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We got home late Thursday after a quick trip to Denver to visit family. On the way back we stopped at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City which is the site of the prestigious Prix de West annual show and also home to a fabulous collection of art. As I have mentioned before, my friend and mentor Hollis Willford (1940-2007) was a two time Prix de West winner. His monumental Welcome Sundown stands outside the entrance to the museum.


Although seeing the current Prix de West show on exhibit was a treat, the most moving part of the visit for me was to see, once again, Wilson Hurley's gigantic triptychs which are installed in a special room. I have written about Hurley here and why he and his work have influenced me. Here are a few very poor shots taken with a cell phone camera. You can't see much about the art but you can get a sense of the scale. Makes my little triptych efforts look very puny! For more about Wilson Hurley's triptych project for the museum you can go here.


That's me standing across the room and also in front of the New Mexico triptych (below).

Skies

Last week, my online class The Painted Sky started. It is a very lively group and in addition to lots of sky painting we've been looking at images of studies and paintings by other artists from Constable to the present. This week I posted several Wilson Hurley paintings as examples of "big sky" paintings and I thought I'd post them here too. Hurley lived in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains just outside of Albuquerque near where I lived for over five years. I had the pleasure of meeting Hurley at a show at the Albuquerque Museum a few years before he died. He was a true gentleman and an encouraging role model. We shared both our prior profession (the law) and a passion for painting and art history, particularly the Hudson River School. The man could paint skies. Oh yeah, and these are big. Enjoy!