CATALOG FOR PICTURESQUE IMAGES FROM TAOS AND SANTA FE BOOK

NEW MEXICO - beautiful desert country millennia of erosion into a myriad of fantastic fotms: gashed arroyos, sculptured buttes, high mesa-land, furrowed and folded hills and tridescent mountains. A country which moves in rhythmical flow, shape against shape and color against color, extending as far as the eye can see!

Arid lands, baked by the searing rays of the intense light. Land, where every color is visible: red, pink, lavender, purple, yellow, gold and delicate gray. Bare slopes which are dotted with green clumps of juniper and pinon; forest with golden color of Aspen and Cotton-wood. Then light--impressive, lucid, ethe-real--providing the magical touch for the changing colors in the sky, from delicate, silvery yellows to turquoise and azure, and then to saffron and rose.

LAND of the mystique and picturesque--whose colorful and exotic qualities captured the romantic and poetic nature of the artists drawing them to the Southwest to record their vivid impressions of America's last frontier: boundless wilderness, architecture as "homogenous as the structures of Palestine" . ..

"and people

as old as the peoples of history; with customs and costumes as ancient as their traditions." Perhaps the same colorful aspects which lured the artists, poets and photographers of yesterday continue to touch our sensibilities, along with our nostalgia for the historical past and our strong ecological concern for our lands.

It was shortly before the turn of the century, in September of 1898 that the artists, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, discovered Taos! --becoming co-founders of the art colony.

Although Blumenschein had made a brief visit to New Mexico the previous winter on an assignment for McClure's Magazine, it was on this September trip that he received the most

"unforgettable" experience of his life: "The color, the effective character of the landscape,