Art Thrives in Red Rock Country

Art Thrives in the Land of the Red Rocks Neo-primitive to Classical

Ever since the days when famed surrealist Max Ernst lived in Sedona, it has been a favorite haven for creative artists. Some of the original "old masters," are still around. Zoe Mozert, for example, whose ravishing pastels of nude ladies were once featured on magazine covers and calendars throughout America, is still painting, but now only for private collectors.

"I was Sedona's first famous professional artist," she reminisces, but adds with a wistful sigh, "All they want now is girls pinched into blue jeans!"

Today more than 200 professional artists and about the same number of near-professional, amateur, and hobby painters, printmakers, sculptors, ceramists, jewelers, and weavers make Sedona their home. Many of them are young and productive. They have been drawn to Sedona by its special magic.

Three of the old masters are best known to followers of the Cowboy Artists of America: James Reynolds, Joe Beeler, and Frank McCarthy. Often reproduced in Arizona Highways, they are striving heroically in their Sedona ranch house studios to keep up with the growing demand for their work.

Other Sedona old masters are Nassan Gobran, the Egyptian-American sculptor, Jeffrey Lunge, the English watercolorist, Mary Pendleton, the weaver who researched and published the secrets of Navajo weaving, Charles Murphy, the prizewinning bird-painter, originally from Minnesota, and Stephen Juharos from Budapest, who has resided in Sedona two decades, painting landscapes, portraits, nudes, and religious works with Rubens-like bravura.

According to Lucy Banks, Sedona Art Center Director, the Center has over 1100 members. With its auxiliaries, the 213-member Guild and the 203-member Barnstormers, the women's auxiliary, it fields a full program of exhibits, visiting lecturers, concerts, and art instruction. A popular recent addition is a dance class taught by Dr. Gertrude Mooney, and a roster of Sedona artists is in the works.

Sedona also has its "art underground" young, as yet unrecognized artist-craftsmen who live for art but wait tables or clerk in gift shops to earn a living. Typical of these are Aurora Adonai, whose immense, immaculate works-in-progress depict her futuristic visions, Patricia "Trish" Nelson, who lyrically glorifies her front-yard sunflowers on acres of canvas, and Devorah Curtis whose pastels superimpose shimmering occult traceries as delicate as spiderwebs on spirit-verAmong Sedona's regiments of traditional watercolorists, some, like Jean Moers and Helen Jordan, have recently won honors by leaning toward abstraction or naive realism.

sions of the peaks of Oak Creek Canyon.

Sedona's only professional cartoonist, Don Bloodgood, now 84, is famous for his comic maps of Arizona and of Navajoland. For the past 40 years he has drawn "the Bloko Boys," comic operators of a rattletrap service station, for the Shell Oil Company's magazines. Though too modest to mention it, he is also a painter of vivid and highly original Western landscapes.

Catalyst for all these groups is John Davidson, former art professor and curator, who now operates a frame shop and paints neo-primitive reliefs on plaster. And benignly recording all local art trends are the bemused old-time authors, Elizabeth and Douglas Rigby, and canny art dealers like Allan Husberg, originally from Sweden, Ernestine Todd, and Don Pierson.

Perhaps of all the long-time Sedona residents, the artist who most truly represents the spirit of Sedona is Nassan Abiskhairoun Gobran. Born in Cairo, he became, while still in his 20's, Egypt's top sculptor, receiving grants and commissions from the last of the Pharoahs. Called to Sedona 30 years ago to teach at the Verde Valley School, he became one of the founders and the first director-teacher of the Sedona Art Center. For a whole generation he has provided leadership for the art community. text continued on page 11

AVisit With Frank McCarthy

by Kay Mayer He looked younger than his photographs, wiry, medium height, dark hair, trim beard, blue workshirt, faded jeans, sort of relaxed, like a Sunday sailor. But there was a touch of gray to his beard, a touch of authority, almost brusqueness to his manner. As Frank McCarthy stepped from his driveway to open his Sedona studio for his visitor, he glanced at his watch.

Friends had warned, “He's a workaholic.” The studio was apparently enlarged from the original garage of the house. It was office-efficient worktables, drawing board, easels and like Thoreau, His other companions were silent. They lined the walls, sat on easels, leaned against the table: U.S. 5th Cavalry surprised by hostile fire, Indians burning a relay station, a stagecoach fording an icy-clear stream.

“I try to put a story in motion,” McCarthy said.

Motion? This was complicated action, set by the brush of a master against a stark fist of red rock, under snowwrapped mountains, on grassy plateaus in piney woods, on a moonlit desert.

Being surrounded by them was like being swept into all the landscapes of the early West, into all the classic moments of American mythology. Excitement exploded. Unneeded were the careful questions to discover the why of his popularity. Words tumbled like a rockslide.

And when the explosion settled, there was Frank McCarthy no longer clockwatching, inviting his visitor to use that other chair, and talking. He talked about his increasing research, about his long artistic ties with the West, about working vacations, and using his camera to document light “I really don't paint green trees. I paint how they look at that time of day.” Finally he spoke of his method of working. “Some paintings start with landscape ideas, some with action. I begin with small abstract designs, trying to figure a pattern, the time of day, the balance of light and dark.

“But it's change, change, change. In this one,” he picked up an Indian scene, “I went from 14 or 15 Indians milling around on a great rock ledge to that single figure in the foreground, later adding secondary figures. And the background! I must have had five or more background changes in this painting.

“Some paintings sit around for months before I decide everything in the design works. That's the second most important part of my paintings, the actual design in dark and light patterns.” What's the first?

“The feeling. It doesn't look like it because after a while the emotion develops into realistic paintings. But the feeling comes first, whether the painting is still or has a little bit of movement or a wild tearing around of horses. I've got to have the excitement first and I work to keep it.” And of such stuff are waking dreams made.

Nassau now works half of every year in New York City, where his sculptures, exquisitely carved out of rare Arizona onyx, quarried from his own quarry, are sold to private collectors.

Although he is expert at modeling quick portrait-sculptures to be cast in bronze, like his portrait-bust of Cecil Lockhart-Smith in the Sedona Art Center, a more typical example of his style is his 36-inch onyx head called The Prophet.

To absorb the meaning of this work, you must walk slowly around it. Gradually, a very sensitive, hooded head swims into focus. Red jasper markings in the creamy flesh define the hair and slightly-hollowed eyes. And just as the stone itself guided Nassan's hand to discover its details, so the finished image ultimately teaches the viewer to understand it as an artistic embodiment of the generative essence of the earth itself.

Similarly, Nassan's abstract figure called Transcendental uses the striations of the stone to suggest the flow of muscles and drapery. Before your eyes it becomes a living creature, evolving from crystal to amoeba to human body to pure beingness. The subtle, very touchable undulations in the form reveal the skill and penetrating insight of this gifted artist.

Jeffrey Lunge, the London-born watercolorist, arrived in Sedona 13 years ago after sojourns in California and the Orient. His straggling columns of Navajos mounted on dark mustangs, are silhouetted against snow, mist, or dust. This pervasive vapor obliterates the horses' hooves and seems to set the riders afloat in a mythological tribal world. His annual exhibitions in Scotts-dale's Main Trail Galleries always sell out.

Of the more recent arrivals in Sedona, Del Yoakum is the most be-medalled. A student of Thomas Hart Benton, Henry Lee McFee, and Rico Lebrun, he came to Sedona after 21 years as a Hollywood artist, working for Walt Disney Studios, Paramount, Universal, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

He is fond of watching roadrunners, Arizona's popular gallivanting cuckoos, scoot around his backyard. “They have a marvelous searching eye,” he says, “and don't miss a thing. And they can really stand off my big black cat!” His roadrunner paintings capture not only the bird's sportive alertness, but also its comic chic.

Del Yoakum's dazzlingly delicious colors are highly personal and refreshing, sometimes neon-bright, sometimes silvery-neutral. They show the same playfulness and unpredictability that determines his subject matter perky quail, well-groomed buffalo, gossipy antiques, and nosy cats.

Curt Walters, a 30-year-old artist, moved to Sedona in 1979 with his wife Connie and two daughters, partly to be near his favorite subject, the Grand Canyon.

Why Sedona? He explains: “Sedona's vivid light, dramatic sunsets, dense cloud shadows crawling over hills and houses, and dark moody skies after a storm, inspire me to paint!” (Left) Art, artists, and art galleries, like Husberg's Fine Art Gallery, abound in the Sedona area. Allan Husberg, below, is himself an artist. His creation Forest Cathedral, published in the December, 1979, issue of Arizona High-ways Magazine, drew enthusiastic approval from readers around the world.

(Below, left) Sedona artists John Davidson, left, and Del Yoakum. Davidson, a former art professor and curator, paints neo-primitive reliefs on plaster. Yoakum, a former Hollywood artist, is a relative newcomer to Sedona. His roadrunner paintings capture the bird's sportive alertness as well as his comic chic.Harry Wood Supplying La Galleria in Sedona and his five dealers in other cities with five current pieces each, keeps him studio-bound. But, to keep his eye in tune, he makes a practice of whipping out one oil sketch outdoors for every painting composed more deliberately at the easel. Each of his dealers has a waiting list for his much-cherished views of Canyon de Chelly, in northeastern Arizona. But he refuses to make more than two a year. Nor will he copy his own works, even when offered twice the asking price of the original. Repeating himself, he says, would take the fun out of it.

Yet, only a little more than ten years ago, he began his self-instruction by copying every painting in his father's collection in Farmington, New Mexico. Later he quit copying and burst outdoors on the advice of a contest judge.What I find exciting about Curt Walters' paintings that lifts them a cut above the camera-happy rock-copiers, is that he “moves” you, in both senses of the word, to participate in the vast dramatic spaces of the West. I inquired how he goes about it.

“I think like a fly,” he chuckled, “and buzz around behind. I begin by laying in the dark foreground. After that the background usually drops in place.” He socked his stocky abdomen.

“The Grand Canyon hits me here! Maybe that falling-in feeling I've experienced so many times, is what scares people into buying my pictures! I think if I did fall in, I'd enjoy the trip down.” Curt Walters' color combinations, more imaginative than most, include pigments like Mars violet, Mars orange, Indian red, cadmium vermillion (a pinkish tint), and cadmium orange, all tempered and cooled with permalba white.

His real strength as an artist, in addition to his hearty zest and steady work habits, is his almost ruthless capacity to eliminate unnecessary detail. Not easy in Sedona's lavish wonderland!

Reagan Word and his wife Sally and two children, live in a Sedona valley where he can view the whole panorama. Trained as an architect at the University of Texas, he looks like a modern monk in blue jeans. His speciality is relating birds and animals to their own true terrain. He often hikes into nearby arroyos to check up on the chipmunks, quail, coyotes, and other friends whose fur and feathers he renders so devotedly. Though he seldom sketches on location, he emphasizes with every rock and ripple, watching for “that moment when everything seems just right.” The first painting he made in Sedona resulted from such a hike. “The ground just seemed to open up and speak to me,” he says. “I started loving nature, and nature loved me back. When I feel such forces at work, it insures me of the significance of my own life.” In Sedona his paintings may be seen at the Husberg Fine Arts Gallery. Several of his paintings are released each year in 1000-print editions by the Gray Stone Press.

When I first saw the canyon paintings of Cynthia Bennett in El Prado Gallery in Sedona's Tlaquepaque, they stopped me in my tracks. Her rock forms, simplified as if sliced from layers of velvet, captured those breathtaking early mornings when the world barely emerges from mist. Though some of the shapes are sharp as shards of old Hopi pots, they are never harsh. Their suede-grays, shell-pinks, and thrush-browns, allure the eye with an almost strokable softness. Suddenly I realized what I was seeing a rare new phenomenon in Western art rugged canyons seen from a woman's viewpoint!

I was not surprised to learn later that the painter, an attractive young woman who allows her two cats, a Siamese and and a Himalayan Persian, the run of her studio, had lived 12 years on the brink of the Grand Canyon, or that she had been an anthropology major at the University of California at Berkeley and at Northern Arizona University.

Another artist whose work combines the distinctly feminine charm of the doll-maker with the imagination of an impassioned beachcomer, is Winnifred Stryker. Her striking wall hangings, composed of driftwood, rusted metal, weathered fabrics, and pebbles-withnatural-faces, are completely free of the artsy-craftsy stereotypes. They reflect instead her dozen childhood years on the Hopi Reservation where her father was a missionary, and her lifelong interest in Indian legends, languages, and ritual.

All the fragments she assembles seem sanctified and seasoned by purifying sunlight. What makes them dance off the wall into your heart is their humor. They bring a beaming Hopi smile to even the soberest Anglo face.

Winnifred Stryker is a retired schoolteacher living in a remodeled one-room schoolhouse on Oak Creek. It is surrounded by a workshop clutter of driftwood “goodies” she gathers on long excursions into the wilderness she has known since childhood. Looking at this collection, I could see that every fragment had been harvested with love. Some of that admiration still subtly radiates from her art. It can be seen at the Tavernier Gallery in Tlaquepaque.

In her work, as in that of Nassan, on a more sophisticated level, the ancient heritage of Sedona, as recycled by its living artists, still rings true. Whether they came from Egypt, London, Budapest, Minnesota, Texas, or Disneyland, Sedona has transformed them into inspired and inspiring co-creators of the West.