors to immerse themselves in a solo exhibition and full body of work by this distinguished Santa Fe artist.

“The starting point for this body of work is the idea that the atmosphere has an enveloping presence over the landscape,” says Nisbet. “I’ve always treated the landscape the way a writer treats language – which is to say that the clouds, light, shadows, mountains and ravines are each like phrases in a book. When they’re put together in an artistic way they create a story, and add to the idea that the landscape is more than just a place, but an atmosphere in which one goes to have experiences.”

Nisbet refers to his latest work as “spirit paintings,” as the artist interprets the landscape through a sacred lens. “The way some people go into a church on a Sunday describes how I like to go into the landscape,” he says. “It’s my place of special attention and reverence.”

Nisbet’s subject matter for his Santa Fe exhibition references southwestern locales, with the centerpiece for the show inspired by a weather phenomenon familiar to the region called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These fire clouds are associated with eruptions or wildfires, and are an eerie sight all too familiar to the southwest. With heightened drama, Nisbet treats the subject mythologically for The Age of Fire, a 50” x 62” painting that he’s been working on for over a decade. Even with its otherworldly feel, this piece was created in response to current events and is a marker of history. “The Age of Fire is inspired by the idea that we’re now heading into a new era of climate,” explains the artist. “The fires happening in the west and around the country are indicative of a new way of life. As an artist, I’m responding to this change.”

Nature’s drama is further explored in a 36” x 68” piece titled The Gorge, in which Nisbet paints spectacular shifts in light from a passing rainstorm over the Little Colorado River Gorge in Arizona. As the storm recedes into the distance with tumultuous clouds and dark skies, the Gorge is left drenched with water and bathed in clear light as mist rises theatrically from its depths. The artist first experienced the Gorge in 1970; captured by its grandeur, he has painted it many times throughout his career and refers to it as one of our country’s great landscapes.

“This is my final statement on it,” he says. “It feels complete in a way.”

This sentiment is shaping the way Nisbet approaches the next phase of his career, which will focus on large paintings and legacy works with complex and dramatic subjects. “I’m going to take a long hard look at the works of Thomas Moran and J.M.W. Turner and see where my particular style of painting interfaces with what they did,” says Nisbet, who honors these great artists by continuing to share the evolving story of the American landscape with similar spiritual reverence and technical prowess. “I have so much left to say and a lot of time to create some major pieces, so that’s where my focus is for the future. I want to make final statements.”

The Age of Fire

oil

50 x 62

“It becomes very clear to me that the landscape is like a language. When you tell a story, you have phrases, you have words. The landscape is the same way. It has phrases, it has words. The way in which a cloud changes form, the way in which the light moves across it, or the shadows set up shop.

The whole thing speaks its own particular language.”

-P.A. NISBET

“Any attempt at making sunrise in the Grand Canyon requires a very early wakeup. This is especially true for pleinair painters. Dark, cold and windy conditions awaited me this particular morning at Maricopa Point. The sun was still below the east rim; the paints were mixed in the fleeting darkness. Anticipating what was coming, I threw together a very fast five minute sketch, a virtual blur of paint. Fog rose swiftly from below as the first rays of light pierced the vapor.

Like the bang from a gun the sun shot up and the whole world was blinded in lemony brilliance.”

Sunburst, Grand Canyon

oil

38 x 54

“The atmosphere is a cauldron of invisible soup. Given the right conditions of heat, wind and humidity, any summer morning filled with blue air can give way to a boiling, towering powerhouse of a cloud that can tear wings off an aircraft. The amount of energy that it takes to keep this much heavy vapor aloft is the equivalent of more than a hundred nuclear bombs.”

Tempest

oil

30 x 48

“Thunderstorms are like rogue animals that wander unrestrained across the pastoral landscapes of the west. It is the animal-like energy they possess that is so intriguing for me. They’re massive and grizzily when taken head on. The power they possess is a constant reminder that we live within a wild and wooly broth of atmosphere.”

House of Power

oil

22 x 32

“The dawn comes up playing a crescendo! In truth a painting cannot really capture the intensity of color that spreads before the astonished eye. On canvas the reds and yellows are by necessity dull compared to the real transmitted brilliance of a New Mexico sunrise. Attempting it in paint is a kind of celebration and also a forgiving nod to the limitations of pigment.”

High Desert Dawn

oil

20 x 32

“When visiting the California coast, especially near San Luis Obisbo, one can find arrangements of large boulders scattered along the beach at low tide. The colors are metallic in the brilliant sun, the air charged with the energy of oncoming surf and a blanket of vapor makes for spectacular painting sessions.”

Rough Beach, Central Coast

oil

24 x 30

“Painted specifically in the spirit of 19th century artist Martin Johnson Heade, Afterglow pays homage to the American Luminist tradition where artists attempted to capture light in all its manifestations. The Luminists were primarily focused on Eastern seaboard subjects but the last light of the Pacific atmosphere works equally well. Pacific. Peaceful. A meditation on the end of day.”

Afterglow

oil

20 x 32

“On a high bluff overlooking the Yellowstone. Gold light serenades the day’s end. Hardly a wisp of air disturbs a clear envelope of sky over vast country. If one listens one can hear feeding fish break the surface of the river or the distant rustling of a herd of Buffalo.”

Yellowstone River

oil

24 x 42

“Like ships at sea, thunderstorms move across the Sea of Cortez making brief but beautiful displays, especially in the late light of day. To walk these beaches and watch the clouds form one wonders how rough it can be for Mexican fishermen in panga boats way out there, eagerly pointing their noses toward home on a very rough sea.”

Passing Storm, Sonora

oil

21 x 34

“Where I live the atmosphere sets up a constant drama at day’s end. Some evenings are filled with storms, others sing out in a riot of color. Twilight celebrates the breath-on-glass stillness that settles just before the earth’s shadow climbs up into the eastern sky and announces the onset of night. There is a kind of cosmic quietude that brings everything to a perfect standstill, almost as if the world has paused in prayer.”

Twilight

oil

20 x 30

“Many of the landscapes I visit are places where there is very little to see except vast distances. Distance marks the eye’s journey out there, a faraway place where resides the horizon. One can never reach a horizon therefore it remains the perpetual domain of possibility. The horizon offers a deliverance that, in truth, one can never reach. It makes faraway journeys mythical by comparison.”

Horizon

oil

18 x 30

“A distant storm over Texas, 100 miles away, with warm colors to bathe away the day’s labors. A time for contemplation.”

Song of Summer

oil

18 x 30

“If you have been to southern Italy then you know about the olive groves that are scattered throughout the land. Like many things found dear in Italy these trees are very old. Some of them are over 300 years in age as their trunks will testify. Like gnarly centenarians the olive trees whisper on their ancient bark of the centuries they have known.”

The Olives

oil

18 x 26

“You say the earth is solid. I say the earth is made of air. The Gorge celebrates a place where the land gives way to sky, where atmosphere pierces the veneer of solid earth with air and vapor, cutting deep, with a great cosmic knife, the gash known as the Little Colorado Gorge. It is anything but “little”.

It is a breathtaking first act in a drama playing just downstream, the mighty Grand Canyon.”

The Gorge

oil

36 x 68

“Actually, I don’t know the name of this bend in the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon. It was early morning and I was trying to quickly finish an oil sketch as the boats were preparing to shove off from camp. They were yelling at me to hurry up because I was holding up the departure, and so the title.”

Hurry Up Canyon

oil

20 x 18

“This is what I would call a cameo landscape; a portrait of an actual place. Near Second Mesa I feel certain that this land is Hopi land. The Hopi have been here for a very long time, growing their blue corn in clusters and singing out to the gods. I am just a visitor here.”

Wh e re Ho p i Dw e ll

oil

14 x 21

Study, The Gorge

oil

12 x 20

“Sometimes a foreground is just a distraction, almost a cliche. I am forever chasing clouds and searching for forms in their evolving dramas. Crown Cloud is an archtypal riser, one that begins to show the characteristics that I explored more thoroughly in Age of Fire.”

Crown Cloud

oil

16 x 12

“There is little verbage that I can add to describe a New Mexico moonrise.

Some are crisp and brilliant, others seem to swim in distant vapor. This one was just outside my door. As it rose a soft atmosphere of blue light sifted down upon the shoulders of the junipers.”

Moonrise, Cloud Way

oil

10 x 17

“There are endless secret canyons to explore in the Escalante wilderness and surprises are always just around the corner. I guess it is the stillness of the glades beneath gold rock overhangs that I love the most. Everything is fashioned from flash floods: the silts and reflections in the pool bear a precise witness to an intelligence far greater than my own.”

Stone Glade, Escalante

oil

12 x 10

“I began my painting life outdoors and in many locales. The Grand Canyon has always been the most challenging place to do plein-air work. Conditions there require speed of execution while attempting to hold on to the essence of a particular painted moment. This little painting is a plein air piece completed in about thirty minutes.”

Last Chance, Hermit’s Rest

oil

6 x 8

“I pay homage to the vision of another, particularly to a kindred spirit who can point me in a new and different direction. Rose is such a person. She always creates flower arrangements in endless variations. The peonies reminded me of a scene I might have witnessed in 17th century Delft.

Because there was no electric light back then, flower arrangements would have floated in an atmosphere that was both soft and luminous, like being suspended beneath a transparent blanket. It was the light of Vermeer, after all.”

Rose’s Peonies

oil

33 x 20

“From a hillside perch near Amman, Jordan, I witnessed a variety of backlit, sunburst compositions. It was a very humid and sultry afternoon, one that reminded me yet once again that the atmospheres of the world are always different and yet somehow the same. It is the middle east but it could also be the English countryside or even the luminous shores of the Atlantic seaboard. Grace is where you find it and Nature is full of grace.”

Water Sky

oil

16 x 20

“On a driving trip before dawn in southern Utah I travelled through a cold, sere and lifeless setting. In First Light I came across this bend in a high road where the very “bones of the world” seemed to have pushed up through the earth’s skin and into the frigid air. I stopped the truck, took a sip of hot coffee, and in a frozen gaze noted the morning star and crescent moon. Suddenly, the sun broke the horizon in half proclaiming what felt like to me the very first day of the world.”

First Light

oil

30 x 60

P. A . N i s b e t At m o s p h e r e s Price list

The Age of Fire

oil

50 x 62

$155,000

Sunburst, Grand Canyon

oil

38 x 54

$76,000

Tempest

oil

30 x 48

$58,700

House of Power

oil

22 x 32

$38,700

High Desert Dawn

oil

20 x 32

$28,500

Rough Beach, Central Coast

oil

24 x 30

$28,000

Afterglow

oil

20 x 32

$28,000

Yellowstone River

oil

24 x 42

$54,800

Passing Storm, Sonora

oil

21 x 34

$32,700

Twilight

oil

20 x 30

$27,800

Horizon

oil

18 x 30

$24,500

Song of Summer

oil

18 x 24

$19,000

P. A . N i s b e t At m o s p h e r e s Price list

The Gorge

oil

36 x 68

$115,000

The Olives

oil

18 x 26

$21,600

Hurry Up Canyon

oil

20 x 18

$18,500

Where Hopi Dwell

oil

14 x 21

$15,000

Study, The Gorge

oil

12 x 20

$9,800

Crown Cloud

oil

16 x 12

$9,200

Moonrise, Cloud Way

oil

10 x 17

$8,500

Stone Glade, Escalante

oil

12 x 10

$4,800

Last Chance, Hermit’s Rest

oil

6x8

$2,800

Rose’s Peonies

oil

33 x 20

$30,200

Water Sky

oil

16 x 20

$15,000

First light

oil

30 x 60

$72,000

Meyer Gallery

225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.983.1434 800.779.7387 www.meyergalleries.com