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“Inside Passage”, a superb Abstract Expressionist oil

painting of Alaska’s inside passage by John De Puy, 1982

John De Puy’s paintings are the stuff of dreams; intense, powerful portrayals of the deeper underlying reality of the surface landscapes that we normally see. His lifelong friend, the late great American writer, Edward Abbey perhaps put

it best in 1982 the very same year that this painting was painted:

“A De Puy landscape is not the landscape we see with routine eyes or can record by camera. He paints a hallucinated, magical, sometimes fearsome world—not the world that we think we see, but the one, he declares, that 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”

—“Down The River”, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982

John De Puy (1927-2023), whose life’s work was the subject of a major 2016 retrospective exhibition at the prestigious Harwood Foundation Museum in Taos, NM, had a distinguished 60-plus year career as one of America’s finest Abstract Expressionist painters. Although his strong environmental activism and support of numerous “lost causes”, as he put it, have made him a larger-than-life, almost mythical figure within certain Southwestern circles, De Puy was an iconoclastic and intensely private individual. He exhibited very rarely over the many decades of his career, preferring instead to extensively explore, draw and paint his own unique interpretations of the Desert Southwest, Alaska and Morocco and quietly sell his work to a small and devoted cadre of enthusiastic collectors around the world.

John De Puy at his retrospective exhibition opening at The Harwood Museum, Taos, NM, February, 2016

When he occasionally emerged from his self-imposed isolation to publicly show his color-saturated and intensely powerful expressions of the landscape, the results were glorious. John De Puy’s paintings deal far less with objective reality than they do the primordial powers and feeling of the land. The imagery and color palette De Puy employs is arresting, powerful and haunting. De Puy’s paintings depict an inner world of extraordinary intensity, of form and color, of powerful forces inside, above, under, and all around the land.

This painting is executed in oil on canvas in an interesting and highly compressed palette of three colors only; a deep purple, a lighter purple and three small, precisely-applied spots of bright orange. De Puy skillfully manipulated the paint surface and texture through the application of layers of a very thick impasto and by inscribing directly into the paint surface all of which gives the painting a taut, tactile intensity and focus. Simulataneously and at once the painting portrays by its subdued color tones and flattened persepective a surface reality of a vast, frozen forbidden land encased in ice and expresses the deeper underlying reality of ions of endless time, vast silence and a forbidding peace,

a hostile environment in many ways yet welcoming on its own terms. Looking at this painting one can feel the immensity of time and place. Also, De Puy's chosen title "Inside Passage" has a surface reality of a particular geographic location, but also begs the deeper question of "inside passage to where"? The painting measures 23” in height by 30” in width. The framed dimensions are 24 1/2” by 31”. The painting is in generally excellent original condition with a very tiny amount of craquelure here and there due to the incredibly thick impasto of John’s paint application.

The painting looks remarkably fresh overall for a 43 year-old piece. The painting is titled, dated and signed on the verso as follows: “De Puy 82’ Inside Passage”. The painting is very beautifully and appropriately framed in a modernist-style, anodized steel “shadowbox” or “floater” style frame by Santa Fe’s premier fine art framers, Goldleaf Framemakers.

The painting’s provenance could not be better. We purchased it directly from John De Puy at his Taos, New Mexico home in 2016. This splendid painting could hang proudly in any modern art museum anywhere across the country or anywhere around the world. You now have the unique opportunity to enjoy having it hanging in your own private museum.

Price available upon request

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“The land is my root and my being. Everything I am

is the land and I spent 50 years interpreting it in painting

and fighting lost causes.”

-Excerpted from “An Interview with John De Puy”

in “The Canyon Country Zephyr”, 2001

“John De Puy: Painter of the Apocalyptic Volcano of the World” exhibition at The Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico, February 13-May 1, 2016