Soul-Stirring City of Art

New Mexico reaches out in endless vistas of vast deserts and majestic mountains. Nicknames the Land of Enchantment, it delights the visitor with the glitter of morning sunlight on the desert sand and the unique cultural heritage of Indian and Hispanic peoples; and nowhere is the brilliance and enchantment of New Mexico more captivating than in the state capital, Santa Fe. Here, the flower of culture blooms in the desert with breathtaking beauty and a fragrance of all-absorbing passion. No wonder the British novelist D. H. Lawrence said, “Santa Fe changed me forever.”

Red and Blue

Santa Fe is blessed with natural colors. The Colors of nature are always changing, and they never clash with other colors. The chilies hanging outside a gift shop look all the more red in contrast with the yellow walls, and the cobalt-colored sky looks all the more blue above the adobe buildings. The orange sunset is reflected on the ridge of a nameless desert mountain, opening a great feast of color. Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “All the colors needed for the artist’s palette are right there on the hundreds of miles of desert!”

Earth and Sky

In Santa Fe, architecture and the land are like one. The adobe brick buildings made of earth, clay, and straw look as if they have just risen out of the ground. Wherever lines or surfaces meet, the corners are rounded without any sharp edges, creating an effect of total unity. These earthen houses with their thousand-year history look up to the sky in the middle of the desert, like a bridge between Santa Fe’s past and present.

People and History

History flows along the river of time, but people keep looking back to their history. Santa Fe is home to the Native American Indians who first came to this place thousands of years ago, to the Hispanics who colonized the area, and nowadays to Americans from many different backgrounds. Its past history of conquest and fighting has been transformed into today’s harmonious society of different people respecting each other’s traditions and culture. That is what makes Santa Fe such a vibrant city.

Indian Hispanic cultural heritage

If you thought Santa Fe was in Mexico, you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, for it was once the capital of a Spanish colony and only became part of the USA about 160 years ago. The Historic owners, the Pueblo Indians and the Spanish, have left a cultural legacy that has shaped the city we know today. Looking at the adobe structures, the dark skins of the merchants in the Santa Fe Plaza and their displays of hand-made Cocopeli dolls, you get a fresh sense of who the local people are

When the Spanish colonized this area, they used religion as a way to infiltrate the lives of the locals. They built churches at the center of every village, and people’s lives came to revolve around the church. Two churches that took that role in Santa Fe are Saint Francis Cathedral and San Miguel Mission Church. Completed in 1884, Saint Francis Cathedral is built in the Romanesque style, which is rare in the area and contrasts markedly with the local Pueblo Architecture. A short walk from Saint Francis Cathedral brings you to San Miguel Mission Church, known as the oldest church in America. This church is built in the adobe style with far less decoration that most churches, and its terracotta-colored walls stand out in bold contrast to the cobalt blue sky.

The Spanish used the adobe style not only for structures but also for everything from villages to city centers. Today, all the hotels, galleries, gift shops, and restaurants in downtown Santa Fe have been rebuilt in the adobe style.

For a glimpse of the colorful lives of Pueblo Indians take a trip to Taos, a two hours drive from Santa Fe. The eight Native American tribes that live in New Mexico are collectively known as Pueblo Indians, and the Taos Pueblo village. Listed by UN-ESCO as a World Cultural Heritage site, has been kept in a remarkable state of preservation.

Art, the common language of people inspired by nature

Languages spoken in Santa Fe include English, Spanish, and the Pueblo Indian language, but the language shared by everyone is art. The local passion and talent for art is on show in art festivals year round. At the Annual Traditional Spanish Market Show and Sale in July, the Santa Fe Indian Arts Festival in August, and the Winter Spanish Market in December, you can vividly sense the Indian and Hispanic views of nature through such media as painting, textiles, jewelry, drawing, and sculpture.

In Santa Fe, art is a language of nature. The early Hispanic settlers took nature as both the movie and the material of their art, using aspens and pines and extracting pigments from natural materials. To this day, early Spanish colonial arts are carried on as family trades including furniture making textiles silverwork, and the carving of santos, or images of Saints.

Not few artists have moved permanently to Santa Fe, inspired by its desert scenery. One of the Leading American painters of the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keeffe, passed painters of the twentieth century Georgia O’Keefe, passed through Santa Fe in 1917 on her way back to Texas from a holiday in Colorado she was enchanted by the vast skies, orange day in Colorado. She was enchanted by the vast skies, orange sunsets, gray clouds, and the lonely wastes of the desert. After that, she visited Santa Fe to make sketches, and in 1949 she left New York to spend the rest of her life at Ghost Ranch House, about 190km from Albuquerque. Today, Ghost Ranch House is open to the public only by appointment, but if you miss the chance to see it, you can still admire her paintings of desert scenes at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in downtown Santa Fe.

Artists active in the western USA have converted some small former mining villages near Santa Fe, such as Madrid, into artists’ studios, forming an artistic community for the Southwestern states. This is why there are so many galleries in Santa Fe, where curators present new works inspired by nature to visiting art lovers and dealers.

Returning to the Santa Fe Plaza, I stopped to look at the bundle of goods that an old Indian woman was selling. I picked up a rather worn wooden stick doll, and she told me it was a charm that would keep me healthy during my travels. This seemed a bit doubtful, but somehow I found it reassuring. When I saw the woman’s wrinkled face, I couldn’t bring myself to haggle over the price. Carefully packing the doll in my bag, I turned to see the westward sky beginning to turn a rich crimson shade. In the distance, between the adobe buildings of Santa Fe, I saw a mountain that looked familiar although I don’t know its name. It reminded me of Seoul, where you can always see mountains wherever you go.

On my way back to my lodgings, I smiled as I remembered the words of someone I had met in Albuquerque. “Around here, even a fine day can turn foul in a moment. We get a lot of tornadoes, and when the lightning flashes from those gray clouds, it’s like the desert splitting apart. Gut the sight of tornado is so beautiful that people stop their cars to watch.” I liked the way the locals thought of nature, not as something to be feared, but as something to be loved and admired.