well as the soar and sweep of hawks and turkey
vultures.
Diminutive, blue-eyed Priscilla Wiggins not
only paints in nature, she lives in the nature she
paints, whether it be in the Big Bend of Texas, a
favorite winter location for 30 years, or in a
Colorado wilderness where she has painted
aspen groves each summer for even longer.
Wiggins has stood at an easel almost since she
was able to stand. At the age of three her moth-
er, an abstract expressionist, enrolled her in an
experimental pre-school run by Columbia
University in New York City, where every child
was given an easel. Living near the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and seeing the masterpieces of
Oriental art and French Impressionists as a child
“laid the foundation for my delight in painting
nature,” explains Wiggins. After further art stud-
ies at Bennington College in Vermont and in
Boston and New York, she moved to the
Southwest in 1968, earning her B.A. at the
University of New Mexico. By 1977 she had set-
tled into a lifestyle of camping and painting out-
doors. Her year-round home is a camper with
sleeping space, windows on every side and a
propane-powered refrigerator and stove, mount-
ed on a four-wheel-drive pickup.
“I enjoy camping in remote, silent places to
paint the beauty of my surroundings undis-
turbed. The intense vast silence stretching unin-
terruptedly in every direction, especially in Big
Bend, evokes the spirituality that painting satis-
fies,” she said. “I don’t really choose my subjects,
it’s more as if they choose me. Furthermore, real-
ism has never been my intent, but to convey the
essence of the dazzling array of light and form
around me which constitutes what we call the
natural world.”
Wiggins’ devotion to plein air painting stems
partly from her belief that the silence of wilder-
ness is inspiring. A typical day could include
strong winds that knock over her easel and force
her to hold her shade umbrella with one hand
while painting with the other. There may also be
encounters with wildlife: minor bear and javeli-
na dust-ups and once “a hummingbird’s insis-
tence on probing my hand with its beak” while
she was painting.
Her favorite mountain in the Big Bend is
Chilicotal Mountain in the heart of the national
park—she last climbed it on January 1, 2011.
This painting, along with others, is on show at
Eve’s Garden in Marathon.
Wiggins’ paintings are available at Argos
Gallery in Santa Fe, N. M. (www.Argos-
Gallery.com). She will be at Eve’s Garden in
Marathon from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 2,
to meet and talk with visitors who attend a recep-
tion honoring the artist. Paintings include
“Ghost Mountains” 18 x 24 inches, “Stillwell
Blue Bonnets” 18 x 24 inches, “Feather Clouds”
16 x 20 inches, and “Spring Flowers” 11 x 14
inches.
Mary Baxter, earlier of Marathon and now
resident in Marfa, is another Big Bend plein air
artist. Mary does sketches for many of her paint-
ings en plein air but recently she has begun to
create larger paintings at her Marfa studio at
1300 West San Antonio, where she is also cast-
ing bronze animal sculptures. She welcomes vis-
itors to the studio, but adds that her hours there
are irregular.
A native of Lubbock, Mary moved to the Big
Bend area in 1994 after graduating from the
University of Texas at San Antonio with a B.S.
in business and marketing. She also had taken
more than 30 hours in printmaking and paint-
ing.
Her first post-college job was taking care of a
ranch south of Marfa, where she trained horses
and raised yearlings, and the landscape soon
enticed her to follow the example of her grand-
mother, a landscape artist in Sweetwater.
“Everywhere I looked there was something to
paint,” she said, recalling those years. Even tak-
ing a photograph would have required hours of
driving to and from Alpine, the closest site to
take film for processing, she explained. “This
was in the pre-digital age, and so I learned to rely
on sketches and notes for reference, a practice I
still prefer to use today.”
Her aluminum easel can be set up in less than
a minute, but she only does paintings smaller
than 18 x 18 inches in the field. Mary uses “a
mobile studio, a ratty old vintage trailer” for on-
site painting, but she seldom stays out overnight
-- “I don’t like to drive after dark because of the
animals.”
Her paintings— signed with only her sur-
name ‘Baxter’— range in price from “a few hun-
dred to a few thousand,” the artist said, and can
be seen online at her website (www.baxter-
gallery.com), at the William Reaves Art Gallery
in Houston and at the Hunt Gallery in San
Antonio.
In a telephone interview, Reaves said his
gallery “adopted Mary” as part of a Texas
regional group of artists from throughout the
state.
“She is the only one from the Big Bend. A lot
of folks go back and forth to the Big Bend area.
I’d been looking at her work for a while, and in
Marathon two years ago I stopped by her gallery
and was very impressed. We love her style, I
think she’s an excellent painter, exceptional
composition, and we’re excited about the poten-
tial of her work.”
Paintings on view at Mary’s studio in Marfa
in May included a 30 x 60 inch painting of
Devil’s Den at the north end of Big Bend
National Park, with the mountain in orange
with blue brush and prickly pears. A large paint-
ing (48 x 52 inches) in dark blues and greens
showed the Rio Grande winding through the
foreground with lots of lights in the distance—
Presidio at night. “I had to camp out for that
one,” Mary said.
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Skinner & Lara, P.C.
Certified Public Accountants
610 E Holland Avenue
Alpine, TX 79830
Phone (432) 837-5861
Fax (432) 837-5516
continued on page 25
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2013
9