Giving back: Gallery with a Cause exhibit highlights 'Movers and Shakers'

Mar. 17—Gallery with a Cause has gathered 16 artists who give back to their communities through paintbrush and lens.

Dubbed "Movers and Shakers: Artists Who Teach, Lead and Inspire," the exhibition showcases 360 artworks, with 40% of each tax-deductible sale earmarked for the New Mexico Cancer Center Foundation. The money supports patients' nonmedical needs while they receive treatment.

Oil painter and Albuquerque resident Nancy Davis grew up on a ranch near Portales.

"I just love making ranch-influenced paintings," she said.

The painting "Kim" captures her niece roping cattle.

"I paint outside a lot and I also take a photograph," Davis said. "Sometimes the plein air paintings work and you know within a couple of hours."

"Kim" gestated from a photograph of the subject roping and branding on the family ranch.

"I expanded the horse the way I wanted to," Davis said. "His demeanor was very calm. The cattle I did from memory."

Rio Rancho's Carol Mell grew up in Oregon, where she learned to play in the forest, collecting mushrooms and spotting deer and bears in the dark.

Her photo encaustic "Playground" pieces, with Surrealist-meets-landscapes, draw from that experience. Swings dangle from the top, cradling a baboon and a rabbit, while an owl sweeps the sky.

"It's a place you can imagine going into and playing there," Mell said.

A former journalist, the artist began in photography but disliked framing her work behind glass. She saw it as a barrier.

"I got into fine art photography in Taos," she said. "When I moved here, I wanted to paint photographs."

Mell found a teacher online and studied encaustic. The process consists of natural beeswax and dammar resin (crystallized tree sap).

"The wonderful thing about encaustic is that you can touch it," Mell said. "And I wanted texture. I wanted my pieces to look like paintings."

She begins with a photograph, then invents a digital composition.

"I did a slow shutter photograph at Heron Lake" in "Playground with Owls," she said.

"The swings are from Ghost Ranch," she added.

Mell lifted the most of the animals from dominion-free photos and used her own image of a baboon taken in Ethiopia. Then she began painting over the composition in encaustic.

"Over the top of that you use an oil stick," she said. "It's sort of a combination of painting and photography."

As a child, Mell felt a kinship with the trees, the waters and the creatures that lived there, especially the birds.

"Birds are like the messengers between the physical and the spiritual.

"I love my fantasy playgrounds," the artist said. "It's a place you can imagine going into and playing there."

When she was a child, a neighbor took Mell to a ghost town to collect mushrooms. She absorbed the beauty and magic in nature.

"She taught me how to navigate the forest," Mell said. "She'd say, 'You know there was a deer here last night.' "

Santa Fe's Adrian Skiles created his homage to New Mexico in "Pueblo Ladder" after moving here from Atlanta three years ago.

"It originally was a color photograph," he said. "I take it into my method called 'image shifting' and added color, the texture and the depth, and it really popped. I have a program I use that adds a little AI."

"I've always been an amateur photographer," Skiles continued. "I did a lot of landscape photography. I moved into digital six or seven years ago."

He moved to New Mexico to capture the feel of the Southwest. He worked as a mortgage broker before coming here.

"I think you capture something in a moment," he said of his avocation. "You look at it differently, then you freeze that image. It gives you time to appreciate it."

He first showed his altered image of Taos Pueblo at the Eldorado Studio Tour three years ago.

"I had it in my home," Skiles said, "and a lady said, 'I saw this at the preview gallery and I almost broke down in tears.'

"That really moved me."