D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
Yankee Ingenuity
New England painter Deborah Hutchings reinvents and reinvigorates her art in the Southwest, trading watercolors for oils and barns for adobes.
By Donna Clayton Lawder
"You feel like Zorro is going to show up," Deborah Hutchings says with a laugh. She takes a step back from the painting, "Adobe Hollyhocks," one of her many oil paintings hanging and perched on easels in her eponymous gallery on Texas Street in Silver City.
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Deborah Hutchings
in Hutchings Fine Art, the gallery she owns with her husband Alan. Behind
her is her oil painting, "Warren House Hollyhocks." (Photo
by Donna Clayton Lawder) |
"It's in Mesilla," she says of the brown adobe wall ensconced in a rainbow of hollyhocks that she's captured on canvas. "Mesilla's just great for painting. It has that old Spanish feeling that hits you right here." She thumps her heart.
Hutchings grew up in the Northeast, living and painting in New England for many of her adult years. But she'd visited the Southwest many times.
"I guess I have a western heart," she says, touching that spot again. She tells of playing cowgirl with her father, of her love of country-and-western music. "I saw those mountains, got chills and that was it. I just kept coming back."
Eventually, after many visits over the past 20-plus years, Hutchings found a place to call home in New Mexico. Just over two years ago, she and her husband, Alan, made it stick and bought a house in Silver City. They opened their gallery — Hutchings Fine Art — in August, just in time to get established and participate in her first Weekend at the Galleries last month.
With "Hutch," as she calls her husband, taking on most of the gallery sitting and business aspect of their venture, Deborah Hutchings says she has been able to devote herself to painting. She walks around the sun-filled gallery, its walls filled with paintings of poignant landscapes, rich florals and striking buildings for which Hutchings is known, like this month's Desert Exposure cover.
"We opened in August with a whole gallery full of new work that I painted just since April," she says. "Sales immediately were very good, so to replace the ones I've sold, I just keep finding more things to paint. And that's just a delight!"
Standing near several paintings depicting barns, Hutchings reflects on her love of buildings, a theme in her work. "The starkness of a building can be beautiful, whether it's a lighthouse on the shore or an old adobe in the field," she says. "A lot of artists stopped painting barns because it started seeming trite. Barns were so popular at one point that they fell out of favor. But I'm something of a renegade, I guess, because I still paint them. I wish there were more barns around here!"
But the Southwest, she allows, has given her new and varied subject matter. She describes the road trips she and her husband take, journeying to new sights and scenes throughout the Southwest, discovering new vistas for her to capture — first in watercolor sketches, then the finished paintings in oils.
The red barns and green fields of New England have given way to earthen adobe houses and gates, golden fields and the purple mountains of New Mexico — the latter being showcased in her painting, "Purple Mountain Majesty."
"The mountains replace the beauty of the ocean," she says. "Living here, we have to give up the shore but we have the gorgeous mountains to console us."
Hutchings adds that her move to the Southwest also changed her choice of medium and color palette. "In New England, I did watercolors," she explains. "But the Southwest calls for a stronger medium, and I've found myself working with oils since I came to New Mexico. For one thing, it's the light here and the intensity of color it brings out.
"We have the golden colors of our landscape and that big blue sky above us. Gold is opposite blue on the color wheel. It's like the color wheel itself was invented here!" she adds animatedly. "And we have it all. You want green? Paint the Gila River and all those lush trees around it!"
In fact, in a painting titled "Gila River Reflections," she has done that, too.
Hutchings says she enjoys playing around with words when naming her paintings. She gives the example of one titled "Not So Quiet in the Barn": The landscape is pristine, vast, open; near the center of the painting sits a small, dark-red barn.
"Look at the scene around it, all that serene landscape," she says. Indeed, the barn is quite small in comparison. But something about its singularity, out there in that wide-open space, draws the viewer into the scene.
A playful look comes over Hutchings' face. "Doesn't the title make you focus on the barn and wonder what's going on in there? Are the animals up to something? Are there people in the barn having a good time? Just what's going on in there?" she asks with a small laugh.
She points out another painting, "Behind the Gate," this one distinctly Southwestern with an adobe wall and wooden gate, cacti growing just outside the door.
"It's a beautiful adobe wall and gate," she says, "but I wanted the title to make you think about the mystery of what's behind the gate."
And sometimes the mystery is what's inside the viewer, Hutchings adds. She especially enjoys watching visitors ponder a painting, then asking them what they are thinking. She points out a large painting, "Warren House Hollyhocks," near the rear of the gallery. A rendering of the Warren House in Silver City, the scene is often recognized by locals, Hutchings says.
Hollyhocks are a favorite flower of hers to paint. "They are so brilliant and beautiful. They add so much color," she says. "In our golden-and-brown landscape, it was such a joy for me to discover so many hollyhocks growing around here!"
She says she's been surprised at how many men, in particular, spend time gazing upon her paintings of the dramatic, tall-stalked flowers.
"I've noticed a lot of men looking at my paintings of hollyhocks, and I ask them what the painting makes them think of. They tell me that the hollyhocks remind them of their grandmother. I've gotten that same answer several times now," she says, reflecting with a smile on how such sweet memories are associated with the old-fashioned flower.
Hutchings acknowledges she is something of an unusual artist in one way in particular: She especially enjoys painting commissions.
"I think it has something to do with my marketing background," she says. Hutchings earned a bachelor's degree in graphic arts from the University of West Chester in Pennsylvania and did postgraduate work at Northeastern University in Boston. She also studied at the Ridgewood Art Institute in New Jersey and the Silvermine School of Art and The Lyme Academy, both in Connecticut. In 1992, after a successful career as an advertising executive, she returned fulltime to fine art and dedicated herself to her painting. She had a strong following for her work in Connecticut, she says, a following built largely on successful commissions.
"I love sitting them down, visiting with them and asking them questions," she says of her commission customers. "If they want a painting of a special place, I want to know why is it special to them. Was it where they spent their honeymoon? Is it a building from their childhood? I love getting inside their brain and their soul and then creating something that causes them to say, 'Oh, it's just what I wanted!' or 'It's exactly what I was thinking of.' It makes them feel something."
She tells the story of a man who asked for a painting of anemones for his wife. Every year he gave her anemones, her favorite flower, for her birthday. One year he asked Hutchings to make a painting of the flowers. Knowing this particular woman had admired a vase in Hutchings' house, she painted the flowers as a still life in that vase.
"It was perfect!" Hutchings says of how well the gift was received.
But it's not the commissions — or their fees — that keep her painting. Asked why she paints, Hutchings has a simple, ready answer.
"I paint because I was meant to," she says. "As a little girl, I walked to art classes every Saturday with my little paint box under my arm. I just had to go."
Though she's exhibited her work in many juried and solo shows across the country, she doesn't keep track of those things.
"I'm proud of my track record, but that's just for me, not a resume," Hutchings says. "It's when my work touches someone, when it's just the perfect thing and it brings them joy — well! Those are my honors."
Locally, Deborah Hutchings' work can be seen exclusively at Hutchings Fine Art, 211-B N. Texas, Silver City, 313-6939, www.debhutchings.com
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.
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