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“Desert Landscape”

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A singular and remarkably beautiful Modernist Abstract oil on canvas painting by Rick Dillingham, Albuquerque, NM, 1971

"Rare" doesn't even begin to describe this painting because it's much rarer than rare. At the moment, it's the only known piece of its kind in the world, the only known easel painting ever done by Rick Dillingham. And if you should have any information that somehow this isn't the case, we'd definitely like to know about it.

James Richard "Rick" Dillingham (1952-1994) was one of the most accomplished, inventive and interesting artists in Southwestern history. Born in the northern Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Rick moved to New Mexico to study art and anthropology at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where he soon became engrossed in the history, tradition and technique of Indian Pueblo pottery-making. Working at the University’s famed Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, he studied everything from ancient Mimbres culture picture bowls to the modern-day pottery of the families of the great Pueblo pottery Matriarchs, Nampeyo of Hano, Maria Martinez, Margaret Tafoya and others and in the course of his work there as a pottery restorer, he repaired and re-assembled countless pottery vessels, experience he would later employ to great artistic effect.

Rick also wrote prolifically and significantly on the subject of Pueblo pottery in several important volumes beginning with the seminal Maxwell Museum exhibition catalog “Seven Families of Pueblo Pottery”, (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1974). Rick also spent years as a well-respected dealer in historic Pueblo pottery in Santa Fe where he delighted in passing on his intimate knowledge to his colleagues, clients, friends and fellow potters among whom he was a deeply respected artist, friend and tireless promoter. We were pleased to have been acquainted with him during some of this time and always enjoyed seeing and talking with him.

A Further Note On This Painting’s Unique Rarity.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the only known Rick Dillingham painting in existence. It is certainly the first and only one that

we have ever seen in 45 years, both of knowing Rick personally and of buying and selling many pieces of his work. A longtime Santa Fe art colleague of ours mentioned that he had heard a rumor of the existence of another Rick Dillingham painting years ago, also reportedly done by Dillingham during his student days at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, but said that he had not seen

it personally nor did he know where it was. In 2023-2024, as pictured below, The New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe mounted an extensive retrospective exhibition of Rick Dillingham’s artwork entitled “To Make, Unmake and Make Again”. We attended this exhibition several times and noted that there were no Rick Dillingham paintings at all in this large and otherwise very elaborate

and comprehensive exhibition other than his many various painted three-dimensional pottery pieces.

A Beautiful Early Blueprint For Things To Come

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This 1971 “Desert Landscape” painting was made well before the vast majority of Rick Dillingham’s later ceramic work was created. And, in this way, this painting and its 1971 companion jar can be seen and considered as being preliminary design studies or or templates for the various painted and glazed designs, layouts and forms to come on his later ceramic pieces.

The painting beautifully and powerfully depicts and expresses an abstracted desert landscape exactly as it is titled, it could be an aerial view of a winding desert river or arroyo twisting across the land, it could be a steep vertical redrock canyon cliff side alcove with water dripping down the wall and a display of “desert varnish” from years of this happening as shown in the photos below. Dillingham also beautifully used the woven texture of the canvas itself to accentuate the textured variegated surface nature of the brush and possibly drip-painted design. This is essentially a Modernist presentation vignette of the distinct hues and contours of the harsh and dry, yet gorgeously and richly beautiful, layered landscapes of the American Southwest with the rich mixture and subtle interplay of the various browns, beiges, reds, pinks, whites and gray hues. The overall impression here is of a vast and somewhat eroded, ancient prehistoric Southwestern landscape of great age and antiquity, but what it really shows us is not only how elements of the vast Southwestern desert look, but also how they feel, what feelings they express and emotions they evoke. This is the essence of Abstract Expressionism, to communicate or express a particular feeling and or place or sensation through the painted medium.

In his numerous writings and over the course of several personal conversations with him, it was clear to see that Rick Dillingham was fascinated with and completely enamored by the entire process of making art pottery literally from the ground up, from the gathering and handling of the clay to the management of the firing process and the often very elaborate later processes he developed for working and reworking the pieces which he created. Dillingham literally and figuratively broke the mold with his startlingly original ceramic work, combining age-old Native American methods and ancient Japanese Raku pottery techniques with his own imagination to create a unique and daring modern body of distinctive, deeply personal work. There is an artistic energy, freshness and dynamism immediately evident in them, a certain air of familiarity, but also the distinct sense that you have never seen anything quite like this before, that new ground is being broken here. As he himself often explained it, as a non-Pueblo person, he was largely freed from the creative constraints and conventions that generations of tradition and custom impose upon almost all Pueblo people. Pueblo societies are inherently conservative in nature and change when it happens, occurs only incrementally and slowly over time. In dramatic contrast, Rick broke all the dishes, literally and figuratively speaking, artistically from the very beginning.

And the very beginning of Rick’s artistic career is precisely when Rick made this uniquely original and remarkably accomplished oil on canvas painting, and in reality it was actually made even earlier during his undergraduate student days at The University of New Mexico when he was just nineteen years old. And, as such, this painting is one of the very first and thus most important revealing looks at the unique and intense artistic brilliance that was later to come into full flower. And, very interestingly, this painting's 1971 date is the exact same year as the earliest dating we have for a Rick Dillingham pottery piece which is the globular jar shown here above and below. The painting's abstracted "desert landscape" composition from March, 1971 compares directly, almost identically in fact, with the painted composition of Dillingham's 1971 pottery piece leading one to believe that they were likely done at almost the exact same time. Which then, of course, naturally begs the "chicken and egg" question of which came first?

The overall composition, the purposefully restrained color palette and the deliberately repetitive pattern of dripping paints, the artist’s “hand” and the overall visual re-creation and evocation of a “Desert Landscape” are almost identical in the these two pieces, yet the pottery piece is done in three dimensions while the painting is done in just two. Possibly, Dillingham made the creative decision, consciously or unconsciously, early on at the overy start of his artistic career that two-dimensional expressions weren’t consistently enough for what he wanted to express and that he needed three so he concentrated his artistic focus on making various forms of paiinted and glazed pottery instead of continuing with easel painting, choosing three dimensional painting as it were on more sculpturally-shaped clay canvasses, so to speak.

The painting is done in oil paint on canvas and it measures an impressively-sized 35” in height by 37” in width (sight). Its framed dimensions are 37” in height by 39” in width and 2 1/2” in depth. The painting is very handsomely and most appropriately framed in a custom-made, hand-carved beveled walnut shadowbox-style frame by Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe, Santa Fe’s premier art framers. Both painting and frame are in completely excellent original condition. There is a bit of what appears to be intentional “distressing” or "texturing" here and there on the canvas surface, but we believe this is completely and deliberately done by Dillingham to further enhance his artistic composition and presentation of “Desert Landscape”. The painting is signed, titled and dated in graphite pencil by the artist on the verso as follows:

“Dillingham, 1971, March, Desert Landscape”

The painting’s provenance is brief and very locally focused, it has apparently never left the state of New

Mexico or traveled any further than some 70 miles from where it was originally created. A very experienced

and knowledgable Gallup and Santa Fe, NM art dealer colleague and friend of ours, the late Harold Jay Evetts, purchased it in around 1990 at an estate sale in Albuquerque, reportedlly from its original owners. Several years later, in 1995, we purchased the painting from Jay Evetts and we have owned it here in Santa Fe for the past 31 years. This painting is now some fifty-five years of age, nearly a senior citizen, and it is is still just as fresh as a daisy, a great testament to the timeless, organic and essential nature of Rick Dillingham’s art.

"I try to keep the work fresh and fairly intuitive. I keep all the processes as simple as possible

to reach the results that I do. And keeping the forms simple as well–spheres, triangles, cones, rectangles –lets me get away with visual murder on the surface. As a painter looks at a canvas,

I look at a form and think how can I make it work? I calculate my process, but not my work."

-Rick Dillingham

Above left, an aerial view of The Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell in Utah. At center and above right, examples of accumulated "Desert Varnish" on red rock cliff faces in the Canyon country of the American Southwest.

Left photo source and © U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Center. Center photo source and © Eliot Porter. Right photo source and © Naturalis Historia

This painting is an ultra-rare example of a very fine and accomplished painting by a very fine and accomplished modern artist who primarily chose to express his considerable artistic talents in other, more three-dimensional painted forms. There are many cases of such artistic polymath behavior in the history of art; Pablo Picasso was primarily a painter who sometimes made ceramics and occasionally sculpture, Leonardo Da Vinci was a painter who often invented and designed sophisticated mechanical objects and machines, Michelangelo was a painter, muralist and sculptor. And, closer to the American Southwest, the great Hopi artist Charles Loloma was a master painter, pottery maker, draftsman and, ultimately, a world-renowned jeweler.

Artistic geniuses often express themselves in many ways and in many forms, this marvelous painting is a particularly rare and particularly poignant example. Rick Dillingham tragically died far too young from a terrible, incurable disease at a tender 41 years of age. Had he lived longer, there might have been many more beautiful Rick Dillingham paintings in the world to admire.

Rick Dillingham’s accomplished artworks are held today and highly coveted in the collections of numerous important museums from The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum

of Art in New York City, The Brooklyn Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Albuquerque Museum and The New Mexico Art Museum in Santa Fe and in numerous other institutions as well as in many significant private collections.

Consider the fact that this painting, “Desert Landscape” 1971, by virtue of its unprecedented rarity and great beauty, might in a very significant and meaningful way be a much rarer and thus more unique and desirable Rick Dillingham artwork than any or all of these other pieces. It would be even more unique and desirable in the company of its near-identical ceramic twin, the early 1971 Dillingham ceramic jar shown here. This possibility

can be discussed as an additional purchase. These two pieces together would make for a particularly excellent, artistically and historically appropriate, relevant and perceptive Museum or private collection display.

Price available upon request

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Important note: This painting will require specialized packing and shipping/delivery arrangements at the purchaser's expense. Depending on the purchaser's location, some delivery options might not be possible.

Direct pickup by purchaser or purchaer's agent in Santa Fe would be possible by special arrangement.

The entrance to the New Mexico Museum of Art's 2023-2024 Rick Dillingham retrospective exhibition in Santa Fe.

Interestingly, in addition to signing, dating and titling the painting on the verso, Dillingham also deliberately added a hand-written specific notation of where the “TOP” of the painting is with an arrow pointing upwards.

"Desert Landscape", Rick Dillingham, Albuquerque, NM, 1971

"Desert Landscape", Mother Nature, Glen Canyon, UT, 1,000,000 B.C.

The unique Southwest landscape-inspired color palette, surface landform variegations and irregular textures of the harsh, dry, rugged, yet extremely beautiful Southwestern desert landscape are beautifully suggested, stylized and eloquently expressed in these painted, dripped, sometimes deliberately distressed design details which Dillingham first foreshadowed and expressed in this 1971 painting and ceramic jar. Above left and right, Rick Dillingham's signature and 1971 dating on the painting and jar.

Above, juxtaposed with the painting are similar compositional details from two other Rick Dillingham ceramics, the early 1971 jar at upper left and below center and a second jar from 1976 at upper right, lower left and lower right which, notably, was formerly in the personal collection of the world-renowned Hopi Indian pottery and jewelry artist, Charles Loloma.