A Searching Look

The first thing you should know about painting in Taos is that the light here doesn’t just exist—it performs. It flits and flickers across the adobe walls, turns the mountains into backdrops for something grand and operatic, and does scandalous things to the color of the sky. And if you spend enough time watching it, it changes the way you see faces.

Take this young woman. She has something timeless in her gaze, a way of looking that is both knowing and uninterested in whatever nonsense the outside world is selling today.

Painting portraits in Taos means stepping into a long and somewhat complicated history. You have the old Taos Society of Artists, who came here with their easels and their refined East Coast sensibilities and immediately lost their minds over the “picturesque natives.” They painted the people of Taos Pueblo like they were relics in a living museum, something ancient and unchanging, a thing to be admired but never spoken to. Then you have the Hispanic santeros, carving saints out of cottonwood, working in the same tradition their great-great-grandfathers did, creating devotional art that pulses with faith and history.

I land somewhere in the middle, wanting to paint people as they are: not props, not symbols, but human. This portrait isn’t just about her face—it’s about her presence. The blue of the sky against the warmth of her skin, the earthen colors of the landscape sneaking into her cheekbones, the touch of violet in her scarf catching the last slant of light. It’s a kind of realism that isn’t about photographic accuracy but about truth—about representing people as they feel, not just how they look.

Somewhere behind her, there’s an adobe house with a turquoise door, and if you listen closely, you can hear the murmur of a radio playing Spanish ballads, the slap of dough being shaped into tortillas, the sound of footsteps moving slowly across a well-worn floor. This is Taos. This is home.