The Richness of Reality

An impressive new book honors the life and work of painter Wilson Hurley

This story was featured in the October 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art October 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

The widely recognized landscape artist Wilson Hurley (1924-2008) is the subject of a new coffee-table book titled The Life and Art of Wilson Hurley: Celebrating the Richness of Reality. Written by Hurley’s wife, Rosalyn Roembke Hurley, it chronicles the artist’s journey through careers as a pilot and a lawyer before his commitment to painting at the age of 40. The book’s foreword by the late Peter H. Hassrick, director emeritus of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, is reproduced here with permission from the publisher. For more information, visit www.wilson-hurley.com.

WILSON HURLEY lived and looked and loved larger than life. From his perch on the west side of the massive Sandia Peak in Albuquerque, he set as his stage a view of the New Mexican skyline that spread beyond imagining to the west over a seemingly endless desert horizon. He gazed upon this glory through his days and evenings and made it his own special world. As summer thermals filled the limits of the vista before him, forming into anvil giants that would bring rain and thunder in their wake, he found his muse. As he turned east, out his front door, he encountered the rouged profile of the great mountain on which he dwelled, and there, too, he found his muse. And as he trekked and flew among the geomorphic spectacles of the West that became his larger studio, from Wyoming’s Teton Range to Arizona’s Grand Canyon, he found yet another muse. His heart tugged the whole of his ample being into a world of inextricable union between man and nature—one that demanded the full embrace of his physical, spiritual, and creative self and defined him as a man and an artist.

His were not solemn meditations on a Thoreau-sized forest pond, but rather, boisterous proclamations of vast scale considering the dynamics of Earth’s most spectacular marvels. His largest commission came in the early 1990s from what is known today as the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. These were five monumental murals of the nation’s grandest natural wonders, and he painted them all as triptychs, a historically spiritual format that lifts the works out of the ordinary, mundane world and into one of divine otherworldliness. Using his brushes, paints, and inordinate dexterity, Hurley wed the majesty of Earth’s most magnificent features with a heavenly, theatrical domain. Together, combining his tools and his vision, he strove to pay tribute to the world’s most histrionic and revered topographies. One is as awed standing before these canvases as one would be if posed as a supplicant in Notre-Dame in Paris. But in his triptychs, Hurley contrarily turns the viewer outward to absorb the grandeur of nature’s cathedral, unbounded by walls and lit not by the reverent glow of stained-glass windows but by the exuberance of sunlight’s most inspiring, deferential grace.

Once Hurley finished the five murals, he was quoted as saying, “They show a view of the world passed through another’s mind.” This resonates with the thinking of two of Hurley’s favorite standard-bearers from a bygone generation, Thomas Moran and George Inness. Those aesthetic pioneers were each convinced of the notion advanced by their contemporary, the French writer Émile Zola, that art was defined as “nature seen through a temperament.” Hurley’s disposition was shaped to accept Zola’s dictum and embrace what Moran once wrote: “The grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature would, in capable hands, make the grandest and most beautiful or wonderful pictures.” Both Moran and Hurley were emotionally equipped to stand up to the challenge of being interlocutors positioned between humble mankind and the overwhelming measure in which nature presents herself from time to time.

IN HURLEY’S depictions, nature is essentially devoid of living things like wild animals and humans. Hurley as a sentient being, though, openly welcomed his fellow man. He exuded gentility, urbanity, and an exceptional degree of savoir faire. No one could have been more personable, more distant from the shadow of misanthropy. Yet, his vision reached beyond the corporeal. The insertion of animate things in his landscapes would have been a mistake—they would have diminished and deflected from the splendor and joy that he so relished. His viewers would have been left pondering the wrong things, the narrative rather than the existential power of nature’s reality. He, the artist, accepted the role of chronicler. He, the artist, became nature’s voice … silent yet imposing, internal yet shared.

This tension between picturing the human saga and rendering the landscape by itself had its antecedents in the early career of the 19th-century grand master landscapist, Albert Bierstadt. Torn between focusing on Native people of the West like the Sioux and the Shoshone and scenes of the ineffable Wind River Mountains, Bierstadt chose to include them both prominently in his first major western canvas, THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, LANDER’S PEAK. The reviewers demurred, however, claiming that he needed to select one or the other, but not the pair. The esteemed critic James Jackson Jarvis, for example, opined that the picture was confusing, with the Indians “detracting from its principal features, besides making it liable to the artistic objection of two pictures in one.” Bierstadt, with real regret, abandoned the Indians.

Hurley’s approach to landscape painting, though often associated with the legendary, master painters of the late 19th-century West like Bierstadt and Moran, was in fact quite distinct. The two earlier grand-manner scene painters were guided by pre-Darwinian perceptions of nature in which the physical essence of landscape was considered providential and the pictures that they created were representations of moral principles. This teleological approach to nature’s rendering had been common since the 1830s and was strongly reinforced by the venerated British critic John Ruskin (Moran’s prelate) and noted American scientists like Louis Agassiz (Bierstadt’s close friend). While those painters universally believed in evolutionary geology evidenced in the newly articulated theories of glaciation, rather than the idea of a singular, cataclysmic biblical event like the great flood, their scientific vision was fundamentally tempered by Transcendentalist underpinnings.

Hurley’s vision was rather more empirical, more observational, and more objective. His experience as an Air Force fighter pilot brought him into direct contact with the sky, its wonders, and its most fundamental realities. In describing a landscape painting he called A CUMULUS CLOUD BUILDING OVER 4TH OF JULY PEAK, Hurley articulated its wonder without a hint of emotion or mystical tint. His was an unbiased scientific explication:

The sun has heated the surface of the land to where the air over the top of the valley floor is so hot it is showing the color of the sky at the horizon. We can see from the flat bottom of the cloud that the atmosphere has cooled and can no longer carry moisture. So, looking up we can see where the dew point is. About half-way up the cloud there is a thin veil acting as a prism showing wispy rainbow colors across the surface. This prismatic effect is caused by ice crystals, so we know where the freezing level is, and up in the very top of the cloud we see its shape turning flat with a kind of smoky edge. It is very cold at this point, about -30 degrees, and the warm cloud is flattening out beneath the stratosphere. This is the way the sky reveals its secrets all the time.

This is also a time when a pilot, skilled as Hurley was, wants to alter his course.

From the date that Hurley embarked on the full-time life of a landscape painter, in 1965, he became the Nestor of a whole generation of similarly inclined artists. For example, the devoted student of nature’s moods, the talented landscapist Curt Walters, started painting around 1973. But as Walters struggled with his art, he soon sought out the tall, lanky aficionado from Albuquerque as a teacher. The acolyte would later proudly claim that he gratefully “learned about the academics of painting from Wilson Hurley.” In their sessions together, Hurley not only inculcated in his friend the foundational techniques of his craft but also much about the spirit of his personal interaction with his subject as well. Walters would come to echo Hurley’s sentimental side as he sought his own personal slant on the definition of art as an expression of “the interaction between the emotional content of the day and my own feelings.”

Hurley’s paintings carry another profound message beyond the pictorial celebration of the western landscape, the exploration of the sublime in nature, and the emotive balance between the humble self and the bewildering mysteries of the planet. In addition, his works serve as expressions of patriotic symbol. They represent national emblems of an exalted America, not symbols sullied by today’s political wrangling or biased recriminations, but ones brimming with a praiseworthy, universally adored narrative in which the nation plays out its most ambitious self-evaluations and comes up proud.

This story was featured in the October 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art October 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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