Field Notes | 20 March - 1 May 2026

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

Yellowstone Lake, c. 1881

Oil on paper affixed to board

13 1/2 x 18 3/4 inches

The title of this exhibition comes from a practice, not a metaphor. Field notes are what an observer carries into the landscape - the sketchbook, the study made on site, the notation taken before memory can soften what was actually there. The artists in Field Notes kept them, literally or in spirit, and the works in this exhibition are the result.

The exhibition opens with Bierstadt's Yellowstone Lake, (c. 1881), a small oil on paper made on site during one of his western expeditions, nine years after Yellowstone became the first national park in American history. Bierstadt's monumental studio canvases defined the visual imagination of the American West for a generation - paintings that idealized a landscape into spectacle. A field study of this kind precedes that transformation. It is the observed fact before interpretation intervenes, direct in a way the studio could not recover, and works of this intimacy are increasingly understood as essential to his canon.
Dave Wade (1952–2019) settled in Cokeville, in western Wyoming, moving there from Salt Lake City in the late 1990s to put himself closer to the landscape and animals he had spent his career painting. Wyoming's high plains and border country hold elk, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and mule deer in numbers that have made the state a gravitational center for wildlife painters for more than a century — Wade was not the first to go there, but few stayed as consistently or knew it as well. He painted full-time from 1976 and won the Wyoming Art Stamp competition five times. His own description of his ambition was characteristically direct:

“My desire as an artist is to capture the animal in its setting — bold and loose, but with accuracy.”

High Country Grubbing and Ice and Elegance are among the last significant originals available. Wade died in October 2019.
Arthur Dove's Goat (1), (1935) offers an unexpected point of comparison. Dove was one of the pioneers of American abstraction; his watercolor of a goat is not a wildlife painting in any conventional sense — it is a formal exercise in which the animal is observed with complete attention and then resolved into something closer to geometry than description. The field note survives, but the representation does not.
Linda Lynch works from a related but distinct position. Her Pronghorn Studies, in pastel and graphite on cotton paper, reduce the animal to mark and silhouette — the kind of image that comes from having known a subject for a very long time rather than having looked at it carefully once. A native of the Chihuahuan desert of far west Texas, she did not go there to paint. Where Dove abstracts from observation, Lynch abstracts from something that preceded looking: the knowledge of a place so long inhabited that it has become interior. The field note, in her case, was never written down. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Harvard, Yale, and the Menil Collection.
The remainder of the exhibition includes work by Herbert Dunton, Belmore Browne, Michael Coleman, Howard Post, Thomas Quinn, Tony Abeyta, Page Allen, William Marple, Charles Prutzer, Ila McAfee, Doug Hyde, Dan Ostermiller, and Barbara Latham — painters, printmakers, and sculptors across more than a century of American art, connected by the same direction of travel.

Field Notes is on view March 20th through May 1st at The Owings Gallery on Palace, 100 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday 12 to 5 p.m. For inquiries call (505) 982-6244 or email info@owingsgallery.com.

Item added to cart

Join our mailing list