Jim Wagner Painting - Rio Grande Train (1996)

Jim Wagner (American, 1940-2021). Landscape with Rio Grande Train. Acrylic on canvas, 1996. Signed and dated at the lower right. An acrylic on canvas landscape by Taos artist Jim Wagner, signed lower right and dated 1996, depicting a Rio Grande railroad locomotive cutting a bold black silhouette across the middle ground of a characteristically exuberant New Mexico landscape. The composition is built in Wagner's signature manner: broad, freely applied zones of cadmium yellow, viridian, and turquoise construct the hillside and sky with the confident looseness of a painter who has looked at this terrain long enough to distill it rather than describe it, while scattered dark marks animate the golden slope above like a murmuration caught mid-flight. Size of painting: 12.25" W x 9" H (31.1 cm x 22.9 cm); of frame: 14" W x 10.75" H (35.6 cm x 27.3 cm) The locomotive, lettered "Rio Gr..." in white, anchors the painting with a note of narrative specificity that keeps Wagner's abstracted landscape tethered to the particular world he inhabited, the train a recurring emblem of the Southwest's industrial history threading through its ancient geology. About the artist: Jim Wagner arrived in Taos in 1961 at the age of 21, drawn by the counsel of a friend of Agnes Martin who told him simply: if you want to be an artist, go live in Taos. He took the advice and planted roots that would hold for the better part of six decades. Within a few years he had found his footing among the Taos Moderns, studying under Andrew Dasburg, Louis Ribak, and Emil Bisttram, and developing the distinctive visual language that would come to define his career. Wagner's paintings approach Taos with the intimacy of long acquaintance. Magpies and crows, fish and canyon walls, adobe churches and clotheslines, a well house out back, chickens in a yard, the mountains at every hour of light, all circulate through his canvases as a private but immediately legible vocabulary. The work reads as deceptively naive and proves, on sustained attention, to be something considerably more layered. Gallerist Stephen Parks has described Wagner as one of "a new breed of Taos artists, infected by the free-wheeling spirit of the times, searching singular modes of expression and social relevance," and more than fifty years into his career, as the honored elder of that community. In the 1980s Wagner expanded his practice into furniture, designing and building chairs and trasteros rooted in the craft traditions of 18th and 19th century New Mexico and embellished with his signature painted motifs. The work found an immediate following. In 1984 he co-founded Muebles, a program teaching furniture-making and decoration to former convicts and at-risk youth, reflecting a longstanding conviction that creative work is among the more reliable instruments of personal transformation. Muebles has been covered by New York Magazine and featured on the cover of New Mexico Magazine. Wagner's biography has not been short on material. A 1977 assault conviction, a subsequent pardon by Governor Anaya, a period of incarceration during which he produced the celebrated Prison Series drawings, and sustained struggles with addiction all fed into a body of work that carries its weight honestly. He has spoken about creativity's redemptive power with the authority of someone who has tested that claim personally. A recipient of the 2013 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, Wagner is the subject of the monograph "Jim Wagner: An American Artist" and has been the focus of a major retrospective at the Harwood Museum in Taos. His work is held in numerous private and public collections throughout the Southwest and beyond. Item # 201717

Estimate:£264.65

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