Jennifer Cavan: Spirit of Place

Timeless landscapes & old adobes animate the essence of New Mexico in Jennifer Cavan’s art

By Gussie Fauntleroy

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.

JENNIFER CAVAN was standing beside her work at her first major art show, in Dallas in 2000, when a fellow artist stepped into her booth and looked around. He took in the earlier pieces Cavan had created shortly after she moved to Angel Fire, NM—retablos and bultos (two- and three-dimensional images of Catholic saints) in the mode of Spanish Colonial art. Then he spent some time in front of her more recent work—vibrant oil-pastel paintings of northern New Mexico villages. “You used to do that,” he said to her, pointing to the saints, “and now you’re doing this,” he said as he nodded toward the oil pastels. “You should be done with the other and focus on the paintings.” Cavan smiled in agreement; she had been thinking the very same thing.

Since that time, she has continued to create award-winning paintings that convey the timeless essence of her adopted home, expressing her feelings about New Mexico in vivid colors and intentionally simplified forms. The 57-year-old painter describes her aim as “presenting, rather than representing” what she experiences as she wanders along back roads with camera and sketchbook in hand; hers is a contemporary take on the ancient landscape and traditional architecture found in her favorite corner of the West. The approach resonates with collectors and has earned her such honors as being selected as the featured poster artist at this year’s highly regarded Cherry Creek Arts Festival, held in Denver in early July.

After spending 22 years in the mountain town of Angel Fire—and doing many more art shows—Cavan and her husband, Rees Lawrence, have settled just outside of Santa Fe. From there she continues to explore and paint New Mexico while also gathering and presenting imagery from other parts of the country, including massive barns in her native Midwest. While her smaller pieces tend to focus on clusters of venerable adobe buildings in colorful, stylized landscapes, her larger works include what she calls “structure portraits.” One such piece, MONUMENTAL SPIRIT, portrays San Miguel Chapel, Santa Fe’s oldest mission church (circa 1610), against a star-filled night sky. The image fills the canvas with the power of its presence and scale.

NONE OF THIS was really on the horizon for Cavan when she was growing up in a Chicago suburb. A shy child who loved coloring and drawing, as a teen she had a well-used annual pass to the Art Institute of Chicago. She enjoyed art in junior high and high school—she even switched guidance counselors when one attempted to steer her away from art and toward honors courses to boost her GPA. At Brown University in Providence, RI, she took a few drawing classes. But she had never met a full-time professional artist, and the concept of making a living that way did not occur to her at the time. Instead she earned a history degree, reinforcing an interest to which she would return some years later through her art.

Following graduation, Cavan turned to the corporate world in search of a financially viable path. She worked briefly in marketing and management consulting and then spent a dozen years in real estate strategy with Sears, traveling the country assessing retail sites. When Sears moved its headquarters from downtown Chicago to the suburbs, her commute became too much to handle. She and Lawrence considered looking for a home midway between their workplaces. But for an energetic young couple, living in the suburbs was not a thrilling prospect. What did excite them were memories of New Mexico, where they’d gone to visit Lawrence’s parents, who were living in Angel Fire.

With its clear light, time-honored cultures, and strong sense of place, New Mexico was a revelation, particularly for someone with an artistic inclination. After being used to the fast pace and crowded skyline of an urban world, “it was a bit of a culture shock,” Cavan says. “But we traveled around the state and fell in love with it.” When it was obvious they were ready to leave corporate life, she and Lawrence headed for Angel Fire. They ran his father’s mini-storage business and renovated an aging house while trying on a back-to-the-earth way of life. And Cavan returned to her love of making art.

FASCINATED WITH New Mexico’s Spanish Colonial past and the ways it melds into the present, she started off using acrylics to create religious imagery, selling her pieces at a nearby church. Then one day Lawrence suggested she use three frames that were waiting for retablos to try a different kind of painting. She pulled out her oil pastels and some bright-red pastel paper, excited about discovering how the rich colors and buttery, crayon-like application might express what she felt about the world surrounding her. At an art show not long afterward, all three paintings sold right away. “The mark-makings were more hesitant, and there were different color combinations from what I’m doing now,” she says of those first pieces, but she had found the subject matter that continues to be central to her art.

As Cavan became more prolific and began to paint on a larger scale, her Angel Fire studio became too small. In search of a suitable space—and closer access to an airport for visits to family—she and Lawrence moved to Santa Fe in 2016. There her studio, which has good north light and generous skylights, has room for each of the processes and kinds of work she does, including her own framing. In one space a large table allows for prepping canvases and panels with colored gesso, her favorite colors including burgundy, red, and indigo. As she works, the aspens and piñon-covered hills outside her windows inspire her. Cavan also works in oil pastels on paper, panel in a birch cradle, and framed board. Each surface offers distinctive challenges and delights. Her canvases, as large as 4 feet square, lend themselves to striking portraits of individual edifices that loom above the viewer, including timeworn barns the artist didn’t much notice growing up. “They’re fabulous structures,” she says now.

On panels, her imagery frequently features villages or groups of houses in a quintessential northern New Mexico landscape—as seen through the artist’s “rose-colored glasses,” she says, where color and composition are tweaked to convey her feeling of place. “It’s not super-accurate, which makes it more interesting. I’m always playing with the angles of buildings. It can almost look like a building is moving or dancing,” she says. TIME WILL TELL ME, for instance, was loosely based on a scene in the village of Peñasco, but with houses set closer together and a narrow red road twisting among them. Cavan lined the road with flowering chamisa, inspired by watching seasonal changes in New Mexico vegetation as she walks her dog. She was also visually drawn to the twin portals of the house on the left, curious in particular about how the wood and adobe elements intersect.

Likewise, Cavan’s interest in history, cultures, and architecture intersect in her work, as she continues to explore these aspects of New Mexico. “Many of the old adobe structures haven’t changed in hundreds of years,” she points out. Others, such as a village church between Angel Fire and Mora, have seen transformations—the exterior painted yellow, then re-stuccoed in an earth tone, then given a new bell tower—just in the time she’s lived in the state. Despite these and the world’s dramatic changes, many of the places she paints have retained important cultural and visual qualities from an earlier time. “In the northern New Mexico farming villages, there’s a simpler way of life that’s been passed down and is still being lived,” she says.

The timeless feeling in Cavan’s art is, in part, a result of the absence of figures. “I do like my solitude, and I don’t want these places to feel crowded,” she says. “I hope the viewer will want to populate the landscape with whatever they like.” In the same way, the empty, winding country roads in virtually all of her New Mexico scenes are aimed at pulling in the eye and opening the imagination. “I hope viewers want to put themselves into the piece, wander through, and see where it goes,” she says. She points to such acclaimed New Mexico painters as Tom Noble (1941-2017), Ed Sandoval, and Alyce Frank—all of the Taos area—as inspiration for this approach.

Although her visual themes have remained constant over the years, Cavan enjoys exploring variations in materials and surfaces. Recently she has begun trying out more highly textured surfaces, applying tile adhesive and then colored gesso to her canvases or boards before painting, which adds dimension and qualities of light reflection to the oil pastel. Each choice reverberates in other decisions as she paints. “Sometimes the texture dictates where compositional elements can go,” she says. And each decision adds to her enthusiasm for her chosen vocation and the place she lives. “You’ve always got to keep playing,” she says, and then adds with a smile, “I’m definitely doing what I want to do.”

representation
Leslie Flynt, Santa Fe, NM; Luca Decor, Santa Fe, NM; www.jennifercavan.com.

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.

MORE RESOURCES FOR ART COLLECTORS & ENTHUSIASTS
• Subscribe to Southwest Art magazine
• Learn how to paint & how to draw with downloads, books, videos & more from North Light Shop
• Sign up for your Southwest Art email newsletter & download a FREE ebook