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An exceptional, Taos Modernist watercolor
and ink painting by John De Puy, 2006
One thing is for certain, you will never see this western landscape view in any Hollywood Western movie because this amazing depiction comes only through the brilliant eye and singular mind of one of America’s true artistic treasures,
John De Puy (b.1927), who was perhaps best characterized as being a “Madman, Seer and Painter of the Apocalyptic Volcano of the world” by his closest friend, the late American writer and environmental activist, Edward P. Abbey (1927-1989).
De Puy, whose life’s work was the subject of an excellent major retrospective exhibition at The Harwood Foundation Museum in his home town of Taos, New Mexico in 2016, has had an extraordinary 60-plus year career as one of America’s finest abstract expressionist painters. An iconoclastic and extremely private individual, De Puy exhibited very rarely over the decades, preferring instead to privately explore and paint his interpretations of the Desert Southwest and to quietly sell his work to a small and devoted cadre of private collectors around the world.
When he did emerge from his self-imposed isolation to show his color-saturated and intensely powerful expressions of the Southwestern landscape, the results were glorious. John De Puy’s paintings deal far less with objective reality than they do the primordial power and feeling of the Southwestern desert landscape and the imagery and color De Puy employs are arresting, powerful and haunting—a landscape of dreams and endless time. De Puy’s paintings show an inner world of extraordinary intensity, of form and color, of powerful forces inside, above, under and all around the land.
His great friend, the well-known Southwestern writer and fellow Monkey Wrencher, Edward Abbey, expressed this
most eloquently in an essay he entitled “My Friend Debris”:
“A De Puy landscape is not the landscape we see with routine eyes or can record by camera. He paints a hallucinated, magical, sometimes fearsome world—not the world that we think we see, but the one, he declares, that is really there. A world of terror as well as beauty—the terrible beauty that lies beyond the ordinary limits of human experience, that forms the basis of experience, the ground of being”
-“Down The River”, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982
View of the John De Puy retrospective exhibition at The Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico, 2016.
“Everything I am is the land and I spent 50 years
interpreting it in painting and fighting lost causes.”
-Excerpted from “An Interview with John DePuy”
in “The Canyon Country Zephyr”, 2001
At left, John De Puy at his exhibition opening at The Harwood Museum, Taos, NM, February, 2016. At right,
The Harwood Museum exhibition catalog, a copy of which will be included with the purchase of this painting.
Left photo source and © Fine Arts of the Southwest, Inc.
The painting is executed in watercolor and ink on what appears to be French Moulin D’Arches artist’s paper and it measures 30" by 22" (sight), the framed dimensions are 33" by 24 1/2". The painting has been most beautifully, archivally and recently framed by Goldleaf Framemakers, Santa Fe’s finest fine art framers in a custom handmade beveled and splined maple wood frame under True Vue UV-Reistant “Museum” conservation glass. The painting is signed and dated by John De Puy as follows at the lower right: "De Puy 06' ". The painting is in completely excellent original condition and the framing is brand new.
The painting has an interesting provenance. John De Puy gave it to his former Taos Gallery owner, a longtime colleague
of ours, soon after he finished painting it in 2006 as a personal gift to celebrate the opening of his new gallery. As it happens, the gallery owner never framed or hung the painting; he just kept it in a storage drawer for the next 18 years until selling it to us recently.
The composition of the piece is superb and is most beautifully rendered; airy, open and filled with light and space. It might possibly be John’s expression of an aerial viewpoint of a large, deep canyon system such as The Grand Gulch in Southern Utah or The Grand Canyon in Arizona in which various tributaries are branching out in different directions. This idea, of course, is completely subject to one’s own personal interpretation which is the essence of the point of Abstract Expressionism, how the artist chooses to express his or her personal interpretation of a particular subject or idea in paint. The color palette which De Puy used in this painting is, very interestingly, limited to three colors only; purple, blue and
red and also of course the background luminous white of the paper sheet itself and the manner in which De Puy uses and reverses these few colors to depict the surface world and the world above and below is both masterful and highly expressive.
All in all, this is a beautifully conceived and beautifully executed extremely lovely painting,
full of life and energy yet quiet, serene and contemplative.
Price $7,650