Santa Fe Painting: Christo Rey

Last fall I visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, and totally fell in love.

Looking about with an artist’s eye, always on the search for something new to paint, I snapped lots of photos to refer back to later.

The natural scenery with its bizarre-shaped buttes and crazy-colored cliffs was amazing, but what really stuck my fancy was the adobe buildings. The graphic shapes made by the sun and shadows on the smoothly rounded forms fascinated me. These buildings are like no other kind of architecture: earthy and warm. Organic.

One afternoon we drove past this church, and I just had to stop and snap some photos. I love the solid, grounded shape of its asymmetrical towers.

Christo Rey by Barbara J Carter, 11×14″, acrylic on canvas

I’m working on a series of paintings of adobe buildings from Santa Fe, and this is the first. I don’t really know anything about the church, I just liked how it looked. The sky that day was gloomy and foreboding, but the tiniest little hint of light was picking out the curved edges of the building like a tiny glimmer of hope amidst the gloom.

Here it is in a frame:

Like all my paintings on canvas, it’s wired and ready to hang, with or without a frame. The sides are painted a solid red color and the canvas staples are out of sight on the back, so a frame is strictly optional. Click here for purchasing information.

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