John DePuy lives in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, and has been a resident since 1951 of various other places in the deep west and high plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. He paints the transcendent spirit of these landscapes, the paint taking root on the canvas, carving and gouging and coaxing into shapes and colors the mysteries and sacred spaces of the Southwest. This exhibition includes works loaned by the artist and examples from the Roswell Museum and Art Center’s Permanent Collection.

DePuy studied with Hans Hoffman in New York in the early 1950s, and credits Hoffman with imprinting upon him a “wonderful feeling for color and form—essential to visual expression of the Canyonlands country.” During this same period DePuy was introduced to the painter Mark Rothko, who prophetically advised the young artist: “You should return to your roots in the Southwest; the source of your art is there.” At Hoffman’s suggestion, DePuy looked up Louis Ribak in Taos and studied with him. While the contact was for only a brief period of time, the artist acknowledges that Ribak was a “main influence on my work and on my philosophy.”

In the late 1950s, DePuy met lifelong friend, writer, and activist Edward Abbey who would later write about the artist’s work: “… DePuy’s landscape is not the landscape we see with routine eyes. He paints an hallucinated, magical, and sometimes fearsome world—not the one we think we see but the one, he claims, is really there. A world of terror as well as beauty—the terrible beauty that lies beyond the ordinary limits of human experience, that forms the basis of experience, the ground of being.”