National Pastel Painting Exhibition ‘Pastels In Bloom’ On View At Millicent Rogers Museum Through Sept. 21

Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on September 9, 2022
- 8:51 am

Nori Thorne, Sunflowers and Conchas. Courtesy/MRM

MRM News:

The 30th National Pastel Painting Exhibition is on view through Sept. 21 at the Millicent Rogers Museum (MRM).

Many of the paintings offer moments of “blooming”. The soft pastels the artists in this exhibition use facilitate the finest portrayals of color due to this highly pigmented medium that allows artists to draw and paint at once.

Nori Thorne’s Sunflowers and Conchas brings together a staged Southwest scene that offers a vivacity far from its genre name, “still-life”, which is often a misnomer. Here, Thorne’s composition of sunflowers in an orange vase with Pueblo pottery designs exudes a transitional energy from summer to fall, intensified by the turquoise and silver concha belt that wraps around the vessel and up into the sunflowers’ lower edge. The effect gives the flowers and vase an anatomical feel, appropriate since pottery vessels act as coiled bodies where one references its lip, neck, waist or foot. The warmth of the painting positions it far from a “still-life” and much more as a life in motion. It presents a dream of beautiful support, from the flowers to the vase, to the belt. It sends one into envisioning these three elements reciprocating each other.

MRM extends much gratitude to all of the artists in the exhibition: “We enjoyed the demonstrations by Tobi Clement and Paul Murray alongside many of our community members in Taos.”

All paintings are for sale, Click here to view the catalogue.