Bridge Rio Hondo

Bridge Rio Hondo is a superb example of the artist’s fascination with the landscape and region surrounding Taos, New Mexico. A tributary of the Rio Grande, the Rio Hondo is a river located in Northern New Mexico near Taos, which flows approximately 20 miles from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the Rio Grande Gorge west of Arroyo Hondo. The locale was a popular destination for a wide range of painters, including members of the Taos Society of Artists. Using his celebrated broad strokes and high-keyed colors, Fechin models the profile of a bridge within a landscape of bold and abstracted planes of color. As is typical of the artist's style, Fechin discarded his artist's tools in order to rework and refine the landscape’s features directly with his thumb. A brilliant punch of blue in the upper left immediately draws the viewer into the composition, which leads into the vibrant foliage and then cool greys of the river bed. The result is a fully immersive image brilliantly capturing the magic of Northern New Mexico.

Galina P. Tuluzakova writes of Fechin’s landscapes, “In Taos, Fechin did not limit his work to depictions of Native Americans. Undoubtedly these works are an integral part of the Taos Colony’s oeuvre, and they were the first to attract critical attention; but they represented only part of Fechin’s Taos output, and an overall picture is more complex. The New Mexico landscape is magnificent and, for an artist like Fechin, impossible to resist painting. The contrast between the brightness of the sun and the subdued hues of the desert, the soft forms of adobe building and the brilliance of water in the acequias running down the mountains along stony paths—nothing escaped the attentive gaze of the artist…” (Nicolai Fechin, The Art and the Life, San Cristobel, New Mexico, 2012, p. 128)