From turquoise blue panoramic skies to deep red rock canyons to celadon green sagebrush, artist Tony Abeyta is inspired by the high-desert landscape of his home.
Whether he’s working in vivid color or charcoal, in landscape or abstract, in Italy or his native New Mexico, painter Tony Abeyta says one thing never changes: His work is always a response to nature. “I think I have a relationship with everything around me,” he says. “I see it, I experience it, and I’m passionate about it.”
Abeyta, who is of Navajo and Anglo heritage, spends most of his time in Santa Fe, though he frequently makes his way to both coasts and even farther-flung locations, like Italy, where he once lived for two years. “I travel a lot to augment and to get some new perspective,” Abeyta says. But no matter how far he roams, it is the color and personality of the Southwest that so often make their way into his work.
“I came from the small town of Gallup, which is pretty monochromatic,” he says. “But in any other direction the landscape changes dramatically.” And colorfully. En route to Arizona, there are the “big, tall green ponderosas.” And on the way up to Taos, “it’s much more about panoramic skies and deep canyons; there’s sagebrush everywhere, so you get celadon greens.”
This high-desert landscape, which has attracted and inspired artists for generations, is reimagined through Abeyta’s own perspective and techniques. Working largely from memory instead of from photographs, the artist says he often takes snapshots mentally. But he sees more than just the physical landscape.
“I’m looking at the culture that belongs to a land,” Abeyta says. “Whether that’s the Pueblo culture or my Navajo ancestry, all of that stuff is part of how the land feels. Of course, cities like Albuquerque and Santa Fe have gotten bigger and more cosmopolitan, but on the outskirts they have a memory of what it was like a thousand years ago.”
It’s that contemporary portal into something primordial that makes Abeyta’s work so compelling and mysterious. Sometimes a fan of his work will tell him that they were on a hike and saw one of his landscapes — it’s the artist’s favorite compliment. “That’s exactly what art should be,” he says. “You’re dictating an experience and relaying that to somebody, and they can relate to it instantly.”
Tony Abeyta is represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe.
HEADER IMAGE: Yei Creating. Photography: Courtesy Blue Rain Gallery
From the August/September 2013 issue.
