New Mexico Landscape by: Marsden Hartle

Hartley’s New Mexico Landscape is an intriguing and beautiful composition that lays hold on the speculation as if this is the image of one’s night vision while sleep.
Marsden Hartley painted New Mexico Landscape in Berlin between 1923 and a powerful piece of work, and is one of twenty-five works referred to as The New Mexico Recollections, in which the artist simplified his configurations to capture a dreamlike impression of the place because the way the objects are shaped. With cactuses, a home, hills, clouds, and bushes, seem to be gathered to look like a cool spring evening because of the color shadowing. This canvas sets a relaxing mood good probably for a den in a single family home or doctor’s office.
Hartley’s use of colors in this composition seems to set the mood and gives clues to the time of day and year. They appear as a conclave of universal elements trusting in one another, (very unique work), because you have things that look like sun rays and suns themselves at sundown time all radiant together in the same piece of art!. It’s a kind of cosmic dictation applied aesthetically to produce a harmony of shapes and colors with a sense also of the color of sound as I get these feelings out of music. In this painting the shapes in the painting are clearly delineated in a way that became a signature with applied oils thinly so that each shape would not blare out but work in harmony with the others.
The artwork seems to have no fear combine as an example of what he may have meant to be intuitive abstractions, his own cosmic cubism. The painting is a marvel and it is surprising that Hartley did not pursue its themes even more as they seem to offer infinite possibilities. This canvas is a model for uniting mystical and romantic qualities with an expressive realism which employed the rhythmic patterning and dark palette.
It does appear spiritual as well as just simply powerful. The painting of the landscape endowed with a rustic power, express a strong romantic attachment to the land, as if the painting were a poem. I love the sound of the words "expressionism," "emotionalism," "personality," when in regards to this painting, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I myself prefer to have personal life. Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual delicacy. Persons of well-defined feelings should keep themselves apart their painting.