Let It Glow

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Ever since I saw his paintings on my first visit to Taos, New Mexico I have been a huge fan of Tom Noble"s watercolors. I discovered them on the walls of a little diner where I was having lunch and I felt like a miner who had crawled through a tunnel to find cave walls full of gold. Tom grew up in the rural farmlands around Taos and that was his subject for the rest of his life. Much like the American artists Andrew Wyeth and Dean Mitchel, Tom Noble spent his entire art career depicting the land and people where he lived in his own unique paintings. Rather than traveling the world to find different subjects, he stayed home and showed the world his own charming interpretation of New Mexico. When I think of "The Land Of Enchantment" which is the state nickname for New Mexico, I think of Tom Noble's watercolors.

I wanted to take some of the things that I learned from studying Noble's work and apply them in a painting of my own. His paintings glow with unusual color combinations like lime green wood, blue and purple trees, pink mountains, and earth tones that seem to sparkle with sunlight. I find his nocturnal landscapes particularly interesting because of the unusual colors that glow in the moonlight so I decided to try a night scene. These ramshackle adobe buildings are across the road that surrounds the iconic Saint Francis Mission in Taos and I have painted them on several occasions but never at night. There is an old street lamp next to the buildings that puts off an eerie light at night that reminded me of Noble's nocturnal landscapes and I tried to capture that mood in this painting.

To get the particular glow I wanted in the adobe colors I mixed orange with yellow ochre and cobalt violet. The lime colors in the wood are a combination of lemon yellow and cerulean blue and the sky is indigo and cerulean blue. The indigo will overwhelm the cerulean if you stir them up so I just gently pushed the two colors together right on the watercolor paper. Tom Noble often depicted birds flying across his landscapes and I couldn't resist adding the magpies cruising across in front of the adobes. The black is a combination of French ultramarine blue and burnt sienna with bits of the blue visible. The white feathers have some light cerulean blue to give them volume.

It was a privilege studying Tom Noble's work and using some of his ideas in a painting of my own and I am delighted that his legacy lives on through his paintings of New Mexico. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton