Q uartet

A photographer and four area artists make beautiful music in the studio

BY GUSSIE FAUNTLEROY PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUDREY DERELL FOR TREND

What sparks the creative process? We think of an artist looking around at the world or inward in reflection and feeling inspired to produce something. But just as often, the tools, media, and the artmaking itself become the engine. Even the studio space can be part of the equation, perhaps filled with bits and pieces, and odds and ends that work their way into art. Or it can be spare but well designed, stocked with all the tools for encouraging the creative flow. Wherever they work, artists are wired to use whatever they have at hand in the moment to translate materials and techniques into color, movement, and form.

Photographer Audrey Derell spent time with four Santa Fe-area artists exploring their lives and art. At different stages in their careers and working in a variety of media and styles—from animal assemblages to mural painting—the four have little in common. All were born in or drawn to Northern New Mexico. And all say that when they make art, they shift between following intuition and intentionally harnessing artistic knowledge and skills. Yet what emerges for each artist is magically unpredictable in its distinctive way.

Michael McCabe

Years after graduating from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Michael McCabe ran into his first printmaking instructor. McCabe asked his teacher why he had waited until his students were at the highest level of printmaking before teaching them monotype, which produces one-of-a-kind prints on a smooth, nonabsorbent surface. His reply: If students learned monotype in the first semester, they’d be so enamored with it that they wouldn’t want to learn anything else.

In McCabe’s case, that’s probably true. For almost 40 years he has been exploring monotype, all in his expressive style. Much of his focus has been viscosity printmaking, which allows the printing of multiple colors on a single plate. After learning it in 1986, McCabe pushed the technique into ever-changing combinations of inks, materials, and methods. Moving confidently in his neatly laid out studio, he enjoys the tactile feeling of mixing inks and rolling them out, not too thin or too thick.

He also delights in teaching workshops and classes. As a master printmaker living in Santa Fe since 1973, he has printed the works of acclaimed artists, including Forrest Moses, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Emmi Whitehorse, and Edgar Heap of Birds.

Born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Santa Fe, McCabe held his culture close as a young man. While he was inspired by artists in his family and encouraged by art teachers who recognized his talent, his strongest early artistic influences were abstract painters like Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell.

Then, a few years ago, a relative searching through government archives found the only known photograph of McCabe’s nomadic great-grandfather. The printmaker now includes the photo in his layered, collaged works, along with such elements as raven imagery, Asian calligraphy, and parts of circa-1800s handwritten letters and cast-off papers. “I’m putting my greatgrandfather in environments he would never have seen in his life, like taking him on trips,” he says.

The viscosity process allows the collaged items to show through two to four thin layers of colored inks, all printed in a single pulling. McCabe uses inks with diverse properties, including some that resist or attract one another; different papers; and a variety of plates, with copper, aluminum, and plexiglass among them.

“I can plan, but there’s also a margin for unexpected outcomes, which is one of the great things about it,” he says. “It’s always a surprise and there’s always something new.”

Geoffrey Gorman

The space in and around Geoffrey Gorman’s Santa Fe studio is crowded with mostly castoffs—rusty metal, inner tubes, wire, pieces of canvas, bundles of sticks—which he has been assembling and transforming into enigmatic and oddly compelling animal figures for almost 20 years.

Yet one material—wood—has been at the heart of Gorman’s creative life since his childhood. Growing up in rural Maryland, he explored woodlands, played in chestnut log barns, and, whenever he had paper or canvas, drew and painted trees. “I absolutely love wood. In a past life, I’m guessing I was a tree,” he jokes. Along with art studies at the Maryland Institute of Art, the Boston Museum School, and Franklin College in Switzerland, Gorman attended furniture making school in Vermont.

Decades later in his studio, he combines materials in ingenious ways. Unlike found-object art in which the identity of the original parts remains clear, these materials are deftly transmogrified—bike tire rubber carved into an antelope’s hoof or a half-covered penny as an anteater’s heavy-lidded eye.

Gorman also produces some pieces entirely in wood, including carved birds inspired by early species collections— birds killed and labeled by ornithologists in the name of science. “I’ve been thinking about the duality of beauty and death. You open a drawer of bird specimens and they’re very beautiful, but it’s also very morbid,” he says.

Part of the beauty in Gorman’s carved wood art is its surface quality—rich colors, distressed finishes, or an almost ceramic-like polished luster. While much of his art is freestanding, he also produces wall-mounted works, including a series of wooden, fanned-out bird wings. Datura, which resembles wings and is part of the series, followed a rafting trip on the San Juan River in Utah. On his journey Gorman was captivated by the datura flower’s beautifully stark shape and deadly poisonous aspect—the intertwined existence of beauty and death.

Having spent time in southeastern Alaska, he has long been fascinated by whales. But it took him 17 years to gain the confidence to carve the seemingly simple-shaped creature. Then a neighbor’s gift of a large piece of apricot wood coincided with his sense of readiness, and a series of tabletop-scale carved whales emerged. He smiles. “That’s the serendipitous life of an artist,” he says.