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B eginning in 1926, Hogue spent three to seven months each year in the artist colony of Taos, New Mexico, until the onset of World War II. In order to break up the long drive over dirt roads in a Model T Ford, Hogue would visit a sister and brother-in-law in Amarillo, then sketch the deep canyons of nearby Palo Duro. The owners of a large ranch at Palo Duro, Dave Currie and his brothers Tom and Jenks, happened to be friends of Hogue’s sister and invited him to camp on the canyon floor. Although Hogue had spent several years as a working cowboy just a short distance away, he had never been able to explore the vast chasm. “It was quite a trip down there,” said Hogue. The only way to get in was through a locked corral gate in this big ranch. From there you’d take a trail. You’d see a windmill and then all of a sudden you’re on the edge of the canyon looking down. It’s that quick. There is enough of an irregularity to indicate why that canyon is there—why it eroded when other places nearby didn’t do the same thing. It was a high spot and it cracked! And this area that I loved was in the deepest part. They had a permanent tent down there, which they let me use. It was quite a deal to carry my supplies. I had to make several trips to get everything down there. The canyon was about fifteen hundred feet deep at the time. I called the canyons “upside down mountains.” They’re as flat as this floor and then all of a sudden—Bang! There it is. Dave Currie got interested in what I was doing immediately, the idea of sketching. I think he was an artist at the soul. I showed him how to make a finder with your fingers, a little square, or you can change it to horizontal or vertical. I’d watch him while we’d be walking and he’d be over some place making his finder. He’d say, “How about this? This looks like it would make a good one.” And sure 2 : Taos and Back to Texas 30 chapter 2 place, but also the resounding decision to allow his inner pulse, his personal gait, to determine his imagery. He immediately became entranced by the New Mexico landscape, its colors, the clarity of the light and the ambience created by the mix of three cultures: Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo. In Taos, Hogue’s engagement with the forces and phenomena of nature achieved full expression. More important, this personal journey was determined by a physical experience of grace, lucidity, and impermanence. By the time Hogue got to Taos he was a fairly seasoned painter. Still, there are obvious linkages between the loosely brushed, visceral strokes of the early oils and the lozenge or block-like slabs of paint in works such asPinonandSage (1926), Twining Cabins (1927), and September at Twining (1927). All of these paintings reveal Hogue’s numerous little decisions as to tone and color—warm against cool hues—imparting an excited glimmer to the grandly raw landscape. The green of the scrub shows against the tall, resolutely brown trees which let through dabs of amber light. A calm, meditative focus unifies the picture’s planes and consolidates the relationship of shapes, with intimate flickers set against vast masses. Annually, for eleven years, Hogue would take students from Texas State College for Women in Denton to Wheeler Peak. The hike started at Twining, a mining town named for an Englishman who brought in the drilling equipment that sifted sand and stones. “Charles Berninghaus and I left for a ten-day painting trip at Twining the day before the Dempsey-Firpo fight,” recalled Hogue. “And we did not know the outcome until our return. No transistors, thank God!” Not romantic, expressionistic , or impressionistic, these scenes are depicted as clearly as Hogue observes them. In Sangre de Cristo (1926), the distinctive character of the mountains depends as much on the quality of light as it does on the natural and human-made landmarks that Hogue includes within the landscape. Hogue wrote: “The typical blood red sunsets at Taos is what set me off and of course as you know that is the translation of the name of the mountain range.”1 We can speculate that the close focus on the...

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