Monday, October 10, 2005
What might it feel like to know a great deal about something that one cares about not being able to share this knowledge with anyone?
First snow on the slopes around Taos NM 2005
Sarah
Marshall-Hill
Publisher,
Southwest Art Magazine
A
Kelly Pruitt has been an enigma during a 60 year career, having painted his
first oil paintings in the late 1940s.
I have recently worked on two 1953 oils that needed to be cleaned and
oiled. These two images might be the
first two to be seen in a new marketing of Pruitt/ThunderBow images within the
pages of Southwest Art Magazine.
The
target of the ads would be an edition of 20 each of 30 images:
http://www.virtualtaos.net/Pruitt/brochures/Oct2005.htm
Perhaps
as many as 4000 original oil paintings were created, and many of these have
been lost for various reasons. Most of
the work is unknown. Many paintings
that are exceptional have been seen by only the person who watched Kelly paint
it and then brought it into a private collection. Many of these paintings were sold to meet the needs of the
present moment, and so often the paintings were placed in trailer houses or old
cowboy line camps. Notables like
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton acquired original oils from Kelly directly.
It is
extremely difficult to piece together an understanding of how many original
oils that have been. I kept a
collection of over 100 colors slides of paintings Kelly and I were selling in
the early 1980s were I managed as an "amateur" an art gallery on the
square in Taos.
Virtual
Taos is now a company registered in Taos New Mexico and having the web sites
as
well as
I
have started a project that would find as many of the original oils as possible
and make very high resolution digital scans - so that the images could be made
available as Pruitt/ThunderBow Giclee Extensions.
In
the early 1980s I published, again in an amateurish way, 8 limited
editions. As part of this effort, I advertised
in Southwest Art magazine. A story was
done and published. However, the photographs
of the paintings were very poor - and as likely hurt not helped Kelly's work's
image in the "professional" art world.
I
have long sought to correct that mistake.
Kelly is living during the winters in various line camps along the Rio Grande in Texas, and during the Winter he has his studio in the Indian Hills Inn in Taos New Mexico.
Perhaps
we can talk on the phone and make the necessary arrangements.
Dr
Paul S Pruitt
703-981-2676