Over the Shoulder

Maybe I should paint a landscape, something grand and sweeping, the kind of thing that could hang in a doctor’s office and make patients forget, if only momentarily, the paper gown that never quite closes in the back. But instead, this face appeared.

Instead, we are still moving in this direction. Here she is—strong, defiant, and suspicious of my presence, as if she knows that I, too, am an interloper in my own painting. She looks over her shoulder, not quite willing to offer a full gaze, because she understands something I don’t: that identity, at least in New Mexico, is a thing both given and taken, worn like a strand of turquoise that carries the weight of history and commerce in equal measure.

Her skin is warm, sunlit, and painted in thick strokes that refuse to be smoothed out, because life here is not smooth. New Mexico is not a place that accommodates your desire for neatness or control. It is a place where the land itself determines your fate—where the wind decides if your house will stay standing and the desert sun determines whether you are a local or merely a tourist passing through, melting into your car seat.

The background is almost an afterthought, but New Mexico does not allow itself to be an afterthought. The ochre fields and the sagebrush demand space, the sky so blue it’s practically a threat. And yet, despite this vastness, she commands the frame. This woman is the center, and everything else bends to her presence.

I’d like to think I was painting someone specific, but that would be too simple. Instead, this is nearly every woman I have ever seen at a Northern New Mexico flea market, every quiet force of nature that has stood in line at Albertsons with a basket full of chiles and a look that says, “I have seen things.” Is she New Mexico, or maybe she is just herself? And in painting her, I realize that I, too, am trying to find out who I am in relation to this land, this place that I love.