Daniel Morper: Everything is Illuminated by LewAllen Galleries

Receiving Signals from the East, 2008 Oil on canvas, 42 x 48 in

Daniel Morper

Daniel Morper: Everything is Illuminated

Before its transformation into a bustling arts district, the Santa Fe Railyard looked like a slowly deteriorating landscape and a remnant of bygone days. Artist Daniel Morper (1944-2026) painted it with fidelity, harking back to the romanticized portrayals of Western imagery by such Hudson River School painters as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, but with a twist. While that 19th-century movement envisioned an America of sun-dappled vistas and pristine natural beauty, Morper, a century later, turned his attention to what’s on the landscape, be it a skyscraper, a telephone pole, or silvery train tracks with rusty cars sitting idle. Regarding these manmade objects with the same eye as Morper also painted the canyonlands of the Southwest, they become an indelible part of the history of a place — and a testament to change.

In his 2008 essay, “Daniel Morper: In the American Way,” art critic Peter Frank wrote that “Morper is seeking to recapitulate and to update the scope of earlier American landscape painting, the kind of painting that unabashedly and unselfconsciously celebrated the new land while it was still relatively new.” In that way, they are an addendum to the great landscape painting traditions of the past and an evolutionary reflection poised somewhere between what was and what is, because what was and what is are always shifting.

Morper’s paintings of the Railyard exemplify this. Painted in the last years of the 20th-century and the first decade of the new one, these Santa Fe cityscapes, which connect the Santa Fe Southern Railway, to his larger bodies of work on the subject

of trains and railways, are a glimpse into a time of sluggish change, when plans to build a park had not quite been put into action.

So, in them we see a double nostalgia: for a time when Santa Fe was a destination along the tracks, which is inherent, and Morper’s quiet view of a lonely place where time moves slower than a coal-fired engine, and for us, viewing them in the present, nostalgia for a more recent past, before the restaurants, cafés, and international biennials brought throngs of people, and before summer movies were screened in the park.

It was also before LewAllen Galleries existed in its present location. But Morper seems to have presaged a time when his own visions would fill spaces in that same Railyard. Two views of the tracks, In the Yards (1996) and Illumination (1997) capture views from near-identical vantage points, one under the light of a cloudy day and the other at sunset. In an unexpected and, perhaps, meaningful exchange between past and present, in the distance of both paintings, a two-story building along the tracks, at the end of a long warehouse, mark the backside of the gallery’s present location on Paseo de Peralta.

Illumination in particular, treats its corrugated subjects with the same eye as Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole, infusing his vistas with a light that is divine. What he sees in the tilting telephone poles, dirt and dust of the high desert, and an idle caboose are markers of human activity, but mostly seen in the moments inbetween, when activity is indicated (someone stacked those bales of hay on the platform bed of that truck) but unobserved in the moments captured. There is no Essay continues on page 6

In the Yards, 1996 Oil on canvas, 34.25 x 44 in

New Ties, 2008 Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in

Daniel Morper: Everything is Illuminated

sense of condemnation or of loss, no tragic sense that the natural has given way to the artificial. It is the inherent beauty of these things, natural and human-made, as captured in morning light, at sunset, and at dusk, and the way they are lit up with an inner fire that grab our attention.

His paintings envision quietude. The drama is in the light, which certainly carries over to his more traditional landscapes, such as Wotan’s Throne Aflame (1988), which uses a name from Norse mythology to establish a connection between the natural beauty of the Western landscape and the celestial realms of the gods. Now, transfer that view to the city. It is the same. “New York and the Grand Canyon were probably his favorite subject matter,” his widow, artist Carol Mothner, once told me. He treated them as though they were no different at all, trading multistoried buildings for striated cliff faces and vice versa.

To live with a beautiful landscape is to always have a window into another world, real or imagined, and an ever-changing narrative. Lovers of Santa Fe and its history have a rare opportunity to view Morper’s works in the context of the very subject he painted.

Morper could not have envisioned the changes to come to the Railyard, but his work is a document of culture clinging to life, uncertain of its future, and from the standpoint of our own time, establishes a contrast between old and new.

—Michael Abatemarco