The master of plein-air realism finds truth in what is
ARTIST STUDIO BY ELIZA WELLS SMITH | PHOTOS BY KATE RUSSELL
If only more of us could express ourselves as clearly and profoundly in word or image as Woody Gwyn does with his paintbrush. The intense detail in Gwyn’s natural realism delivers us true terrains of New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, California—wherever he is inspired.
Light is the common thread, and Gwyn treats it with delicate precision. His light moves like a life force through the canvas to shroud a tree, grace a field, climb rocks, splash into the Galisteo Basin, or tip the waves of the sea. It’s ironic how such intense precision and energy conjure a feeling of calm.
Often there is historic relevance to a site. In Midday (2010), Gwyn painted near Manassas, Virginia, where George Washington used this tree as a marker when he surveyed the land. Gwyn studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia “before the Civil War,” he jests, adding that “actually, I was there the day Kennedy was shot.” He studied under Carolyn Wyeth, the sister of Andrew Wyeth. This family of painters profoundly affected the 19-year-old Gwyn, and he found himself getting to know them quite well. At the time, the Wyeths lived in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, a township about 25 miles west of Philadelphia. “I had a car,” Gwyn recalls. “One time, Mrs. Wyeth was stranded when Andrew took their car up to Maine, so I drove her around.”
“Sometimes I’m like a dog who knows where his bone is buried,” says Woody Gwyn. “I go seek what I imagine.”
Gwyn recalls as well some words of wisdom from Andrew Wyeth, who told him: “Whatever you do, do it like a man.”
The Wyeth family has long had a presence in New Mexico as well. Michael Hurd, son to painters Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth Hurd, lives near Ruidoso, New Mexico, on the Sentinel Ranch that his parents established in the 1940s. There, Michael operates the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery, which not only showcases his own powerful paintings, but also those of his parents and his uncle, Henriette’s brother, Andrew Wyeth. Gwyn hopes to go there to paint soon, continuing a five-decade long relationship with this iconic family of American artists.
True to his Welsh heritage, Gwyn is a storyteller. As a young man, he made a point to meet great artists. He sought them out or visited studios. “I’ve gone out of my way to meet these people, so I could know what it is to be an artist,” he says. “I’ve always been curious about artists.”
He speaks of visiting Georgia O’Keeffe. She showed him a note by 19th-century Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, a modern master. “I asked Mrs. O’Keeffe what she thought of Brancusi. All she said was, ‘He had the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen.’ That’s the only info I got about Brancusi. She was like a teenage girl.”
Midday (2010), oil on linen
Open and affable, easy and coasting on life, art, and meanings, Gwyn describes how he finds landscapes to paint. He says they are either places he passes, or places he’s imagined. “Sometimes I’m like a dog who knows where his bone is buried. I go seek what I imagine.”
Then the process starts. Perhaps in his “art truck”—a veritable plein-air painting studio on wheels. From there Gwyn studies his spot, making drawings, watercolors, and taking photographs.
“I draw to get the feeling of the place,” he explains. “I take a photo for detail, but it doesn’t ever have the feeling.”
A subject might receive his attention for many months as he paints it in different sizes and shapes, working through the idea until he feels it is complete.
Many Realist painters, Gwyn notes, are considered stylized even though the places they painted really look like their paintings. He cites Peter Hurd, a master of the Western landscape, Thomas Moran of the Hudson River School, and the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto. “They weren’t making these things up.”
Gwyn adds of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), known for his ability to capture “decisive moments” with his camera, that he “showed us that, with vision, every moment has its profundity, even the most slight moments.”
The artist lives a quiet life, both laid-back and intense. His home is a vast, historic adobe once occupied by Bishop Lamy. As we walk through the many rooms, we come to one that was the Bishop’s original chapel. Gwyn says this will soon be his watercolor studio. Next to it, a room that serves as his oil painting studio was the Bishop’s living quarters. We walk through the house under a portal, where a swallow feeds her nest of hatchlings.
In 1976 Gywn landed in the village of Galisteo after attending Art Academy in Philadelphia. In 1997 he and his wife, Diana, moved into the historic adobe museum that once housed Linda Durham’s gallery.
The quiet village has gotten even quieter since Durham moved her gallery to Santa Fe and the Galisteo Inn closed. To bolster the community, two years ago Gwyn and his wife generously opened their front hall, a great room, and the room adjacent to it, as a gathering spot and gallery for local artists. “The only rule,” quips Gwyn, “is that they get along.”
In 2010 Gwyn was awarded the prestigious New Mexico Governor’s Art Award for an Individual Artist. “It felt good to have that recognition,” he says.
This year opened with a dire scare. Gwyn suffered an aortic dissection, a condition in which the aorta disintegrates, pouring blood into the chest cavity. Few survive it, but Gwyn did. After an eight-hour open-heart surgery, he began his long recovery and is painting again.
Gwyn’s paintings are an homage to the earth’s natural beauty—but they are not simple. In many works, he introduces man-made elements, like a blacktop road rolling through a vast landscape, or a railroad track. He delivers a bit of edge by discussing visually the mingling of man and the wild environment. Light serves as the happy music in this show. Gwyn is precise in his representation of geological forms and colors. As he works, from first study to final piece, be it small or large in scale, the process is a constant dialogue back to the initial inspiration.
Many of the landscapes Gwyn has painted over the last 50 years are changed or gone. “Nature’s going to win in the end,” he remarks. The sense that the earth is tired and unhappy hovers over him like a dark cloud. As a body of work, his paintings present an enlightened sense of humility of the human place on earth.
Rocky Point (2010), oil on linen
“There has to be passion. There’s simply no other way to approach this life.”
—Woody Gwyn
As passionate about the work as he is about the process, Gwyn’s credo might be summed up by Brancusi: “Create like a god, order like a king, and work like a slave. That’s what it’s like to be an artist.”
From the Fall 2011 / Winter 2012 issue
