A New Location On A Historic Street

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings, Sculpture, Special Events

It’s Finally Here – Our Move to Canyon Road

(Posted May 2013) Here at Pippin Contemporary, we are ecstatic to announce our move to Canyon Road! We are working diligently to prepare for all the changes our new space will bring. Canyon Road is an internationally known art district; in fact what once began as a rural neighborhood of small farms has become an art Mecca. People travel from all over the world to see The Road’s first-class art offerings, and we are thrilled to soon be in the thick of it all.

The Evolution of The Road and Where We Fit In

The buildings that pepper Canyon Road were built in the Pueblo Revival style, designed to be compounds for multi-generational families, and the oldest of the structures were built as early as the 1750s. Our building has the warm welcoming appeal of a home with historic charm fit for displaying vibrant pieces of art. The uniquely southwestern architectural elements drew us in and we immediately envisioned art filling up the thick walls. We are thrilled to know the beautiful wooden floors will soon be filled with the footsteps of visitors from all walks of life seeking an experience that only Pippin Contemporary can offer.

Growing a Garden of Movement and Form

One of the things we’re most looking forward to is displaying our sculpture garden. It will be a stunningly bold contrast to the surrounding adobe. Our outdoor space will be filled with the progressive works of four brilliant sculptors: Greg Reiche, Nic Noblique, Jim LaPaso and Troy Pillow. From the intricacies of mechanics to the notion of aesthetic movement and emotion, each sculptor brings a niche take on sculpture as an art form.

You’re Invited to the Party of the Season

Our relocation party will not only be a celebration of where we’ve been and what lies ahead, but it will also be an evening featuring extraordinary art. You’ll have the opportunity to see the spirited abstracts of Eva Carter, the expressionistic and contemporary works of Jeff Schaller and much more. We are so looking forward to celebrating our relocation and second anniversary party with you on Friday, May 24, 2013 from 5-7:00PM at our new location on the corner of Canyon Road and Paseo de Peralta.

May 11, 2013/by Aleta Pippin

The Truth Hits Everyone Like a Million Atom Bombs by Nic Noblique at Pippin Contemporary

Dynamic Objects

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings, Sculpture

New location, three new sculptors

Whether they’re swirling paint across a canvas or traveling the world searching for inspiration, the artists of Pippin Contemporary are quite a vigorous bunch. Our latest move is a literal leap across town: we’re relocating our gallery to 200 Canyon Road in early May. The new space has more elbow room both inside and out, and we’re wasting no time in growing our stable to fill it. We’re proud to introduce four sculptors who share our passion for motion, and whose dynamic works will greet every visitor who strolls through our sculpture garden. Meet Nic Noblique, Greg Reiche and Troy Pillow:

Nic Noblique

Nic Noblique may be in his 30s, but the Clyde, Texas sculptor is in the midst of his second successful career. By his early 20s, he’d already owned and operated skate and snowboarding retail shops across the country, placed in the first-ever X Games for snowboarding, and designed indoor and outdoor skate and snow parks and an innovative center point concave skateboard. When he left for the world of fine art, he set out on a mission that was just as radical.

“It’s not about making a political statement or regurgitating a bygone aesthetic or art movement,” he says. “My art is about form, lines and movement from the depths of my imagination that engage the environment in an organic way.”

Nic flattens heavy salvaged steel with tools he designed himself and twists them into elegant shapes that look like ramps for zero gravity skateboards. “I want my sculpture to play a visual trick, a balancing act, and contradict the very nature of the material I use to produce it,” he says.

Greg Reiche

Greg Reiche grew up in Socorro, New Mexico and now lives in Santa Fe. He started selling handmade jewelry and furniture at 16 and ran his own tax business after college. Art kept calling him back, so he combined his business skills and his love of sculpture in an Albuquerque gallery venture. That’s where he met his wife, who applied for a job at the gallery. After 14 years of bouncing between mediums to pay the bills, Greg sold the gallery to focus on sculpture in 1997. The results have been quite literally monumental.

Greg has won public art commissions in New Mexico and beyond, building sculptures as tall as 35 feet that weigh thousands of pounds. Using stone, metal and glass, he constructs enormous wedges, arcs, circles and portals that interact with their surroundings in spectacular ways. A project he did for a ski resort in Colorado includes a gate that changes color with the temperature, shifting as the seasons change.

The sculptures on show at Pippin Contemporary’s new location won’t be quite as large, but they’ll incorporate the same elements as his monumental works. “Beautiful, timeless and elemental, these forms are basic building blocks of our collective visual language,” Greg says. “I am drawn to them for their deep, innate emotional resonance.”

Troy Pillow

Seattle-based sculptor Troy Pillow has owned and operated his own sculpture studio since 1995. He studied architectural engineering at the University of Colorado, a background that’s easily traced in the graceful lines of his precisely balanced, often asymmetrical forms.

“I incorporate metals and glass into my sculptures—materials taken from the earth—and refine them into elegant curves, giving the feeling of movement in their static rest,” Troy says. The sculptor resolutely deconstructs and abstracts, creating objects with a powerful gestalt and a strong modernist aesthetic.

Many of Troy’s sculptures incorporate kinetic factors that move with every slight shift in the wind. “My pieces create a union of ease between modern design and nature, blending fluidly with their environment and the elements,” he says.

You can experience all of our artists’ work at our new location in early May, and follow every step of the move on our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts. Don’t blink! At Pippin Contemporary, things are always moving fast.

March 15, 2013/by Aleta Pippin

Edible Art Tour with Jambo's at Pippin Contemporary

The Aesthestes EAT!

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings, Sculpture

Pippin Contemporary Throws a Beautiful Feast

When art lovers and foodies come together, you know it’s going to be a good party. Not that those two groups are mutually exclusive. At last Friday’s Edible Art Tour, hundreds of visitors feasted their eyes on our artists’ delicious palettes and entertained their palates with the colorful flavors of the Jambo Cafe. It was truly a delight for the senses.

The Edible Art Tour (EAT) pairs 35 Santa Fe galleries and restaurants for a night of feasting and art watching. It’s the most popular event of ARTfeast weekend, a fundraiser for ARTsmart. The nonprofit gives local kids opportunities to connect with visual arts through donations of art supplies and education efforts. For this year’s EAT, we teamed up with acclaimed African eatery Jambo to offer a sweet taste of lamb stew and spicy shots of chai.

While our visiting culinary artists from Jambo dished out the delicacies, Aleta chatted with visitors about art, food and everything in between.

Click here to see all of our pictures from the Edible Art Tour! For more news from Pippin Contemporary, check out our Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest feeds. If you missed this feast, we’ll make sure you know about the next one!

March 4, 2013/by Aleta Pippin

A Moveable Feast

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings

renoir-ball-at-the-moulin-galette-2

Join Pippin Contemporary for ARTfeast

(Published February 2013) “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“Holiday Flair” by Aleta Pippin

It’s not uncommon to hear visitors compare Santa Fe to a village in Europe, especially in the quiet of winter. We’re a town with a central square, charming architectural unity and a friendly personality. For a few hours this Friday though, the streets of our little hamlet will host a scene more befitting of the City of Lights. The Edible Art Tour (EAT) is Santa Fe’s own moveable feast, and Pippin Contemporary is preparing to bring on the metropolitan glitz.

EAT is the most popular event of ARTfeast weekend, a fundraiser for local nonprofit ARTsmart. The organization, founded in 1993, aims to connect Santa Fe’s strong art community with Santa Fe public schools. Through 2012, ARTsmart had distributed over $1,000,000 for outreach efforts, endowment funds and art supply donations to schools.

“Refresh” by Eva Carter

For this year’s EAT, Pippin Contemporary and 34 other galleries around Santa Fe have teamed up with stellar local restaurants for a night of fine dining and art watching. Pippin is hosting award winning African themed restaurant Jambo Cafe, and we’ll be pairing their bold flavors with bright canvases and glowing sculptures from all of our stellar artists.

Just make sure to pause for a moment and relish our offerings. A moveable feast is best enjoyed at a leisurely pace!

February 20, 2013/by Aleta Pippin

A Window Of One’s Own

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings

New Year, New Studio and Ever-Renewing Inspiration

Before…

(Published January 2013) “It’s full of light.” That’s the first thing our founder Aleta Pippin says about her new studio in the Railyard District. “The north-facing windows bring in enough sunshine that most of the time I can work only by natural light.”

One look at Aleta’s paintings and you’ll see why that’s a priority. Think of the abstract artist’s brush as a prism that unleashes the full spectrum of sunlight, and her canvases as portals into galaxies of shimmering color. These are works created in close collaboration with nature, so it was important for Aleta to find a window of her own.

As a new year dawns, Aleta is putting the finishing touches on the new space. It’s a perfect time to look back at the artistic transformations that brought her here and forward to an exciting year at Pippin Contemporary.

Circle of Life by Aleta Pippin

“New starts are about finding fresh directions for your work, moving freely with your creative flow,” Aleta says. For a process-oriented artist like Aleta, art making is a form of meditation on the past, present and future. “Abstract painting isn’t an isolated genre… it is, at its very core, derived from life itself,” she says. As Aleta knows well, when art and life so closely intertwine, artistic passion can manifest in many different ways.

Aleta started her artistic career at four. Back then she was focused on the figurative, sketching horses in pencil and crayon. In her teen years she was an avid figure drawer and designed posters for her high school. Aleta’s creativity turned to the profound art of marriage and motherhood in her early adult life, and then to the business world in 1984, when she founded her own company.

“Business is creating,” she says. “The same as creating a painting. It’s first having a vision that excites, then considering that vision long enough to be inspired, focusing long enough for the inspiration to move you into action, holding the vision until the action manifests into a business.”

The Tide Rushes In by Aleta Pippin

In the mid-1990’s, Aleta felt the impulse to channel this ingenuity back into art. Remembering her early years, she started painting figurative and still life pieces, but it wasn’t until she ventured into the boundless universe of abstraction that her inspiration was truly unleashed.

“My paintings are spontaneous expression, flowing freely through me in rhythm to the music I’m listening to,” Aleta says. She creates her work under elemental conditions, wielding wind, heat and brush to direct swirling constellations of color across her canvases.The paint will dry, but the feeling of dynamic motion never settles.

Aleta’s perpetual metamorphosis took her down another path in 1997. She’d secured representation from Gallery 821 in 1996, but followed her intuition and took a sabbatical from art making until 2000. Upon her return, it was immediately clear that something had changed. She felt a new connection to her work, and the canvases responded with resounding joy. “Color is vibrational. It has an effect on your physiology,” Aleta says. Artist and art were keenly in tune.

Path Home by Aleta Pippin

Aleta was prepared to fully immerse herself in the fiery sphere that had opened to her, and in 2006 founded Pippin Meikle Fine Art with business partner and painter Barbara Meikle. In 2011, she opened Pippin Contemporary.

Our downtown gallery has been a continued source of inspiration for Aleta, combining the invigorating roles of businessperson and fine artist. In 2012 we put on 11 shows featuring all of the artists in our gallery, including Aleta’s ethereal solo show “Spontaneous Combustion” that pushed her high key paintings to new intensities and also intriguingly dipped back into the figurative. 2013 looks to be equally as transformational, with seven shows lined up and a refreshed commitment to reaching out to you via blogging and social media.

When Aleta’s easel is finally in place, it’s easy to see why she chose this studio space. It really is full to the brim with New Mexico sunshine, and with all that light comes an uplifting sensation of swirling fresh air. It’s tempting to wish that it could stay pretty as a picture, but when the paint starts flying, it will take on yet another kind of beauty. Aleta knows this sort of beauty—that of endless creation and rebirth—better than most.

After!

January 8, 2013/by Aleta Pippin

Aleta Pippin’s Spontaneous Combustion Show!

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings

(Published October 2012) “When all of the necessary elements come together, spontaneous combustion occurs,” suggests abstract painter, Aleta Pippin. Her paintings are created through the energy and love of the process, through the music emanating from her iPod, from the amazing color that is instinctual – all coming together in a spontaneous combustion that is a work of art.

Pippin’s show (early October) was a fun and successful event. Several of her paintings were sold. View highlights.

Aleta Pippin’s Opening Reception – Spontaneous Combustion

The Santa Fean Magazine’s preview states – “Pippin’s paintings are, in a word, spontaneous. Wild brush strokes, impasto, and dripped paint express a sense of freedom, rhythm, and surprise.” Pippin goes on to say – “My paintings are about spirituality and purposeful emotional intensity.”

Aleta Pippin at her opening for Spontaneous Combustion

Aleta’s opening reception.

October 17, 2012/by Aleta Pippin

15th Annual ARTFeast and 17th Annual LA Art Show

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings

ARTFeast

(Published February 2012) We’re gearing up for the 15th Annual ARTFeast events. Edible Art Tour is Friday, 2/24 and Pippin Contemporary is paired with ChocolateSmith for delightful truffles and chocolate. Thomas Rheam will be providing music. Our gallery will be an indulgence for the senses; stop by. Hours are from 5-8p, tickets $35/each. There are 41 galleries participating in this fun, fund-raising event. Monies raised by all of the ARTSmart events help supply art supplies for school children and fund art scholarships.

LA Art Show Recap

Julia and I (Aleta) headed to Los Angeles on January 17th for the 17th Annual LA Art Show – Contemporary. We were thrilled to be included in this prestigious show and had a fantastic time interacting with art lovers in the vibrant downtown LA Convention Center. Here are some pictures of our booth.

One thing for sure – Pippin Contemporary had the most colorful artwork in the show!

Setting Up the Booth

Here’s another view of the booth as we’re setting up

Entrance to the LA Art Show

Folks enjoying the artwork

As a result of the show, we developed contacts and added new collectors, while enjoying ourselves.

February 17, 2012/by Aleta Pippin

Aleta Pippin’s New Show – Perpetual Motion

A Sensory Experience of Color and Mood, Abstract Fine Art, Abstract Paintings, Aleta Pippin, Paintings

(Published August 2011) Aleta Pippin’s abstract expressionist paintings are about energy (vibration), color, and freedom. She uses acrylics and oils to create joyful, uplifting work that promotes visual healing. Her art is an authentic reflection of life and a vibration of positive energy that translates into a physiological impact upon the viewer.

Abstract expressionist oil painting by abstract painter Aleta Pippin

Born on the 4th of July by Aleta Pippin

Perpetual Motion is high-energy imagery with each painting communicating a feeling of pleasure and energy to the viewer.

Abstract expressionist oil painting by abstract artist Aleta Pippin

Going Deeper by Aleta Pippin

Pippin’s work is a tribute to beauty and the vibrational impact that color imparts when coupled with an emotional translation of music as she journeys to create a sensory experience of color and mood.

Abstract acrylic painting by abstract artist Aleta Pippin

The Sound of Music by Aleta Pippin

August 14, 2011/by Aleta Pippin