Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112499
re RY GRAZING photography by Ron Watts presence and high-altitude sunlight a world of mythic and mystical intensity. Here was a place where visions could be pursued, where dilapidated adobe haciendas could be purchased along scenic Canyon Road. An artists��� colony, full of eccentric painters and moneyed Manhattan refugees, formed. In 1957, the city issued an edict that all buildings in its downtown heritage zone be adobe, just like the native pueblo villages of the region: no wood, no concrete, no plastic. Soon, tourists came, while native Americans sold their crafts beneath the portico of the city���s 400-year-old Palace of Governors. The opera arrived. Galleries and restaurants opened, so did museums. Today, almost every store and house in historic Santa Fe is adobe ��� with curving corners and protruding beams supporting wisteria-covered verandas. And more art galleries are found here than in any other North American city, outside L.A. and New York. Yet Santa Fe���s population (75,000) is smaller than that of Kamloops, B.C. PUSH OPEN THE DOOR of Arthur L��pez���s Santa Fe home, and one is confronted with a AT DUSK IN SANTA FE, the 19th-century Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi looms over a street���s pueblo-adobe shops. (top) Arthur L��pez���s home is a phantasmagoria of his and others��� bizarre Mexican/Catholicthemed carvings and sculpture; (middle) Lyman Whitaker���s kinetic sculpture garden on Canyon Road, where among the galleries this door (top) leads into a private hacienda. surreal scene of colourful, even comic, religious folk art. Beyond the tattooed 40-yearold artist with the Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses are hundreds of painted-wood Catholic images that L��pez has tweaked into often-satirical updates of spiritual themes. His Holy Rollers sculpture, for example, features a sunglasses-wearing Jesus driving a mauve, flower-bedecked VW van jammed WESTWORLD p32-35_Sante Fe.indd 33 >> FA L L 2 0 1 2 33 12-08-17 1:46 PM