Show Preview | Til Art Do Us Part - Southwest Art Magazine

Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
February 5-27

Tracy Felix, The Sandias, oil, 30 x 40.

Manitou Galleries is known for shows with imaginative concepts and titles that put a smart, engaging spin on the featured artworks. Recently, though, the gallery staff set themselves the challenge, in light of the pandemic, to do even more when planning this year’s exhibitions. “What is our social responsibility?” says associate director Cyndi Hall, explaining the query that guided them in their decisions. “We felt like our shows should truly touch the hearts of our artists and collectors alike.”

Such heartfelt efforts reveal themselves in this month’s show at the gallery’s Palace Avenue location, titled Til Art Do Us Part. Inspired by Valentine’s Day, it brings together the works of six long-married couples: PJ Garoutte and Don Brackett; Nealy Riley and David Frederick Riley; Sushe Felix and Tracy Felix; Carole Nowlin and B.C. Nowlin; Carolyn Thome and Paul Rhymer; and Bernadette Marquez and Arthur Lopez. At least three pieces from each artist are on display. Complementing the daylong opening on Friday, February 5, are a digital catalog and artists’ statements on the gallery’s website, as well as videos posted on Facebook and YouTube.

: PJ Garoutte, Twilight All Aglow, oil, 8 x 8.

: PJ Garoutte, Sunset’s Halo, oil, 16 x 16.

: PJ Garoutte, Neowise Nocturne, oil, 10 x 10.

: Don Brackett, Twilight on the High Desert, oil, 12 x 16.

: Don Brackett, Sunlight and Shadow, oil, 12 x 16.

: Don Brackett, Sundown, oil, 12 x 16.

Viewers can expect the show to provide intriguing insights into the ways in which close personal bonds can translate into creative inspiration. Garoutte and Brackett, for example, have been painting together since first meeting in 1970 during workshops they took at the New Mexico Watercolor Society in Albuquerque. Today, they paint at side-by-side easels in the home they built in 1986 outside of Taos. Brackett notes that lately his “abstract realist” landscapes have found fresh excitement through his use of a palette knife, which he picked up at the urging of his wife; Garoutte revived her own painting practice in a “more expressionistic” style through that tool. “We respect and like each other’s work,” she adds.

Thome and Rhymer, who live in Maryland, met in 1992 and discovered a shared passion for nature as coworkers making models for exhibits at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Thome still works there, but her personal passion is high-definition macro photography of natural objects, shot in her home studio. “I like to bring forth things that usually go unnoticed,” she says. The subject of QUAIL FACE FEATHER came to her through one of Rhymer’s interests, taxidermy, which in turn informs his faithfully rendered yet impressionistic animal sculptures, an art form he now pursues full time. “Carolyn’s work and ideas inspire and influence me, too,” he adds. In the case of the pose for his life-size bronze MAMA BEAR, so did a delightfully unlikely source: a small sculpture Rhymer’s mother made at the age of 12 following a visit to the National Zoo.

: Carolyn Thome, Quail Face Feather, photograph.

: Carolyn Thome, Monarch Chrysalis, photograph.

: Carolyn Thome, Mexican Bird of Paradise, photograph.

: Paul Rhymer, Yawning of a New Day, bronze, 27 x 61 x 6.

: Paul Rhymer, War Eagle, bronze, 24 x 33 x 30.

: Paul Rhymer, Mama Bear, bronze, 42 x 28 x 40.

Sushe and Tracy Felix, who live just west of Denver, present yet another shining example of artistic connubial longevity. They met in high-school art class and married 36 years ago. “We’ve been inspired by the modernist movement, especially painters in the Southwest during the 1930s and ’40s,” says Sushe. Each has a distinctive take on those influences: Her acrylics display a playfully mysterious style, while Tracy’s precisely rendered, simplified scenes in oil show the influence of regionalists like Grant Wood and Charles Bunnell. —Norman Kolpas