05 Mar A VISIONARY OF LIGHT AND LANDSCAPE

Painter Dave Santillanes is an expert in muted colors, edgy quietness, and ethereal light. His landscape and figurative paintings beckon. Although his plein air pieces are too dignified to shout, they nevertheless have a magnetism that has brought admiring collectors.

“Everywhere I look, there is something to paint. I understand why artists in their 80s and 90s are still painting. We feel we are going to run out of time to paint all that we see,” Santillanes says.

Fire on the Mesa | Oil | 30 x 72 inches

Originally from Northern Colorado, the painter, whose formal education spanned fine and graphic arts, can mark personal, professional, and critical success. He belongs to the Cowboy Artists of America and is represented by such galleries as Santa Fe Trails Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Abend Gallery in Denver, Colorado, and Illume Gallery of Fine Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. One day, he may find he has more awards than paintings — and he will be the first and perhaps only one to be surprised.

The Western artist desires to create works that reveal the essence of a place or person. The avid outdoorsman is described as a great painter, an interpreter of nature, and a devoted family man. Yet, he is more than that. He is a man who brings beauty.

The Day Begins | Oil | 24 x 48 inches

Take it from someone who knows. Cathy Turner, chair of Quest for the West, says the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art’s signature art show and sale in Indianapolis, Indiana, eagerly awaits Santillanes’ works. “We always are happy to welcome Dave and his family. But especially anticipating what beauty he will bring to our show,” she says.

Santillanes’ artist workshops have flung him as far as France. But where you will meet the artist is in his landscapes. Santillanes’ works draw you into a world you sense exists; through his paintings, you enter it.

Fading to Gray | Oil | 22 x 46 inches

Treasure, a painting that Santillanes is currently working on, is an example. Look carefully at the child. Look at the sea, the Alaskan coastline. Each has within it a seed of what is lasting. The child is exploring a world of beauty, yet she, too, is part of it. There is in each of us the recollection of a period in childhood in which our young selves picked up a seashell or a rock or a small creature and knew, immediately and instinctively, that it was a whole world.

How can Santillanes distill such images into moments that stretch across eras? Here, in Treasure, an answer: The child is his daughter, Callie, at age 9.

Kaibab Trail | Oil | 36 x 60 inches

Santillanes has pursued creativity since his youth. As a child, a pencil, crayon, or pen was frequently in his small hand, which was often sketching, drawing, and expanding what he saw in an attempt to see it better, to represent it with more accuracy, to infuse it with meaning.

The former wildland firefighter and ski instructor once eyed lockers on a ski hill where he worked and thought, “That would be a good place to paint.” And he did. Day after day. In a tiny space. In the great outdoors. It is reminiscent of Monet’s time in a cramped addition to a hatmaker’s shop in order to paint ever-changing views of Rouen Cathedral.

Santillanes says he learned from closely examining masters — including the late landscape artist Richard Schmid — whose paintings from photographs and life were different in their overall effect. Consequently, he is outdoors, often alone, roaming the high country of the Central Rockies, the tools of his trade on hand. Most of the artist’s paintings begin in the field with plein air studies. This allows Santillanes to capture both the physical aspects of nature and the sensory experience of being there. As he writes in his artist statement, “This intense observation brings a spiritual intimacy with the scene that can’t be achieved in mere passing and allows me to ‘speak’ with complete sincerity in each painting.”

Treasure (Study) | Oil | 12 x 18 inches

Santillanes would argue that, whether a weathered barn or the Grand Canyon, what’s illustrated is the same because it is the same in him; that is to say, he surrenders to his love of the landscape and its inhabitants.

In Silence of Winter, which garnered both the Henry Farny Award for best painting and the Artist Choice Award at Quest for the West 2022, and Fading to Gray, which placed third overall in the eighth annual PleinAir Salon Art Competition, Santillanes shows that even quiet has a voice, even stillness has motion, and that even ephemeral snow, clouds, and water have structure.

“His work is mesmerizing; it’s as though you were there,” says Michele Couch, partner and executive director of Santa Fe Trails Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Silence of Winter | Oil | 24 x 38 inches

His painting The Day Begins was awarded Anne Marion Best in Show and Gold Medal for Oil Painting in the 2024  exhibition and sale by the Cowboy Artists of America. Morning, signified by sunrise, has yet to throw off the mists that still circle the foothills. The thin light in the thick air casts down colors in shades of pink. In the foreground, a cowboy on horseback; in the backdrop, the shifting shapes of cattle. If you have never been in such an environment, you are in it now. You, too, feel air weighted with water and the chill of a wintry landscape made rosy by breaking light.

The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley said his art form made immortal all that was best and most beautiful in the world, arresting “the vanishing apparitions” humankind encounters.

Santillanes is the painter who makes poetry with his brush, bringing forth forms that refuse to recede into nothingness, breathing life onto canvas, ceaselessly whispering of beauty behind, beauty before.