Wilder Nightingale Fine Art

Monique Belitz

I breathe and live landscape – it is the reason that I am now living at 8100 feet elevation in the most fascinating area in Northern New Mexico, where the eye can travel endlessly in each direction. Clouds above me veiling the mountains, sometimes below me obscuring the valley, intricately drawn desert patterns all around me. I have the choice between mountains, the Rio Grande gorge, pinon forests or close-up wildflowers. I can breathe freely in this wide open space. I pay my respect to the forces that shaped the land, as well as to the fauna and flora that inhabits it. I try to preserve this balanced eco-system in my art and fit my life gratefully into its rules. The scale of the western part of the US offers me countless challenges in my art, which I embrace with heart-felt joy.

I was born in the Netherlands and at age seven my family moved to the South of Germany. I received my undergraduate degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich in art education and English as a foreign language. In 1986 my then husband moved us to the US; first to Maryland, then to Oregon, where we lived close to the McKenzie river. I started teaching adults at the Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene in 1995, then continued teaching as adjunct faculty at Lane Community College, also in Eugene.

In 2007 I moved to Albuquerque where I received first my Masters of Fine Arts at UNM in 2010, then my Masters in Art History in 2012. That year I moved to Crete, Nebraska, as an Assistant Professor at Doane University. However, I missed the landscape and the people of New Mexico so badly that I retired early and moved to Lama, north of Taos, as a full-time artist. Every day I am grateful for the beauty that surrounds me and that also inspires my art.

I am a national and international exhibiting landscape artist, who, during the 45 years of my artistic career has enjoyed 49 solo shows and over 75 group shows. I am currently represented by the Magpie Gallery in El Prado, and the Wilder Nightingale Gallery in Taos.

Since I moved to Lama I have been working in two different techniques. The first is a combination of painting and drawing using acrylic ink, either on paper or on wooden cradled boards. My second approach is mixed media, using watercolors, prints and drawings to create collaged landscapes, often with a small woman in it expressing an emotional state or a particular memory. While my current mixed media pieces are typically small, my paintings are mostly diptychs ranging from 8” by 16” to 12” by 24”.

My paintings are mental “snapshots” of the ever changing quality of light, color and mood of vistas I happen to observe from my property in Lama, or while driving. As these “snapshots” are firmly burned into my memory, I have no need to use photos. Using an innovative sequence of techniques, I first block in the main shapes with a brush, then use pen and ink to overlay the painting with patterns describing various surface qualities in fine detail.