Ruidoso a haven for the crafty and creative

Apr. 12—Ruidoso hasn't always been an art town, but for the last century, it has steadily found its footing as a place for painters, sculptors, potters, and more. Noted American artists Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth settled in nearby San Patricio in the 1930s (see "Hurd on the Range," page 22), and the late sculptor and fiberglass artist Luis Jiménez made his home in Hondo in the mid-1980s.

Whether you're walking or driving down Sudderth Drive, the main drag in Ruidoso, you'll feel the gravitational pull of the town's welcoming mural, which spells out all the things Ruidoso is known for in bold colors: skiing, horse racing, mountains, and beautiful vistas. You might feel the urge to stop and take a picture in front of it, and if you're lucky, the person you hand your camera to might just be the artist who painted it.

Muralist Michael Fish, who is from Capitan, about 17 miles northeast of Ruidoso, painted three commissioned works along Ruidoso's Midtown Mural Walk (visitruidoso.com/ruidoso-mural-walk).

As he toured them with Pasatiempo a few weeks ago, he paused along the way when visitors asked him to take their picture, not knowing they were asking the artist.

"I wanted [to do] this one," says Fish, a cheerful person who wears paint-splattered sweatshirts, of the main mural of the town's letters filled with Ruidoso-related attractions. "It's the town mural. It's a tourist town. It makes sense it would be seen more than the others."

Inside the letters are Billy the Kid and Smokey Bear, both characters who found fame in the area (albeit for different reasons). Blue skies and brown mountains dominate the background.

Fish says the Ruidoso mural took about a month to complete. He painstakingly outlined the letters with tape in order to get everything precise and tried projecting his original drawing onto the wall, which is curved.

"I couldn't do it on this wall because of the weird perspective," he says. "I didn't do a grid, per se, but I had to measure everything. It was more labor intensive in the beginning just to get everything up there. It was raining and stuff, so I had tarps up all around me."

Fish, who is also a graphic designer, painted other Sudderth Drive murals. His colorful 12-foot-tall Billy the Kid is based on the famous photograph of the outlaw, and it's set against a mountain backdrop on the slatted garage door of Happy Trails Gift Shop.

ON THE ROAD TO RUIDOSO

Ruidoso is packed with arts and other activities, especially during the summer months (learn more at discoverruidoso.com).

First up: Opening weekend at Ruidoso Downs Race Track is May 24-27 (raceruidoso.com), which is less of an arts experience and more of a place to let off steam and watch the ponies run. The annual Lincoln County Art Loop is July 5-7 (artloop.org). The Alto Artists Tour is August 2-4 (altoartists.com). For a glimpse at the performing arts and live performances, visit the Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts, which also houses a dazzling collection of Dale Chihuly's glass art (108 Spencer Road, Alto; spencertheater.com).

Ruidoso is also packed with an array of small and large art galleries. The following is a sampling.

* The Adobe Fine Art: 2905 Sudderth Drive; theadobefineart.com

* Aigulya Studio & Gallery: 1009 Mechem Drive; aigulya.com

* Grizzly's Bears: 2804 Sudderth Drive

* Mitchell's Silver: 2622 Sudderth Drive; mitchells silver.net

* Mountain Arts Gallery & Framing: 2530 Sudderth Drive; mountainartsgallery.com

* White Mountain Pottery: 2328 Sudderth Drive; whitemountainpottery.net

* Woodswan (handcrafted furniture): 27489 US 70, Glencoe; woodswan.com

"This is a different substrate for a different canvas," he says. "Painting on wood was much different than painting on this metal. It was a learning curve."

His Smokey Bear, emblazoned on the side of Unique Boutique, features the iconic U.S. Forest Service mascot holding a shovel and standing next to a stylized deer and skunk. Smokey is about eight feet tall, and Fish says he didn't have to use a projection technique to create it.

"It's like the old advertisement: Smokey and Friends," he says of his third mural within walking distance of the town center. "It's my take on a skunk, a rabbit, and a fawn. I made that sign to see how I wanted it and put Ruidoso, New Mexico, on it."

Find Fish's work at Roots Ruidoso, 2315 Sudderth Drive. More information at artbyfish.org.

Calling it quilts

For decades, Vicki Conley was one of Ruidoso's preeminent artisans, running a successful pottery business. She recently retired from the potter's wheel and now expresses herself through art quilts.

Conley says making pottery for so many years was hard on her body. She developed back problems and arthritis and felt stifled creatively, even as she was using her hands to make things that people use every day.

"I made functional pottery for the kitchen. Over and over and over and over. The same items. That's what I was known for," she says. " I found fiber art in 2003. I was doing that at the same time and finally it got to the point where I could retire from pottery and just do fiber art."

Conley says she's been crafty her entire life, starting at a young age making art out of holiday craft magazines and soon graduated to making yarn animals that she sold in middle school.

She wanted to be an art teacher, she says, until the ninth grade, when she had a special teacher who taught science. Conley shelved her creative instincts, "did the math and science thing" in high school, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's in physiology.

If that sounds like a weird combination of talents and skills, Conley says there are more science-minded artists than you might think.

"I think you have to be creative in science," she says. "You have to be able to think up a new approach to a new problem and then design some experiments. And because you've had to be creative in science, there's no reason you can't be creative in art as well."

Conley started doing pottery at home while raising her two children as a stay-at-home mom. She put her scientist hat away and began to make pottery.

She threw pots while her kids were napping. The booth fee at her first arts and crafts show was just $4 — they can cost as much as $600 today — and she sold $50 worth of pottery. She was over the moon.

"You're motivated to make more stuff if somebody likes your stuff and wants to buy it," she says. "I made a living doing arts and crafts fairs for 20 years, and when my children were grown and both off in college and graduate school, that's when we bought this property."

Conley came to Ruidoso in 1982, and her home and studio, Pinion Pottery Studio and Gallery, are just a vigorous gallop away from Ruidoso Downs Race Track & Casino. She leased out her pottery studio and now makes vibrant pieces of quilt art that recall Ruidoso landscapes and America's national parks.

Conley has entered her quilts in exhibitions and is a member of Studio Art Quilt Associates, a group dedicated to promoting quilting as fine art.

"As soon as you say you're an art quilter, somebody's going to say, 'My Grandma did that,'" she says. "We're using the layers and the stitching and the fabric in a different way made by an artist's totally original design. It's not somebody who's just making a pattern and choosing the fabric. That takes some initiative on the person's part, but it's not the same level of art as the art quilter who does everything themselves and the whole work is original."

See Vicki Conley's work at vicki-conley.com.

Glass roots

Deb Wight's innovations in glass and metallic art came out of necessity. The Alto-based artist says she had an epiphany 10 years ago while still living in Texas. She's worked in painting, mosaics, stained glass, and photography and started experimenting, pulling everything she had done before into a new kind of composition that incorporated a variety of different glass cut and shaped by hand.

Wight was doing a lot of soldering to form the backgrounds of her pieces when she got sick with both copper and lead poisoning and had to stop working. When she recovered, she had to find a way to keep making art, but with nontoxic ingredients.

Now, the backgrounds of her pieces — which often resemble the mountain landscape she lives in — are made of a wood base and embellished with eight layers of metallic pastes, gels, and paints before she even gets to her glass.

She uses crushed glass, art glass, strip glass, head glass, dichroic glass, and even a bit of stained glass to complete her portraits.

"Everything's very spontaneous," she says of her working process. "I draw nothing. I just get out a piece of glass, and it tells me what it wants to be."

She buys glass pre-crushed, she says, because it took her a long time to physically do it by hand. But the strips of glass in the pieces are hand cut and ground down so they don't have jagged edges and then tacked in place before they're permanently fixed with a resin pour.

Wight stands over the pieces to work her magic.

"I work flat, and it's hard, especially when you're working big, to see what it looks like until you stand it up," she says. "I usually don't stand it up and look at it until it's finished and before I resinate; once it's resined, its done-done."

The resin process takes about six hours to set, and working with it has challenges.

"If there's a bug in the room, it will find it," she says. "If he's too set in, he's got to stay there. And then the next day, you've got to dig him out and re-resin the entire piece."

Wight says she moved to Alto about three years ago; when she was in Texas, she sold her art in street fairs and festivals. Now, she sells out of her home, and thanks to the Alto and Lincoln County art communities, she has hundreds of people coming through on the first weekend of July and on the first weekend of August during art walk events.

"My husband mans the art upstairs, and I man the studio downstairs," she says. "We sell for three days, and it's amazing."

Find Deb Wight's work at debwightstudios.com.

Ruidoso or busts

Sculptor Rory Combs always thought he'd retire to Colorado. But in 2008, when his wife, Rita, pulled the trigger and moved on from her career, they got another idea.

"We found out that everything was so expensive in Colorado," says Combs. "We subscribed to Where to Retire magazine, and they had mentioned Ruidoso a couple times. So on one of our trips to Colorado, we drove down to see what it was like. We found out it's just like Colorado but farther south. It snows, and by tomorrow, most of it will be gone."

Combs, an Illinois native, studied wood sculpting at Iowa State University, where he majored in ad design, and worked with wood for about a decade after college. When he took a workshop on making clay busts, he fell in love with the art form.

Most of the busts he makes are of Native American figures from the late 19th century. Combs is working on a four-foot-tall figure, the largest piece he's ever made, that he says will have about 80 to 100 pounds of clay and probably another 100 to 150 pounds of brass by the time it's finished.

All of the sculptures start with a metal pipe and a stick figure wire armature frame for the legs and arms. Combs then methodically builds his sculptures by clay from the ground up. When he's done, he sends them to a Colorado foundry to produce in sets of 12 or 18.

"One of the things you have to do is make sure they're mold-maker friendly," he says. "When they do a mold like this, it's a latex, so it's flexible. They'll pour a wax casting, which is hollow; it's like 3/16 inches thick and that wax is brittle. When you pull the latex mold off the wax, you don't want to have a real deep undercut that would make it hard to get the mold off."

Combs developed a technique to add shadows and contouring on the faces of his pieces. He adds a homemade patina post-foundry and sprays a diluted sulfur solution to blacken it, and then he goes to work by hand.

"You can go at it with steel wool and Scotch-Brite and things like that to lighten up areas," he says. "I like to have some contrast with the hair on the face. Then you rinse off the neutralizer with water and dry it, and you hit it with a torch at about 200 degrees. You want it just hot enough that when you spray it with a solution, it evaporates very quickly. Then I spray it with a ferric nitrate. It's an iron-based product that gives it more of a golden brownish color."

Combs' studio is on the Art Loop studio tour. His work is in Santa Fe at San Francisco Street Art Gallery, 50 E. San Francisco Street; sfsgallery.com. More information at rorycombs.com.

Chasing the thunder

The family that mines together, stays together.

Lori Lytle Coleman and her husband, Bruce Williams, were looking for a second career they could do while they raised their two young children. That's when they discovered an unexpected enterprise: thundereggs, nodule-like rocks found in rhyolitic lava flows that, when cross-sectioned, are layered with contrasting minerals.

For the past 15 years, they've been hauling in huge amounts of stone from their quarry in Deming, cutting them up, and seeing what's inside. When they find an intact thunderegg, they can sell it for $16 to more than $200 for larger specimens. But they never know what they have until the rock is sliced open.

"The shell is rhyolite and in the middle, where all the minerals go into — like a cave, like Carlsbad Caverns, kind of — it makes these inner formations," Coleman says of thundereggs. "Common opal. Calcite and manganese. Quartz. Agate. Every one is different. But you have to open them with a diamond blade. We cut them open, we look at them, and that tells us what they become. A belt buckle. A necklace. Firepit stone."

Their Alto gallery and work space, called the Spanish Stirrup Rock Shop, resembles both an industrial facility and a museum of geology. Visitors walk past a 36-inch saw to see the wares, and several old and worn blades line the walls.

The couple's commercial tumblers can turn out 150 pounds of tumbled rock every three days, but it's still an arduous task to crack open all the stone. They recently returned from mining 20,000 pounds of rock, and Coleman says it will take years to go through it all.

"This store has to be chock-a-block full before May, because May to September, Ruidoso is crazy," Coleman says. "The track is open. The Texans are here. And they love rocks."

Spanish Stirrup Rock Shop is at 156 Hill Country Road, Alto. Visit ssrockshop.com.