Familiar landscapes

Of all media, I find watercolor paintings the most challenging. Their marvelous clarity escapes me as, time after time, I create puddles of muddy color.

Ana Rosa Navarro also struggled with the medium, and now dominates it with absolute authority.

Her subjects are familiar landscapes in west central Mexico where we both live. Tapalpa's pine forests. Puerto Vallarta's plazas and palm trees. Adobe homes, stone bridges and terracotta pots in flower-filled patios.

She captures the soul of this land and its people.

Anticipation

My training in art and writing was traditional. We first mastered figure drawing, foreshortening and perspective before being permitted to paint abstractions. Painting was a craft, not child's play.

Perhaps that's why I tend to collect abstract paintings. I envy their fluidity, their spontaneity. They capture my imagination. Or perhaps, as T. S. Eliot said, "…human kind cannot bear very much reality."*

(Click on pic for large view)
The pre-Hispanic icons in Alberto Ramos' work convey primal messages. I love the luminosity he brings to his paintings. Revelation is imminent; omens are everywhere. He creates a sense of anticipation in every work.

*T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton I from Four Quartets, 1944