Melissa Bartlett discusses the importance of composition

Before doing anything else, Melissa Bartlett spends a lot of time figuring out the composition of her pieces.

In her opinion, if you have a strong composition, it makes a big difference.  People will be drawn to it. But if you have a bad composition, nothing will save it.

This is how Bartlett described a good composition: "The eye is drawn through the painting. There's some drama.  A little unexpected pattern that's unusual or eye catching."

It can be a little mysterious, but once you understand this concept the little details aren't as important.  The best way to develop a sense of good artistic composition is to keep your eyes open and to experiment.

Bartlett was at an occupational therapy (in addition to being an artist she is an occupational therapist at an elementary school) conference where they had to sit at long tables with white table cloths. On the tables were glasses filled with cheap hard candies.

She spent the entire time composing pictures of the candies in her mind. She said, when it was time to leave, "I dumped them in my purse and spent the morning experimenting.  Taking photos."

Anyone who saw her dump the candy into her purse might assume that he has an addiction to sugar. But really, this is the type of thing that artists do.

In Bartlett's case, she doesn't really paint candy.  She likes to do landscapes and animals.  She said, "Every once in awhile the light will attract me to something different (like the candies). It's what art is.  You look at something in a different way.  Get a different view of something.  Take something ordinary and make it startling."

Although Bartlett is the type of artist who works quickly and usually has more ideas than she has time to complete, there have been a couple of times when she didn't know what to do with a piece and it slowed her down.

"One time I gave my husband a certificate that said I'd do a picture of a fish that he caught," she explained.  Bartlett's husband loves to fly fish and she spends a lot of time sketching on the side of a river while he fishes. "I dragged my feet for a year. I couldn't wrap my mind around it.  Finally, I decided it was a still life.  But it still took a long time.  [In the photo] the fish was on mud, and that was ugly.  So I took pictures of pebbles in water."

Melissa Bartlett's artwork is available at the Karen Wray Gallery of Fine Art.

Sec Sandoval's teachers encouraged him to do his own thing

Sec Sandoval just isn't into painting nude models. When he was young he took an art class with Randall Davey and a model came in and disrobed. Sandoval left to go outside and paint birds.

Later Davey said, "If you want to be an artist you need to draw what you want to draw, not what I tell you to draw."

He's been drawing since he was five, but never took formal art classes (at least not the kind where he had to draw what the teacher told him to). What makes his art stand out is his unsurpassed familiarity and love for Northern New Mexico.

That is something that comes from getting out and painting what you want to paint every day.

"When I came here in '43 it was the first time I painted aspens," he said. "I just fell in love with them. I said I'm going to keep painting aspens until I get it right."

Just because he didn't seek out art instruction doesn't mean that he didn't care about school. "Los Alamos has been good to me in every respect," he said. "When I came here I couldn't read, speak much English, communicate or get along with the other kids on the playground. I started out at the very bottom of the class....But the teachers straightened me up. I graduated seventh in my class, was the class president and the captain of the football team. But I didn't let that get to my head. I had a very old fashioned family. My father was very strict."

He stayed in touch with some of his teachers until they passed on.



After high school he got a position at the Los Alamos National Lab as a mechanical designer and illustrator. He has a painting by his staircase that was influenced by his technical job. But after working for the lab he was soon anxious to follow his own artistic path. He quit 37 years ago.

According to Sandoval, his boss said, "Good for you. If I could paint, I'd quit too."

While he went through the art in his house, showing me what he has done over the course of his career, every now and again he would come across what he considered to be a dud. Mainly they were abstracts that made him exclaim, "What was I thinking?" or "That won't put any tortillas on the table!"

What he mainly does is landscapes of Northern New Mexico. He has done everything from the Santa Fe Mountains to Valle Grande, to Taos. He's painted the Black Mesa so many times that he could do it in his sleep. He said, "You don't have to go very far to find something to paint."

He doesn't like to paint outside because the conditions are too unpredictable. Instead he takes pictures of his favorite places. But recently what he likes to do more than take pictures is to sketch a rock or a tree or a bush and then make his own composition based on the sketches. the place in his paintings ends up being fictional.



Sandoval doesn't like to travel, be in big cities or fly. He went to Alaska once, and took some pictures for paintings but decided that you really need to live somewhere to paint it well. "Here, I go out for walks, see the beauty, see my friends and neighbors....I need to stay home and paint."



He told me about how he first realized that he was permanently attached to New Mexico. "It was the first time I came home on leave from the army. I looked at the Sandia Mountains and I had tears rolling down my face. They were so beautiful!"

Donate your artsy junk

I saw a sign while I was walking around town that said you can donate art supplies to the Santa Fe Children's Museum by dropping them off at Village Arts. Josephine at Son Shine Art is organizing the collections. I'm going to drop off my gazillions of wine corks and packing peanuts and fabric.

David's Folly

David Trujillo tells me that in Great Britain they call it a "folly" when someone builds something just for the hell of it. He certainly considers the medieval tower that he build next to his house to be his folly. But it's a folly that would make anyone proud. From the top he has one of the best 360 degree views in Los Alamos.



In n fact a few years ago a tree got hit by lightning in the canyon in his backyard. The fire fighters couldn't get access to it, and so someone told the fire chief that no only could you see everything from the tower, but there was a path that led to the very spot. So the tower got to function as a fire lookout as well.



His world travels inspired him to build something like a tower.... The Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu were inspirational. But his visit to to the city his ancestors came from before settling in New Mexico generations ago had the biggest impact. Trujillo, Spain had 17 towers!



David just got into scrap metal sculpture last June when he retired from his job as an engineer at the Los Alamos National Lab. His art seems to be another "folly", something to do just for fun, but there's more to it than that.

His neighbor, John Brolley, was a physicist and a prolific sculptor. Brolley gave David several pieces as gifts, and according to David he was the inspiration for the block.

Brolley died in 2008. Shortly after Richard Swenson moved into the neighborhood and was hoping to connect with Brolley to learn from him. Instead he became David's mentor in scrap metal sculpture.



Although Swenson has shared a lot of his techniques with David, David is drawing upon different experiences to come up with his ideas. Swenson has a lot of experience working with horses and observing marine wildlife, and some of his animals are very realistic looking. David has made a lot of southwest animals, like snakes and armadillos, kokipelli. He just finished a miniature Saint James slaying a dragon.

You can see his work at the Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery at 2101 Trinity Drive, Suite B-2, in Los Alamos, NM.

Richard Swenson says that the parts add meaning to the whole

Richard Swenson, an artist exhibiting his work at the Art Stroll at the Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery, was raised on a farm in North Dakota, in a very art-free environment. He said, "The farmers in the area maybe had a picture of grandpa on the wall. But that was it."

Before joining the Navy SEALs Swenson worked with horses a lot and attended agricultural college. After his time with the SEALs he went to the University of North Dakota to study nuclear physics. He went on to have a science career studying the behavior of sound in the ocean (anti-submarine warfare), which enabled him to travel all over the world.

"In my leisure time I visited museums," he said. At this point he was in his mid-thirties, and wasn't interested in specific artists, or art history, or anything formal. He said, "I just like to look at the stuff. Especially in Polynesian areas."



When he retired he had yet to create a single piece of art. He said, "My wife (an epidemiologist) is younger than me and she was super busy and I needed to find something to do to get out of her hair."

So he started to collect John Deere tractors. Soon he amassed and restored a complete collection of all the John Deers built in the 50's. In the process he had accumulated a ton of spare tractor parts. "i started looking at the geometry and making figures out of it," he said. He put his completed sculptures in the yard of a county restaurant in his neighborhood in Mississippi.



When he started to exhibit his work he was amazed by how people liked to look at his scrap metal art. A couple of years ago he displayed 30 pieces, in conjunction with an exhibit from the creators of Sesame Street, at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum, and it was a very successful show. "The guards at the museum said that it was the best show they ever had."

Just last weekend he won the Best in Show at the Lacombe Art Show.

"Here I am, a physicist. I had no idea that this was art. I just think it's fun to do," he said. "I simply weld this stuff together."

He may say that it's a simple thing, but I've been to his house, and it is bursting with sculptures. My favorite is a life sized seal hung high on the wall, so it looks like its swimming. There are other animals too, like a llama, pigs, rabbits, fish and horses. He said that horses and fish are his favorite things to do, because he grew up on a farm and understands horses, and did a lot of skin diving as a scientist, and has spent a lot of time observing marine wildlife. Right now, in his garage, he's working on two 15' whales!

He had an interesting theory about why people are drawn to his sculptures, and want to spend a lot of time looking at them. He thinks that the pieces of scrap metal have something to say. They add to the figure. When people recognize the parts as something that they've used or something they remember, it adds a depth of meaning that he couldn't achieve working with bronze or marble.

"If I make something with kitchen utensils, women will like it," he said. "Then if I make something with car parts, men will be drawn to it."