Sunday June 3, 2022 Still Life Revisited/ To Market, To Market

To Market, To Market


Still Life Series, based on the sense of place, and that place is New Mexico. When we talk about place, It is a combination of characteristics that makes a place special and unique. Sense of place involves the human experience in a landscape, the local knowledge and folklore. Sense of place also grows from identifying oneself in relation to a particular piece of land on the surface of planet earth.

Places that exhibit a strong sense of place have an identity and character recognized immediately by a visitor and valued deeply by residents. New Mexico is such a place, with long history and traditions of family that go years back. Northern New Mexico is known for it's old churches, which help to keep the traditions over time. The oldest church in the US is here in Santa Fe, and the oldest house is also in Santa Fe. It is a land so beautiful, it is known as the "land of enchantment."

Wendell Berry famously said, "If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." And for those of us who make our homes in New Mexico, we are a part of the land, the mountains, the sky, we know who we are and why we are here.

Wallace Stegner interprets that as "... talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in." Hands smooth the adobe each year, people clean the acequicas together, so much of New Mexico is done in community.

Kent Rydon "A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing history with its confines."

Robert Frost "The land was ours before we were the land's."

J.B. Jackson "It is place, permanent position in both the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity."

I am looking at this place, New Mexico, that I now call home. Through the pottery and the weavings of Mexico, that has a strong influence of place over this land.






Still Life Revisited/ To Market, To Market