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| Douglas Atwill's "Careless-Ordered" Garden "That is well said, replied Candide, but we must Cultivate our own garden." -- Voltaire No attentive viewer could fail to guess that here is an artist of true sanguine temperament and, for the most part, a decidedly sunny disposition. And, in the end, many a viewer, contemplating Atwill's new gardenscapes, might even see these works as especially illustrative of that familiar Impressionist description of art as "a fragment of nature, as seen through a temperament." The temperament of Douglas Atwill, transposed into paint, certainly seems to be, "always 'high noon,'" a phrase he has tossed out as descriptive of his work. Atwill's "portraits," if you will, of billowing, sun-splashed gardens are very high-keyed indeed, glorying in the expressiveness of bright, unadulterated color as well as in the place of light and shadow over the trembling foliage and flowers. (Atwill's work, for this viewer, somehow suggests the style of many American Impressionists who, in their study of the painterly methods of their French idols, arrived at a kind of "impression" of nature seen, perhaps, as though "through two temperaments," a vision somehow twice removed from the subject). Atwill requires limitations to his vision; his gardens only run riot within a carefully constructed enclosure. While his shrubs and flowers may at first seem delightfully "careless-ordered," they are in fact rigorously circumscribed, in the tight, often square-framed format the artist prefers, and also in their very compositional structure. The occasional path or garden wall which appears to plunge into the distance rarely ever lends any substantial depth to the compositions, this is most often assured by the artist's constant preference for a very high horizon-line; the end effect of these images is one of tapestry, rather than painting. It is rather as though we are presented with an unfurled bolt of richly figured damask, as opposed to some fleeting scene. Atwill's art. if not his entire life, appears to abide by the eminently sensible admonition of Voltair's Candide - that we should each "cultivate our own graden," or tend to our own business. Just as Atwill famously cultivates exceptional real gardens in Santa Fe, carefully walled and most artfully, though "artlessly," ordered gardens, so has he also, over the years, refined his artistic vocabulary and methods to the point where his works are instantly recognizable. His style, then, has been meticulously developed and his continuing growth takes place with its confines.
Full-color catalog available of recent
garden paintings. |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Poppyfield with Centaurea" Acrylic on linen, 36" x 36" Click image to enlarge. (56K)  |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Kitchen Garden with Lilies & Anthemis" Acrylic on linen, 48" x 48" Click image to enlarge. (64) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Center Garden with Flanders Poppies" Acrylic on linen, 48" x 48" Click image to enlarge. (64) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Poppies in May" Acrylic on linen, 28" x 28" Click image to enlarge. (60K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Aspens/Big Tesuque" Acrylic on linen, 36" x 36" Click image to enlarge. (60K) |
About the Garden Paintings The paintings of gardens evolved from the patches of garden I plant near the houses and studios I've had in Santa Fe over the past 30 years. I move around a bit, changing studios when the idea strikes me, so there havce been more than a dozen studio gardens to work with. Even in the smaller places there is a spot to plant some perennials, build a wall, and lay down a path. The early gardens are just for my enjoyment and I don't anticipate their becoming a major motif for my painting. Those first paintings have a strong geometry as a foil for the garden portion of each canvas. Brick walks angling off left or right, sections of adobe walls to make a triangle of solid color or a large undefined space to give the leaves and flowers something to bounce against. In 1981 my friend Agnes Sims advises me to leave some darkness and unknown portions in each painting and I still try to do that. She thinks that my paintings of gardens are more accessible than the sienna reds, buffs and ochres of the New Mexico landscape that I favor and have been painting. Today my paintings of gardens have less of that early geometry and more pattern agains pattern. Maybe the fullness of time brings a fullness of image as well. I enjoy working the new looseness of technique into more complex compositions. I have particular choices in the flowers I choose to paint. There is a long list including delphiniums, lilies, oriental and other poppies, anthemis and yarrow that I like to work with. I admire variegated foliage and grasses, and shrubs with distinctive form or curious foliage color. Petunias and gladioloas are strictly forbidden. Sometimes when I am stuck on the choice of plant or color, I consult the books of Christopher Lloyd or Penelope Hobhouse for the answer. The landscape around Galisteo contiues to beckon, but I expect I will paint more garden paintings as well, since they give me a sense of joy and season I can't get anywhere else. When the garden starts to burgeon in late April, it's hard to resist.
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| Acrylic paintings of New Mexico landscape and gardens. Atwill is represented in museum and corporate collections as well as innumerable private collections. A 30-year resident of Santa Fe, Atwill maintains a Canyon Road studio that is open most mornings from 9 to 12 noon, or By Appointment at other times. Call the studio number for a selection of photographs of paintings available at this time. Prices range from US$1,000.00 for a 12" x 12" canvas to US$7,500.00 for a 66" x 60" canvas. Posters are available for US$25.00. |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Kitchen Garden with Poppies II" Acrylic on linen, 24" x 52" Click image to enlarge. (45K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Barbados Garden" Acrylic, 28" x 28" Click image to enlarge. (48K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Galisteo Eastview Diptych" Acrylic, 44" x 88" Click image to enlarge. (26K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Galisteo Eastview Autumn" Acrylic, 48" x 70" Click image to enlarge. (32K) |
In the landscapes, his dynamic vertical brush strokes carry us, centimeter by centimeter, across sage-dappled foreground to far mountain silhouettes and horizons of infinite purple. Atwill takes full advantage of the remarkable clarity of New Mexico light that allows a continuity of color and resolution across vast distances. "One of the things I love about the landscape here," he said, " is that you don't get what the Italians call sfumato, that falling off into mistyness with distance, so characteristic of European landscapes." Another link between near and far in Atwill's landscapes lies in the featured prominence of his foregrounds. In fact, boulders appear to fall out of the frame into our lap, a perfect enactment of Cezanne's famous 'Hithering Spill'. Conversely, Atwill usually hangs a corner of sky in his garden still-life -- an escape hatch back into the expansive world of his landscapes. Both subjects, near and far, exhibit his clean, spiny brush stroke. It is so highly characteristic that Atwill found he could stop signing his work long ago. It is a linear, incisive and slightly ascetic stroke, developed to convey arid terrain but particularly bracing when applied to floral arrangements. Atwill paints his large canvasses almost exclusively in his studio, working from photographs and sketches and occasionally stepping outside to water the real flowers too.
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 Image: © Douglas Atwill "House Near Tangiers" Acrylic on linen, 44" x 44" Click image to enlarge. (51K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "White Garden with Urn" Acrylic, 58" x 54" Click image to enlarge. (67K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Studio Garden with Delphinium" Acrylic, 28" x 28" Click image to enlarge. (64K) |
 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Rosemary's Garden" Acrylic, 58" x 54" Click image to enlarge. (55K) |
To the uneducated eye, the New Mexican desert landscape may seem desolate. To Atwill, it is a feast of texture and form. A painting of the spring thaw in Galisteo moves from the snow in the foreground to puddles in middle ground reflecting sky and weeds in small, quiet, almost oriental glints of light. Galisteo Creston, a unique geological formation south of Santa Fe, is painted from atop the ridge itself. The line of stone falls away into the distance in a wavy line sparked by sudden flashes of pure color, the way it actually does in New Mexico. These works of art are constructed in depth from long periods of looking at the subject at hand, and of thinking about the ultimate form that the painting will take. From this studio and from the compositional sketches emerge a clear, readable vision. It is finished with offhand grace, in thick and thin brush strokes that echo the transitory effects of light. "I like just leaving the paint the way it is," Atwill observes. "When you finally get what you want, it's just best not to worry about it." It is this sensibility that gives his canvases the incomparable freshness that floats atop the powerful structural framework. That structure is composed of boldly intelligent lines, the one element for Atwill is perhaps best known. His distinctive clean-edged brush strokes are well thought out, providing visual separation of forms that has only improved over the years. Those powerful, razor-sharp slashes of branch and stone are the very factors that keep his forthrightly beautiful landscapes from mere prettiness, or his garden scenes from becoming too sweet. The hard lines work beautifully in his garden pieces, sending shimmering avalanches of spiky leaves and their shadows cascading over an adobe wall, or a diagonal slash of yellow grasses poking up through the snow. Atwill's painterly vision lends itself to random angularity of these forms and others, such as a dark tangle of branches of a shrub. They appear natural, yet are composed in the finest abstract pattern.
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 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Sienna Cliffs (Abiquiu)" Acrylic on linen, 24" x 24" Click image to enlarge (43K)
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 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Sienna Cliffs (Zuni) I" Acrylic on linen, 24" x 24"" Click image to enlarge (44K)
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 Image: © Douglas Atwill "Small House Near Marrakech" Acrylic on linen, 24" x 52" Click image to enlarge (41K)
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