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FEBRUARY 2004 . SOUTHWESTART.

High Noon
The sun is in full force in Doug Atwill's green, blue, and ochre earth-toned southwestern landscapes

by Devon Jackson

In an overview of the life and work of poet T.S. Eliot, author Cynthia Ozick once wrote that "Eliot's craft lay in the way way he left things out." Similarly, it's the way Douglas Atwill leaves out what other painters typically put in-people, animals, horizons-that gives his impressionistic landscapes and garden paintings their unique power and beauty. One of the premier painters of garden scenes and southwestern landscapes, Atwill feels no obligation to paint exactly what he sees; instead he reinterprets the natural world, generally emphasizing its earthier aspects and geometric structural patterns while compressing distant mountains and bits of sky into corner as escape hatches, and favoring the high horizons that characterize his own vision.

Now a robust 70 and possessing a kind of military officer's grace (not unlike Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy), AtwilI was born in the middle of three boys in Pasadena, CA. A couple of painter cousins lived next door. Down the street, Norman Rockwell wintered with his in-laws. Atwill's father, who worked in the oil business, soon moved the family to Texas, which is where Atwill finished high school before serving in the U.S. Army. After being discharged from the elite counterintelligence Corps, he studied in Italy. He returned to the states to major in English at the University of Texas, staying on in Austin, albeit somewhat grudgingly, to write copy for an ad agency. when one day the firm needed a new art director, Atwill changed jobs. Then in 1969, he changed everything: He moved to Santa Fe, NM, and began laying adobe and working construction during the day while teaching himself to paint at night. By 1975, in his 40s, he'd given up the hard labor and begun painting full time.

He chose Santa Fe because he saw people living open lives there, unlike people in towns in Texas, who tended toward the parochial. "I'd seen enough of the world not to be in Texas anymore," AtWill remarks. "There are lots of places to paint, and lots of places to sell, but other than New York or Los Angeles, not too many places where you have the two combined." In Santa Fe, his own vision finally gelled. Once he found his niche-in the outdoors, in a certain linear, spiny brush stroke, in what he considers contemporary realism-he set up a clean, well-lighted place for himself in the art world. Lately, his paintings have gotten a little more abstract, but they're still recognizably, impressionistically his-even if he has a minor quibble with the label. "It's not right to call yourself an impressionist," asserts Atwill. "That was a specific time and had specific people who belonged to it, and they're all dead."

Specific people he holds in high esteem. "While I was studying in Italy, I actually saw Monet's paintings, and it was great," he recalls. "They're strikingly different from what you see in the books. The surface was very bumpy-with dog hairs and grass and everything in it. Just there to see, just part of the picture. Not at all pristine. And I saw Bonnard, too, the peak of my heroes."

Pierre Bonnard [1867-1947], a post-Impressionist known for his vibrant colors, has been a lasting influence. "Bonnard brought ideas into his paintings by working on them again and again and again, and by working on them inside, not on location," Atwill explains in a rationale of sorts for his own process. While he does some plein-air work, "I prefer the studied studio painting," says the artist. "This way, I can put a lot more into the painting." The result is a clarity enriched by his knowledge of New Mexico's flora and fauna: For instance, he admits to a proclivity for delphiniums, lilies, and yarrow, while eschewing petunias and gladiolas.

In the Southwest, as he has come to intimately know it, "You can't help but have landscape and land invest your work in some way," Atwill proposes. "And that's not really of interest to people out East. They're interested more in ideas, in what's new. Which is fine. But the West Coast is more amenable to images and contemporary realism, and the land here is so compelling, it's hard not to paint it."

ATWILL GOT HOOKED on landscapes during the 1970s and 1980s, when he had a studio in the rural town of Galisteo, just outside Santa Fe. "You go 15 minutes in one direction and you have fir and pines and water. Then you go to the south, and it's chaparral, desert, and chamisa. Whatever direction you go in, you can find something to paint. Unlike Texas, which has its pretty parts, but it's long on the not-so-pretty stretches too," he says. "And you have this very bright, very intense clear light. You don't get much of those graying and violet colors going on in the sky. It's just as clear 30 miles away as it is 30 yards away."

The patterns and perspective of the landscape itself, often portrayed with a trademark high horizon in his paintings, is so entrancing to Atwill that the way he paints, the way he sees, it's just never occurred to him to put a person or a group of people into any of his series of mountains, gardens, houses, rivers, or trees. "Somebody once said that my paintings were all done at high noon," Atwill says agreeably. "And I like that, I like that idea of everything being painted in a key of high C."

Having painted, by his count, nearly 3,000 paintings in the past 30 years, Atwill has slowed up some recently, producing maybe 30 to 40 works a year these days, as opposed to the 120 to 150 he used to crank out annually. Still, he adheres to a saying he found in a biography of Marsden Hartley: If you can't paint a painting in a day, you better give it up. "When your hand is working right, and your hand and your heart and your mind all come together in a short time, that's how it should be going," Atwill advises. "But it depends on your technique, and on other things."

As for those high horizon lines, he says, "I'm fascinated with what goes on below the horizon line. So I usually push the horizon way up to the top of the canvas. I'm also fascinated with what Cezanne called the 'hithering spill,' where you bend the front, the foreground, down to you. Which allows me to paint the distance and the middle." That "spill" is often whatever's in the foreground, at the bottom of the painting-rocks, branches, flowers that become so precipitous they're almost falling out of the painting.

This distinctive approach requires an equally distinctive slash of a brush stroke, "something long and narrow, like a long rectangle," as Atwill describes it. After scrutinizing the adaptable brush strokes and sophisticated techniques of Victor Higgins and Leon Gaspard, Atwill says he saw how he could "boil down the essence of a landscape in an intellectual process and avoid the emotional." He arranged the elements of his paintings into similar, almost geometric blocks (a la Cezanne) and tightened his strokes almost but not quite as intensely as Andrew Wyeth's. Most significantly, he started painting entirely with acrylics. "There's a variance to the surface of acrylic," Atwill maintains. "You can get shine or you can get flatness."

Ironically, the absence of any figures in his landscapes is wholly unnatural, and yet it subliminally compels viewers to see what and how . Atwill sees. "It's an interesting problem," Atwill muses. "To get scale without putting a dog or a human being in the painting. I'll sometimes try to create that with just a piece of grass, or a certain rock." But mainly, he explains, "You're trying to capture this essence, this abstract idea, that you have in your mind," he says. It's why he recently painted ABIQUIU BUTTE, NIGHT, a splendid nighttime doppelganger to ABIQUIU BUTTE, a lighter daytime version, and one that came about in part due to a rare bad mood. "The dark paintings-and I've only done a few, of which that was the first-have a power that color doesn't have," he says.

Although Atwill has spent more than 30 years in Santa Fe, he often changes his perspective by relocating within the area. "You get a fresh look when you get a new studio," says the artist, who moved from his last studio into his current space when he couldn't paint in the previous one anymore. He hated the way it felt: "A studio is a more personal space than a home. The energy goes from you into your space."

His current studio once belonged to modernist Agnes Sims, one of his first great supporters and quasi-mentors during his early years in Santa Fe. Located just off the famed artists' lane of Canyon Road, it has high ceilings, frosted skylights (crucial to AtWill for the almost regulated natural light that they bring in during the day), and plenty of good vibes. Sims' and Atwill friend, Mary Louise Aswell, former fiction editor for Harper's Bazaar, once lived here and had plenty of great dinner parties. AtWill met both Truman Capote and Eudora Welty, among many of Aswell's other writers, right where he now paints. And Sims, too, exerted sway over AtWill, sometimes telling him, "Leave it alone" or "Don't belabor it." It was Sims who encouraged him to leave some darkness and unknown portions in his paintings, for instance, and who found his gardenscapes more accessible than the sienna reds, buffs, and ochres he so often relies on in his landscapes.

Such storied encounters have prompted Atwill to write Why I Won't Be Going to Lunch Anymore, a book of short stories he calls "thickly veiled stories about actual Santa Fe painters," to be published by Sunstone Press this year. "I just wanted to write about what painters are concerned about," he says, alluding to the demanding nature of the pursuit.

Such emotional travails, however, are rarely expressed in Atwill's landscapes of gardens and mountains. It's precisely because of the way Atwill leaves out the sadness, anger, and melancholy that his paintings become almost restorative. "Life is correctable," shrugs this let-me-refill-your-half-full-glass kind of guy. "Just as a painting is correctable."

Devon Jackson also writes for Outside, Glamour, and Sports Illustrated.

Atwill is represented by Munson Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Elder Art Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Lagerquist Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Sandy Carson Gallery, Denver, CO; and Thomas Ingerick Gallery, Aspen, CO.