Mysterious Taos Blue

Watercolor Painting by Dennis Pendleton. Taos, New Mexico is a historic art colony with a great history of artists both past and present. The adobe architecture and famous Taos sunlight have attracted painters for over 100 years. This pink adobe house is right in the center of town and in the middle of summer the pink and red hollyhocks are in full bloom. The lady who lives there is always on the lookout for artists painting or taking pictures and she runs out to collect $50 dollars. I can't really blame her, the house and yard really are classic examples of old Taos charm.

There is a color called Taos Blue which you can buy at the paint store in Taos and it is traditionally used for the doors and windows of the adobe homes. It originated at the Taos pueblo where it was used to ward off evil spirits. I have been told that it’s sometimes seafoam green, a little robin’s egg blue, and part periwinkle so to capture this unique color I painted it here with different values of cerulean blue and a touch of colbalt violet to show the sunlight and shadow. Hollyhocks thrive in the high desert and they appear all over town in their majestic beauty. I painted them with cadmium red, alizarin crimson, cobalt violet, and mineral violet. The tangle of green leaves are olive green, lemon yellow, cerulean blue, and French ultramarine blue, with a combination of hard and soft edges that indicate details without looking over worked.

Adobe architecture comes in many subtle colors, usually earth tones, and here I created the pink adobe with cobalt violet and rose dore. Adobe architecture requires a fair amount of maintenance but, when kept up, it gets more charming with age and you can see the subtle cracking around the windows and door and the weathered look of the pink facade. The lines are never perfectly straight because of the adobe bricks and the curving lines of the overhang above the windows is typical. I painted that green with a mixture of lemon yellow and cerulean blue.

I will be heading for Taos in May for my watercolor workshop and I am dreaming of painting the colors of the high desert. I will add terra verde, viridian and a few Daniel Smith colors to my palette before I leave Denver. Happy Painting! Dennis Pendleton