Friday, November 17, 2017

Margaret Nes

I am loving this book I bought recently, Santa Fe Art.  In addition to all the wonderful reproductions of artwork and information,  there are magnificent paintings on the book jacket by someone called Margaret Nes.  I just love her work.  She works in pastels.

When I took my Absolute Beginner Drawing course,  the teacher introduced us to a variety of media to work with.  One session was on pastels and I was really looking forward to that because I thought I would really like working with them.  I actually couldn't stand them.  The chalk type were dusty and messy and the oil pastels were slimy and yucky.  And this is from someone who loved making mud pies and finger painting...well,  go figure.

Biography, Exhibitions, Collections, Bibliography

Margaret Nes was born in France in 1950 and spent much of her childhood in northern Africa. A daughter of a US Foreign Service couple, she was exposed to many different cultures, art forms and landscapes, from an early age.
Nes moved to a small community north of Taos, New Mexico, in 1969. She is a self-taught artist whose work reflects the aesthetics of the stark landscape and adobe architecture of this area that has been her home for well over three decades.
Nes's primary medium is pastel, which she uses in a unique and powerful manner. Her pastel pigments fully saturate the entire surface, and are worked and blended in with an almost sculptural quality. Her palette ranges from the richest and most luminous of hues to the most subtle and delicate of shades.
Nes's work has been exhibited in numerous juried and invitational shows and is in collections around the world. Her work invokes a sense of beauty, mystery and wonder that is very much her own.

http://www.margaretnes.com/bio.html