Once a painting is finished and it hangs on the wall, the artistic experience happens in the mind of the viewer. The specific location, the time of day, the reason I was drawn to the image no longer matter. Works of art have life because you view them. This Pairing is about how you respond to the image, about where you take it. These paintings are a frame for your experience.
Humans are hardwired to respond to nature. The landscape elicits primal reactions in us. We are drawn to its beauty, awed by its purity, and intimidated by its wildness. These paintings draw on that primal response, but they are not nature, they are a distillation, a recreation, a collection of brush strokes on canvas. How you feel when you look at them is what makes them art.
Humanity and nature are not disparate forces or parallel stories. We are the same. We are nature and nature is us. There is no natural world and human world. There is just the world. The world we live in is shaped by our collective thinking. Interacting with these paintings is an allegory of that relationship.
This Pairing is an attempt to provide the raw material for your experience. It means what you want it to mean. These paintings takes images from our world and hold them up as reflections of your experience.
Tine Hayes was born in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1975. He grew up surrounded by art and artists. His father, Lowell Hayes, is a professional artist who ran a non-profit gallery throughout Tine’s youth. Tine went on to study art at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College. After graduating in 1997, Tine moved to Gallup, NM. In Gallup Tine has been a public school teacher for over 25 years and has pursued a developing artistic career. His art is primarily acrylic landscape paintings of the Southwest focused on the area in and around Gallup. His work addresses the relationship of the modern human experience and natural environment.
Sheldon Parsons
Casa on the Hill
About 1935-1939
Oil on wood panel
36” W x 24” H
Purchased in 1939 by McKinley County for the Courthouse.
Audio description for individuals with low vision. Audio descriptions produced by Art Beyond Sight.
Casa on a Hill by Sheldon Parsons is an oil painting on a wood panel, three feet wide and two feet high. For more about this painting style and the history of this painting, read the “About this Artwork” section above.
The painting shows a scenic view of a tan-colored, single-story house perched atop a small hill and beneath a bright blue sky. The house, with its flat roof outlined in white, has a door and three windows similarly accented in white, creating a striking contrast against the warm tones of the building.
As the viewer, we are positioned down the hill from the house. To view the house, we look past two towering trees with light gray bark and lush yellow leaves, which frame the left side of the scene. Their branches stretch above the house, casting intricate purple shadows across the hillside below it.
At the base of these trees lies a blue stream, beside a footpath that winds up the hill to the right. The path leads around a coral-colored building nestled halfway up the slope before turning left towards the house with white trim at the hill’s crest. At this bend in the path, a smaller tree with radiant red orange leaves adds a burst of color to the right side of the landscape.
The entire painting is filled with color, a bright blue sky flecked with wispy white clouds providing a backdrop to the adobe buildings and towering fall-colored trees. The ground is awash with a blend of bright oranges, yellows, and dusty pinks and straw colors.
Tine Hayes
Indian Hills
2018
Acrylic on canvas
30″ W x 24″ H
Audio description coming soon.
Audio description coming soon.
Gallup’s New Deal art collection consists of over 120 objects created, purchased, or donated from 1933 to 1942 through New Deal federal art programs administered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support artists during the Great Depression.
The Gallup New Deal Art Virtual Museum features three types of exhibits, combining traditional and non-traditional approaches to illuminate academic, creative, and individual understandings.
Gallup’s New Deal art collection includes works by a demographically, professionally, and stylistically diverse group of named and unnamed artists.
Image Use Notice: Images of Gallup’s New Deal artworks are available to be used for educational purposes only. Non-collection images are subject to specific restrictions and identified by a © icon. Hover over the icon for copyright info. Read more
