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Lower Colonias

Currency:USD Category:Art Start Price:NA Estimated At:100,000.00 - 150,000.00 USD
Lower Colonias
Lower Colonias
Artist: Hulings, ClarkDate of Birth: 1922-2011
Medium: Oil on board
Dimensions: 30 x 60 inches
Signed: Signed lower right and dated 1974
Verso:

Clark Hulings grew up in New Jersey, studied in New York under Frank Reilly at the Art Student’s League, and haunted the Grand Central Art Galleries. Golden Age illustrators like Rockwell and Cornwell offered a constant wellspring of inspiration and insight into technique, but the time he spent in Spain as a little boy after the death of his mother seems to have imprinted on his imagination. The old cobblestone streets, donkeys and carts, stalls and markets in Mexico, Italy, Spain and elsewhere became Hulings’s principal subjects. As Hulings himself wrote: “If it is nostalgia that induces me to paint markets and donkeys and Spanish landscapes, perhaps it is also nostalgia that moves me to search out rustic places with bygone lifestyles.” (Hulings, A Gallery of Paintings, p. 5) Lower Colonias, a massive, magnificent work, brings the artist’s sensibility, this drive “to search our rustic places” back home to New Mexico, to Lower Colonias, southeast of Santa Fe, to this weathered house on this two-rut road where the old Chevy (or is it a Buick?) sits idle under a drift at right, ceding the day to the old red buckboard and team of horses. The canvas is full of textures created by the sun breaking through onto the melting snow. It’s a day for getting out, for shedding cabin fever, for letting the wash hang in the breeze without the fear that it will freeze into boards. The horses know that spring is on its way. So do the buds on the trees, and the clouds overhead.