Show Preview | Jeff Cochran - Southwest Art Magazine

Santa Fe, NM
Manitou Galleries, September 16-30

Jeff Cochran, Pauls Bar, oil, 46 x 50.

This story was featured in the September 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

On September 16, Manitou Galleries unveils 15 to 20 new works by Taos landscape painter Jeff Cochran in a solo show at its Canyon Road location opening with an artist’s reception from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Matt Mullins, the gallery’s marketing coordinator, says, “Cochran is well known for his impasto oil paintings depicting the fields, farmlands, and back roads near his home in northern New Mexico. His brush strokes are thick with paint and are generously applied over bare linen, giving his paintings a raw and elemental feeling that retains the energy with which they were created.”

Cochran continues to paint the landscape around his Taos home. “His farming,” Mullins notes, “is a really relevant aspect to his paintings. He’s painting sculpted earth and frozen soil. It feels like it’s tied into his connection to the earth.” Cochran also notes that his farming has introduced him to the landscape in unexpected ways. “When I first bought the property, I found out I had water rights,” he says. The process of getting that water to his land, meeting and becoming friends with local farmers and ranchers, and learning about maintaining and cleaning the acequia took him to places and exposed him to things he would not have otherwise discovered. “That’s had a big impact on me,” he says.

But in these most recent works, Cochran notices his focus shifting. “I have been doing landscapes here for 10 or 12 years,” he says. Drawn to the quieter back roads and iconic adobe structures, he’s now seeing development irrevocably change the landscape. “I have some paintings of buildings or locations that are now gone,” he says. To him those paintings are more than just pretty pictures. “Now they’re almost historic reference,” he says.

A good example is the painting PAULS BAR—a somber canvas featuring an abandoned adobe structure, on the face of which “Pauls Bar” is hand painted along with the crudely rendered outline of a beer bottle. “They are getting ready to widen the highway nearby,” the artist says, “and I’m sure that building is going to be gone soon.” —Laura Rintala

contact information
505.986.9833
www.manitougalleries.com