Thursday, July 12

Santa Fe

We spent the day touring galleries and the New Mexico Museum of Art. The galleries, both at the"Railyards" and downtown were all of high quality, with interesting and often provocative art on display. The Railyards galleries -- and there were more than a dozen of them -- were all in converted warehouses by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, and had large rooms, very high ceilings, and great lighting, all of which made it possible to display quite large canvases. One gallery had dozens of Judy Chicago paintings, including a series of canvases at least 8 feet square, depicting excessively macho males. Very powerful stuff.

2 by Bernard Chaet

To our pleasant surprise, we came upon a painting by our friend Bernard Chaet at the Lewallen Gallery in the Railyards. Chatting with the owner, Ken Marvel, we learned that he had had several shows of Bernard's work, that he had visited Bernard and his wife Ninon Lacey in New Haven, and that we could see much more of Chaet's work at his downtown gallery.

We had a delicious lunch at the "Vinaigrette" restaurant, which was very popular, with people still lining up for tables at 1:30. It featured virtually nothing but salads, and they were good.

Teresa's head

After lunch we took ourselves to the Downtown gallery area, where we spent a pleasant hour looking at dozens of Chaet's canvases, with the help of Teresa Engeltjes, a charming and statuesque (6'1") Dutch woman. The paintings were gorgeous, of course, and included some quite early ones. I took a picture of Teresa for Joy's "back of the heads" project.

Next stop was the Santa Fe Museum of Art, which had a small but excellent selection of permanent and  changing exhibits, including a few Georgia O'Keefe's.

Santa Fe Museum Courtyard in the Rain

We had a 4 o'clock date with Toby and Ralph Branksy, friends of our Gloucester friends Joan and Lynn Swigart, but just as we started to leave the daily afternoon thunderstorm arrived. Of course our raincoats were in the car, several blocks away, so we waited awhile in the museum's pleasant courtyard for the rain to clear. Eventually it let up enough for us to make a run for it. I had a hat; Joy grabbed a tabloid newspaper flyer and held it over her head.

We found the Branskys' house, in a canyon in the hills, with some difficulty, because Carmen the Garmin seriously let us down, getting the streets all wrong (usually when we've disagreed, I've been wrong and she right. Not this time).  We were supposed to stop by for a brief drink, but to our mutual astonishment it was 7:30 by the time we got up to leave. We will stay in touch and hope they can come east for a visit in the fall.

Tomorrow we are off to the west, to Gallup NM on Friday and then to the Grand Canyon on Saturday.