ARTIST STATEMENT

“My love of nature has formed my life. I have always found mystery and magic in beautiful and wild places around this amazing planet. Having spent 30 years painting the landscape imprinted me in so many ways. Although my present work is not representational it is inspired by the immersion of my life in the natural world. I am intrigued by those things in nature observed as well as the things hidden but sensed. I love the subtleties of things in the natural world. They make you really look deeply sometimes or whisper to you from out of nowhere at other times. Reflections, things fading and coming to life are elements that move me. Movement as it relates to nature and music are at the core of my intuitive response to painting. As I paint, I work with elements hidden then perhaps revealed. It is mystery that I paint about. It is the mystery of nature and the rhythm of my life that has moved me to paint from my emotional world, to explore my inner connection to that world and to better understand my place in it. I hope that I can share some of these feelings and explorations with those who view and participate in my work.”

ARTIST BIO

Artist Susan Faust has spent a lifetime focused on art. She has been a professional artist for more than forty years. A native of Delaware, Susan began drawing at the age of five. She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973 with a BA in Fine Art. Upon graduation, she pursued a career as a professional ceramicist. Within two years she was Artist in Residence for the State of West Virginia. For the next 12 years, she was widely recognized as one of the most successful production Master Potters in the Southeast. But thousands of pots later and hundreds of craft shows behind her, her real passion for drawing and painting were going unfulfilled. Susan moved to Sedona, Arizona in 1987 and became the director of the ceramics department at the Sedona Art Center while continuing to study painting. Susan went on to become a successful pastelist and oil painter and was soon teaching workshops and classes while participating in exhibitions around the country. Now living in the light and beauty of the high desert of Santa Fe, NM Susan continues to explore a very personal artistic expression in oil and mixed media.

Francisco Benitez considers himself an atemporal archaeologist who excavates lost and forgotten styles of painting long assigned to the shadows to reveal the ever-transient nature of the human psyche. Trained in a rigorous atelier program at the Art Student’s League in New York, he frequented museums and copied old master paintings in order to master their techniques and conceptual strategies. Impelled by an emotional and psychological impulse, he initially embraced a “Caravaggesque” approach to his subjects, in which narratives were weaved about the subjects as light sculpted their forms out of shadow.

Always concerned with presenting the human psyche in all its complexity, Benitez later discovered the ancient Romans and Greeks, and in his desire to fuse the gravitas of history with the psychological narratives of his subjects, he embarked on a new series of works in encaustic, one of the most ancient painting techniques known to humanity, and one of the most difficult to master.

As the Fayum portraits of Ancient Egypt attest, wax not only served to embalm the dead but to resurrect and revivify the subjects represented. By using the ancient tools and restrained palette of the Greeks, Benitez has isolated the psyche and placed it on center stage, whereby the viewer brings his/her subjectivity to the work and in effect initiates a complicit relationship with memory, history, and the geological layering of the collective human experience through the represented individual.

Born in 1967 in Taos, New Mexico, into a family of performing and visual artists (Maria and Cecilio Benitez), he obtained his BFA from the University of New Mexico, after having studied in Granada, Spain, the Art Student’s League, New York University, and St. John’s College. Besides actively showing in the US, he has also lived and exhibited widely in Europe where he has participated in a number of museum and gallery shows. Benitez currently exhibits internationally in Catania, Italy, Annecy, France and London. Hat Ranch Gallery is honoured to represent Benitez in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Artist Statement

I like to paint ordinary unnoticed places to depict the beauty and capture the ambience of a place and time. The places trigger a common familiarity for the viewer providing solace and a place to sink in to. People frequently remark on my paintings, "I want to be in that place. I want to live there". Many of the places I paint are rural scenes that include abandoned buildings that have an enduring history. My attraction to these abandoned buildlings is to a place forgotten and the triggering of a story or my imagination of “who lived there, how did they live, how did it end?” I see evidence of years of patching or cobbling together the parts of the structures and in many cases, I see them as a testament to survival in harsh conditions. Their history is contained in surfaces and textures and the partially "erased" history of the pentimento of an earlier time.

I focus on light and shadow and the abstract qualities in the puzzling shapes that warp over a surface. I use the colors and tones, along with bright contrasting whites and shadows created by the hot sun. I am also interested in how long it takes the viewer’s eye to move through the painting to get from “here to there” or left to right and front to back. I use formal concerns that engage the viewer like space, color, edge, movement, stillness, contrast, and temperature.

Sweeping or fading colors stopped by something in the way will stop the eye and make the viewer pause. With 40 plus years as a dedicated painter I am still looking for complex and hidden compositions in the seemingly simplest of places.

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Artist Biography

Shown in over 300 exhibitions with 150 of her works included in public collections across the United States, to say that Miles is a prolific artist is the understatement of the year. For over 40 years Miles has exhibited widely throughout the country and internationally and since 2015 has had 4 Museum exhibitions.

Miles earned her BA and MA at Purdue University garnering a full scholarship to the Hans Hofmann School of Art to study with Victor Candell and Leo Manso in Provincetown, Massachusetts and her work has been purchased twice by the State of New Mexico for the Artist in Public Places Program and she was recently selected for the $35,000-$125,000 Large Scale Purchases. She was a San Francisco Public West Coast Artist for the Public Arts Projects and received the Gottlieb Foundation grant.

Miles has held positions as a Director of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Senior Curator at the Yellowstone Art Museum and was Adjunct Instructor at MSU (Billings), MSU (Bozeman) and UMT (Missoula). In addition to her prolific art career, she is also a consultant and workshop instructor both nationally and internationally.

Miles lived in Santa Fe, NM until moving to Oracle, AZ in 2020.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Various times, places and experiences contributed to the evolution of the images found in these bronze sculptures.

During a family dispute in October 1942, I ran away never to return. I ran down into the dark grove of redwood trees and found Bossy our cow. After she kept me safe and warm for three nights, I went to San Francisco and soon found a job as a flanger and welder in Marinship Shipyard. Sixteen months later I was drafted into the US Navy.

Many images are from my experience in Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet during World War II in the Western Pacific. After Japan surrendered, we were allowed to visit the Tokyo Imperial Palace and witness the ruins of the moat, bridges, walls and palace.

In 1960, after receiving the MA in sculpture from UC Berkeley, a Fulbright grant took me to Italy to learn the traditional cire perdue bronze casting process at Fonderia Artistica Marinelli in Florence. The Fulbright Commission provided assistance in planning appropriate travels. I visited French Marian cathedrals; the amazing towers and walls of San Marino, San Gimignano, and Orvieto in Italy; the stunning Chapel of St Michael in Le Puy, France; and various Greek and Roman sites from Carcassone to Carnuntum. These travels continue to be the inspiration for many images. After returning to UC Berkeley, I designed and constructed the first bronze foundry used in an American university sculpture class.

Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites in the American Southwest also are a continual source of ideas. These include Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Acoma Pueblo and Taos Pueblo.

None of these sculptures is an attempt to create recognizable images. They are from airy nothings, a synthesis of ideas, feelings and memories which appear while ruminating on the people who lived and died here long ago.

These sculptures were cast by Madd Castings, Inc. in Colorado; Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque, New Mexico; and the foundry at New Mexico Highlands University.

Sally Stevens is known as a Daily Painter (completes a painting a day). The pieces, while relatively small (6” x 6” image) - (10" x 10" framed), capture the depth and breadth of large scale oils, making them ideal for individual display or grouping. Sally's skilled technique combined with her choice of subject matter have successfully created paintings that are visually and emotionally accessible and convey a reflective and enduring quality. 

Polly is an archaeologist and artist whose diverse works are connected to the land and the people of the Southwest. As an archaeologist, her specialty is ancient Indian rock art and Pueblo kiva murals from the late pre-Hispanic period. In order to better understand the people of the Southwest, her studies focus on the meaning and cosmologies expressed through the images painted and carved on rocks across time throughout the region. As an artist, her drawings and paintings find their inspiration in these same arid landforms.

Polly received her BA in art history (Mount Holyoke College), an MA degree in Anthropology (University of Colorado), and honorary doctorates from the University of Colorado and the University of New Mexico.

Polly’s many publications include: The Rock Art of New Mexico, The Rock Art of Utah, Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, Warrior, Shield, and Star, Images and Power: Rock Art and Ethics. Polly is volume editor of and contributor to, Kachinas in the Pueblo World, and New Perspectives on Pottery Mound Pueblo, and co-editor of Painting the Cosmos, as well as author of numerous journal articles and book chapters some of which have been published by Oxford University.

Polly lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband Curt and their dog on a beautiful old historic adobe compound and still enjoys getting out into the “field” and exploring and sketching for her pen and ink drawings.

John Hogan has been painting, printmaking and drawing since 1956. A graduate of Northeast Louisiana State University with a B.A. and an M.A. from Highlands University, New Mexico, John Hogan studied with Edward Schutz and Elmer Schooley, both exceptional landscape painters.

Hogan taught art at the University of Texas at El Paso where he became deeply involved in both drawing and printmaking techniques that have merged in many ways with his painting. Since the 1970’s, Hogan has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and has work in the Santa Fe Museum of Art, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana and is represented in many private and corporate collections and has shown work in over 40 shows and exhibits, is a multiple award winning artist and has been featured in over 15 publications. Hat Ranch Gallery is privileged to be representing John Hogan’s prints, paintings and drawings.

Take a peek at photos from Shows and Events at Hat Ranch Gallery. 

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