Looking Over the Rio Grande by Madina Croce.
One morning in September, as wildfires burned across northern New Mexico, Madina Croce drove about 45 minutes northwest from her home in Santa Fe to the White Rock Overlook, where dramatically smoke-filled skies glowered over the Rio Grande. “I saw my composition, and all I had to do was just put it down [on canvas],” she says of LOOKING OVER THE RIO GRANDE, a 16-by-20-inch plein-air work that took her two consecutive morning sessions to complete. She adds, “Thinking about the ancientness of the land, you kind of commune with the place, and it gives you information. You’re an open conduit.” The painting won Best of Show in the Plein Air Painters of New Mexico Los Alamos Paintout.
Madina Croce painting on location.
Having trained and worked as a musician and dancer as well as a fine artist, Croce approaches plein-air painting “almost like being a performer. When I go out to find something to paint, I’ll have a visceral reaction to something so beautiful or lit up by sunlight or that has a special mood. I set up as fast as I can and try to work with immediacy. The most successful ones I can nail down in an hour and a half to two hours, and they’re done.”
Sparkle by Madina Croce.
She describes her painting process as “like working in a darkroom. First I put in the big, dark shapes in transparent oil.” Using rags made from old t-shirts, she then wipes off the paint to leave a “very strong light-and-dark pattern” from which the rest of the painting then gradually emerges like the details in a developing photograph.
Whether she’s depicting a vast southwestern landscape or an intimate scene in the lovingly tended garden surrounding her home and studio, Croce doesn’t consider one of her paintings to be truly done “until it goes home with someone,” she says. “Whether it’s art, music, or dance, it’s the witnessing of a work that completes it.” To learn more, visit https://www.madinacroce.com.
Madina Croce’s plein-air easel set up on location.
In Her Heyday by Madina Croce.