Downtown: an excellent lunch with friends at La Boca (this bead and whatsits store is next door) before heading with them to see the Gustave Baumann exhibition at the NM Museum of Art. I thought I knew Baumann's work fairly well - probably everyone in and around Santa Fe thinks so - beautiful, slightly mannered, often slightly over-bright complex woodcuts of the city and landscape nearby; of Taos Pueblo, the Grand Canyon, the Californian coast, and so on. But I wasn't expected to be surprised by his versatility, including his abstract, or near-abstract works: these turquoise eyes are staring out of a corner in Curiosity Killed the Cat (1951), which the wall panel (the wall panels were very hit or miss in their interpretations) tells us "infers [the writer presumably means "implies"] that an undue interest in modernism might be dangerous." Or it might be that Baumann liked painting black cats: it wasn't the only one.
This view onto an inner courtyard captures the at-one-moment raining, at-one-moment sunny nature of the day: the mountains were covered in a wonderful dusting of snow,
and later, the racing bands of dark clouds made for the first spectacular sunset of the year.
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