2024 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction
VERSO
Signed and dated
Inscribed, “The Month of February / One of a series of tempera paintings representing the months of the year in New Mexico”
The artist wrote, “If you take a map of New Mexico, set one point of a pair of dividers somewhere a little north of Silver City, and swing a circle with a two-hundred-mile radius, you will encompass the part of the world I know most intimately and love best. Here is a terrain of wide variety in most terms. Within this circle are found climates that vary from the subtropical to the Arctic-alpine, depending on altitude above sea level. As it is crossed by transcontinental highways and railroads, part of it – a relatively small part of it – is known to tourists. But the greatest part is remote from any road but the most primitive ones and known only to isolated ranchers, a few forest rangers, and prospectors. It is these lonely areas that have a constant, ever-fresh appeal to me. This land and its people have jointly been the subject of the paintings and drawings which have occupied me for the greater part of my life.”
PROVENANCE
Mike and Pat Craddock, Big Spring, Texas, 1988
Present owner, by descent