They had to have painted in Taos for at least three years and have shown their work in reputable galleries or New York salons.

Originally, the group's six members included the two broken wagon wheel artists Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein along with Joseph Henry Sharp (who had been to Taos in 1893), E. Irving Couse, Oscar Berninghaus and W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton.

As years passed, other well known artists took up residence in Taos and joined the group. The Taos Society of Artists remained active for a dozen years, disbanding in 1927.

While Bert Phillips grew up in Hudson, NY, he loved stories of the American Indian. He loved drawing and was quite accomplished before he could write, even winning awards for his watercolors.

Building on his natural talents, he studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design in New York and the Academie Julian in Paris. There, he met fellow American students Joseph Sharp and Ernest Blumenschein, a trio who possessed a fascination with the American Indian. Sharp had been to New Mexico in 1893, telling Phillips and Blumenschein tales of its beauty.

Phillips said, "I believe it is the romance of this great pure-aired land that makes the most lasting impression on my mind and heart." 

His paintings of Indians are infused with his close relationship with the Indians, his deep respect and love for them, their history and and their culture.

While studying in Europe, Phillips loved painting French peasant women. In his Corn Maidens, Phillips transfers his reverence for the dignity of French Peasants to these Indian women. Grouping them walking in a line gives this painting a mural like sense, giving motion to his classically drawn figures.

Ernest Blumenschein was trained in New York and Paris at the Academie Julian where he met Joseph Henry Sharp and Bert Phillips. He is known for his successful illustration career in New York as well as his work in Taos.

He was a musician, playing for the symphony in New York, and in 1894, played first violin for visiting composer and conductor Antonin Dvorak. Four years later, he and his artist companion Bert Phillips suffered that fated broken wagon wheel near Taos.

Blumenschein's compositions are filled with daring bright bold colors and strong geometric elements. He strived to capture the magic and myth of the Taos experience. In attempting to express why he painted, he said, "I can't explain why I paint and draw. It is as necessary for me to do as for an apple tree to produce fruit. Just a job I love.  But a good many bad apples came off my tree - and were often destroyed."

He also said, "Nature moves me most. But, nature is not art. One phase of art is man's ability to express his profound love he has for nature, to interpret in his particular language - and it matters not what particular language he uses - the beauty, the joy, the drama or the despair of life."

He also wrote of an experience while painting outdoors, "The sky was clear, clean blue, with sharp, moving clouds. The color, the effective character of the landscape, the drama of the vast spaces, the superb beauty and serenity of the hills stirred me deeply. I realized I was getting my own impressions from nature, seeing it for the first time with my own eyes, uninfluenced by the art of any man."

Joseph Henry Sharp is considered the father of the Taos Art Colony. Although deaf since a childhood accident, he was known for his cheerful nature and he loved travel. He was among the first Americans to visit Alaska, and he first arrived in Sante Fe in 1883.

He also traveled extensively in Europe, studying in Antwerp, Munich and Paris. At the Academie Julian he met Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein, filling their young enthusiastic and adventurous ambitions with stories of Taos.

In the 1890's, Sharp's portraits of Indians were published in Harpers Magazine. President Theodore Roosevelt was impressed

with Sharp's paintings. He hired him to do some portraits of the Sioux Indians still alive who had participated in Custer's Last Stand. Roosevelt had a cabin studio built for Sharp on the Battle Field site. Sharp eventually did about 200 portraits.

After making Taos his home, Sharp continued to travel, often to Hawaii and California, but loved returning home. His greatest love was painting Pueblo Indians as they went about their daily activities.

One of Sharp's artistic interests was painting figures by firelight. He wrote, "I am interested in firelight things now, and have a little teepee interior rigged up in the studio, where I can pose a model by lamp light and work by daylight. Awfully hard, but lots of fun and interesting."

Joseph was quite aware of the Plains and Pueblo cultures, often writing about the issues which Indians faced such as governmental bureaucracy and the harsh realities of Indian reservation life, disease and alcoholism.

Eanger Irving Couse was born in 1866. As a young artist, he did sketches of native Chippewa Indians in his hometown of Saginaw, Michigan. He honed his talents at the Art Institute of Chicago and New York's National Academy of Design. In 1887, he attended the Academie Julian in Paris, studying under William Adolphe Bouguereau, and where he met his wife, Virginia Walker.

Virginia's family owned a sheep ranch in Oregon. While on his first visit to his in-laws, Couse painted Yakima, Umatilla and Klikitat Indians using pastel colors in a Barbizon style. But at that time, there was little interest in paintings of Indians. The young couple returned to France where they took up residence on the English Channel in the town of Pas de Calais. There, he painted bucolic genre compositions of sheep on hillsides, but determined that rwhat he really wanted to do was to create a uniquely American art, focusing on his lifelong fascination with Indians.

In 1902, Couse finally took advice he received from Joseph Henry Sharp, to visit Taos, New Mexico. Couse was thrilled he found the right subject matter for him.

At first, he had difficulty convincing Indians to pose for him as they held a belief that the soul of one passes into a picture once it is captured on canvas. Over time, Couse found his way around this issue.

When the Taos Society of Art was formed, Couse became its first president. He moved to Taos full time, occasionally visiting neighboring Arizona to paint the Hopi and Walpi. By 1914, his work was being published by the Sante Fe Railroad, becoming the root of their Southwest Art Collection.

St. Louis artist Oscar Berninghaus first visited Taos while on assignment for McClure's Magazine. There, he met Bert Phillips who invited him to return. He spent winters in St. Louis, working for clients which included the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association, but saved his summers for Taos.

He did illustrations for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, depicting Colorado and New Mexico landscapes to be used in sales promotions of the West.

Stylistically, he used short quick brush stokes, giving his paintings a unique texture. He considered the art produced in Taos to be distinctly American. He painted Indians in a realistic manner, unromanticized, going about daily life.

He said of his approach to painting, "The painter must first see his picture as paint-as color-as form, and not as a landscape or a figure.  He must see with his inner eye, then paint with feeling, not with seeing." 

To achieve this effect, Berninghaus took liberties with color and form in his pieces, omitting details when he desired and painting impressionist riffs on the landscape in the background at times.

Of course, Blumenschein filled young Dunton with tales of Taos, and invited him for a visit. Dunton opened his studio there in 1921.

His career progressed, especially in the field of illustration. Some of his best known illustrations were for Zane Grey novels.

Later in life, he took on the nickname "Buck." Unlike others of the Taos Society of Artists, he focused on painting cowboys, animals and the vanishing frontiersman, perhaps to distinguish his work from his artist friends.

Dorothea Lange was born with the name Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn. Two events helped forge an incredible sense of independence and belief in her own indomitable spirit.

At age seven, she contracted polio which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. She said of her limp, "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

At age 12, her father abandoned the family and Dorothea responded by dropping his name, choosing instead to go by her mother's maiden name, Lange. She attended Columbia University where she studied photography.

While setting off on a round-the-world tour, she and a friend stopped off in San Francisco. Due to a robbery, the tour ended in California and Dorothea worked as a photo finisher in Berkeley.

In short order, she opened her own portrait studio. In 1920, she married San Francisco painter Maynard Dixon.

In 1935, she divorced Dixon and married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, a Berkeley professor in economics.

In 1960, Dorothea commented on Migrant Mother, her most famous photo of depression era migrants.

She said, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.

I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed.

She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

Don Coen currently teaches art in Boulder, Colorado. He strives to create art of the rural west without a trace of "western art cliche."

His large scale realistic acrylic paintings of the west seek to draw attention to the dignity of the commonplace.

For the past twenty years, Don Coen has set upon doing a series of large sized portraits of migrant workers, capturing the life and spirit of individual workers.

Coen seeks to raise the consciousness of America to the overlooked workers who provide a vital function in our society. So often, Americans drive by and see workers in the fields, but don't notice them. With these large canvas portraits of migrant workers, we get to know them, cheerful, honorable, and hopeful, portraits with character lines on suntanned faces, and bright confident eyes which speak volumes.

My first experience with Archibald Motley came as a surprise. Having just walked through the Art Institute of Chicago's French Impressionist and Post Impressionist paintings, and hanging close to Picasso's "The Guitar Player," there I saw Archibald Motley's lively and captivating "Nightlife." The whole of the painting was a visual delight, with colorful rhythm and percussion equal to the jazz reverberating among the figures.

The scene's movement drew me in. Throbbing with life, jazz and color, here was a party I wanted to attend. I knew this was a painting I wanted to remember and I vowed to learn more of the artist. And now, with this touring exhibition, you too can get to know of Archibald Motley, and visit this fascinating American painting exhibition.

Archibald Motley was a native of New Orleans and graduated the Art Institute in Chicago in 1918 at the age of 27. He is best known for painting the vibrancy of African American life in the jazz age of the 1920's and 1930's.

Although Archibald Motley never lived in Harlem, he is recognized as a major contributor of the Harlem Renaissance. His specialty was portraiture which he believed gave him an avenue to elevate the dignity of his race, showing the strength, beauty and character of his subjects,

He enjoyed success early in his career. His painting "Mending Socks" was voted the favorite exhibition 1927 at the Newark Museum of Art. His paintings sold well at exhibition and he was awarded the Harmon Foundation Award in 1928

He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927 and won the fellowship in 1929. He found his greatest inspiration among the great Renaissance painters exhibited at the Louvre and among the artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Inspired by these styles, he applied them in new ways to the African American experience.

He was among the first to paint black female nudes, which up until his time, had not been done.

Motley was of mixed racial heritage and was fascinated with skin color, exploring it in many of his paintings.

He never really fit or felt comfortable in any category. He didn't think of himself as being "white" or "black." His wife was white, but certainly her race did not concern him. He instead explored his own racial identity by painting the range of colors found across the racial spectrum.

He explored skin color with paintings of "octoroon," "quadroon," and "mulatto." But the subjects in these paintings cannot be riveted to one definition or another. Without the title of "octoroon," racial mix doesn't matter in appreciating these pleasing portraits on their own merit.

This was Motley's way of saying in a very compelling artistic manner, that such distinctions are useless. To define anyone with physical markers of blackness is an unstable, unreliable, and a meaningless and degrading exercise.

His most popular paintings depicted the black jazz culture in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. His lively and colorful street and club scenes show individuals interacting with one another while simultaneously showing viewers the big picture, giving a full context for the joy and life for his subjects.

The observer can't help but noticing something is going on, something inviting and lively. One can't help but want to join in the fun. His works speak for themselves. It is Motley's visual invitation to recognize and celebrate and dance to rhythms and the beauty of it all.

If you hadn't known of him before, please remember the name Archibald Motley and count him among those you consider to be among the pantheon of great American painters.

Linda Sorensen's paintings can now be seen at ...

the Bodega Landmark Gallery Collection,
located inland in the town of Bodega, west end of town a half block from the Casino, and just across from the General Store and the Bodega Volunteer Fire Department.

Corrick's "Art Trails Gallery,"
located in downtown Santa Rosa on 4th Street, just steps from Santa Rosa's newly opened town Square.

In the coming weeks, Linda Sorensen's creative side will take up residence in her new artist's cabin/studio, located near Monte Rio, among redwoods near the Russian River. Humble though it may be, it is a throwback to the idea of less is more, and a desire for quiet contemplative surroundings. For now, a dream in progress, but look forward to new works and news of an event or two over the summer.

Salmon Creek Artwalk is Saturday and Sunday May 6 and 7 along the twisting streets and dunes of Salmon Creek just off Coast Highway One on the North end of Bodega Bay. Come for the excellent arts and crafts and charming locale. Among our favorites are sculptor Lillian Lehman, photographers John Hershey and Francesca Scalpi, and painters Robin Hale and Janet Elmore. http://www.salmoncreekartwalk.com

Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery is not at present a "brick and mortar" storefront gallery. We've moved out and now exist solely as an online gallery. You may make arrangements to view specific artworks by emailing or calling us. Contact us by by phone 707-875-2911 or email us at Art@BodegaBayHeritageGallery.com. We continue to host our website and Linda's site, LindaSorensenPaintings.com, and publish our online newsletter every month.

Pacific Bay Gallery is Bodega Bay's newest gallery featuring the works of Noki Jones. It is located next to The Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay. You may remember it as our most recent storefront location ... easily identifiable by Bodega Bay's newest and tallest palm tree. They've made some vast improvements to the property. Stop in and enjoy!

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art