This summer I decided to return to Santa Fe. I had only been there once before, back in 2011, for the opera and chamber music festivals, and this time around I decided to explore the area around Santa Fe rather than just the touristy, historic part of town, although I did return to the opera festival too, on the outskirts of town. (The chamber music festival hadn't started yet when I was there.)
The main reason I decided to go was to follow in the footsteps of painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), for whom I have tremendous admiration. She first discovered New Mexico in 1929 before settling there permanently in 1949 after her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946, and spending the last 37 years of her life alternating between Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch depending on the season. O’Keeffe was a pioneer in many respects and didn’t fit an easy mold. She stood out even before she became famous: for instance as a young woman she taught in Texas at a time where people dismissed everything that didn’t happen in New York as unimportant and she wasn't afraid of raising eyebrows with her dark, austere clothing and her (much less austere) behavior with eligible men. She developed her own unique signature style (if you're still reading this post you're probably aware that she is particularly well known for her flowers) and yet also she didn't paint flowers forever and reinvented herself at multiple junctures in her life. She enjoyed alone time far into nature – and nature there wasn’t, say, the Hamptons outside New York, but the arid and unwelcoming Abiquiu area. She didn't follow fads or trends. She made her life work on her own terms.
Visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe museum again counted as a highlight of the trip. I had been very disappointed in the museum, nestled in the historic part of Santa Fe, when I had visited in 2011 because it showed very few paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, but the museum curators have now developed a brilliant retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work (the new exhibit has only been open for a year or two), which gives an outstanding overview of O’Keeffe’s development as an artist. Perhaps O’Keeffe’s life resonates more with me now that I’ve moved to Texas. I also enjoyed her retrospective at the de Young museum in San Francisco back in 2014, but any exhibition of part of her works pales in comparison to what is on display in Santa Fe. The museum also has prepared a great timeline of O'Keeffe's life, which you can enjoy here.
Then, Ghost Ranch. The tour itself was quite good (it showed the landscapes that have inspired O’Keeffe’s paintings, and the tour guide had reproductions of the corresponding paintings as well so we could see first-hand the simplifications or slight changes that O’Keeffe made to focus on what was important in an image), but the drive to Abiquiu was even better. The picture above is one I took during the drive to Abiquiu. I recommend stopping by the Abiquiu Inn for lunch. I wonder how it must have felt to live so far away from most people, back in the 1950s and the 1960s.
The drive through Taos’s High Country also offered some stunning views of New Mexico and glimpses into areas of stark beauty but also stark poverty. I am not much of a church person but the church of Chimayo, famed for its holy dirt, was worth the stop. The Taos Pueblo also remains a highlight of that day. I also saw the Rio Grande Gorges, with very little water due to the drought. For lunch I recommend stopping at Bella’s Mexican Grill in Abiquiu. Both the salad (I think it was the elote salad with shrimp) and the tableside guacamole were exceptionally good.
I returned to the Santa Fe Opera as well. In a 2010 stunning production by the late Lee Blakeley, Madame Butterfly, which opened the festival when it was first launched in 1957 and when it re-opened after a devastating fire, had all the hallmarks of productions I love, with exquisite lighting, outstanding voices, spare sets and rather monochromatic props (in this case inspired of Japanese art), but in addition to the magnificent singing by Kelly Kaduce as Cio-Cio San (the tenor singing Pinkerton didn’t quite have her vocal range and the audience let it be known at the end that it wasn’t pleased), I loved most sitting in the first row of the mezzanine and observing the headlights of the cars go by in the far distance of the mountain range. The theater’s opening in the back on the range offered a spellbinding spectacle.
I also saw Doctor Atomic. I had never seen it (I usually don’t care much for operas sing in English) but the opportunity to see it next to the Los Alamos National Laboratory was hard to pass up. It was very good. I did like Madame Butterfly better. I also went on a backstage tour of Santa Fe Opera, which perhaps could have provided a few more insights and, disappointingly, didn’t allow the group to go anywhere near the performance hall or the stage because a rehearsal was in progress.
For accommodations, I couldn’t have imagined a better place to stay than the Eldorado Hotel, with its back entrance just feet from the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. The breakfast restaurant prepared an outstanding egg-white omelet, although staff tended to be slow in the cooking and the service. Thankfully I was never in a rush. I loved that my room had a fireplace and a balcony. I got lucky without knowing it because I booked the trip with a check-out date that happened to be the day that the governors’ association was coming to the hotel for its big meeting, so guests couldn’t stay beyond that for security reasons, which meant a number of people staying in Santa Fe past that day had picked other hotels for their entire trip, leaving people like me with really pretty rooms in spite of my booking the trip a bit last minute. (I also appreciated the direct flights from Dallas.) For dinner I adored TerraCotta Wine Bistro. A glass of cabernet sauvignon and the best tomato, cucumber and watermelon salad I've ever eaten with the most delicious freshly baked bread: total bliss. Second choice was La Casa Sena, especially for its wasabi crab salad.
True to myself, I prepared for the trip by buying a lot of books about O’Keeffe and dusting off a volume I had about Santa Fe Opera as well as some books about O’Keeffe I had bought a while back. I also added a few O’Keeffe monographs to my collection during the trip. (See below for the book covers.) I came back with Native American artwork and artifacts, books about O’Keeffe, many remarkable memories and – after bringing my sketchbook and pencils to New Mexico with me for a few quick sketches – a commitment to start drawing and painting again on a more regular basis. This was a good trip.
