Show Preview | Bettina Steinke Studio Group

Abiquiu, NM
Abiquiu Inn, August 1-31

Cecilia Robertson, Heading Home, oil, 10 x 16.

This story was featured in the August 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art August 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

DISCERNING collectors of western art prize the works of the late artist and illustrator Bettina Steinke (1913-1999) for her lifelike images that captured subjects as diverse as U.S. presidents, Hollywood stars, captains of industry, and pueblo dancers. She and her husband, photographer Don Blair, moved west from New York in 1955, first settling in Taos and later in Santa Fe. There she mentored local artists, including noted western painter Ned Jacob, in the studio of her adobe home on the south side of town.

Jacob, in turn, continued mentoring artists in Steinke’s old studio, including painters Dave Ballew and Bill Gallen. Then, three years ago, Gallen invited seven of his own students—already accomplished professional artists in their own right—to gather about once a month in that venerable studio to paint together and critique each other’s work as the Bettina Steinke Studio Group. Now, for the first time, some 40 paintings from these seven artists are exhibited together in the upstairs gallery at the Abiquiu Inn in a show entitled Seven Visions of the West. All of the painters—Nancy J. Davis, Paula Devereaux, Ann Jenemann, Lee MacLeod, Cecilia Robertson, K. Shway, and Marcia Williams—attend the show’s reception on Saturday, August 3, from 4 to 7 p.m., and throughout the month, several of them can be found working at their easels en plein air on the grounds of the hotel.

: Lee MacLeod, Evening Light, Abiquiu, oil, 10 x 20.

: Ann Jenemann, Two Pillars, oil, 18 x 24.

: Paula Devereaux, Piedra Lumbre, oil, 9 x 12.

Considering that the inn is a mere 13 miles from the famed Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived and worked, it’s an auspicious location for the group’s public debut. “We all immensely appreciate being able to walk out into the New Mexico landscape and express our responses to it in paint,” says Santa Fe-based Cecilia Robertson, whose richly colored landscapes aim to capture “the immediacy of some moment I’ve seen, whether an animal walking across a canyon rim, or the light hitting a mesa in a certain way.” With like-minded passion, Ann Jenemann, who now lives in Santa Fe after seven years in the little town of Rico, CO, uses broad brush strokes to convey “the elemental sense of the place; its mountains, cliffs, and canyons; and these big skies with clouds that roll in and change things instantaneously.”

Visitors can expect the quality of work on display to be exceptionally high. “We’re all professionals,” says Paula Devereaux, an established sculptor dividing her time between Santa Fe and the northern New Mexico village of Chama, who added painting to her body of work over the past nine years. Adds Jenemann, “We push each other to improve, but we also support each other. Everyone’s such a good painter that it forces you to up your game.” —Norman Kolpas

contact information
505.685.4378
www.abiquiuinn.com