Oil paintings depicting Northern New Mexico by Mary Beth Pizzoli

Artist Statement

I feel very fortunate to be an artist in Santa Fe. Our clear air, combined with the high altitude, provides bright sunlight. I'm inspired by the natural beauty here. It's lovely most of the year, from the golden aspens and cottonwoods of fall, to snow on adobes, to wildflowers alongside dirt roads and gardens inside adobe walls all summer and spring. I try to convey the essence of the four seasons of Northern New Mexico in my paintings.

As far back as I can remember, I've been painting and drawing. When I was 12, we moved from St. Louis, Missouri, to Taos, New Mexico, where my parents opened a cafe and ice cream shop. Artists who ate there gave me lessons in exchange for free meals. I was the youngest member of the Taos Artists Association and won a scholarship to the summer art school at the University of Kansas when I was only 14. I didn't think I could earn my living as an artist, though, so I later earned a degree in Management. I continued to paint and study art while raising my two children and developing my career in Human Resources. I took an early retirement in 2000 to become a full-time artist and to travel with my husband.

I'm affiliated with several Northern New Mexico artists' groups and have been represented by galleries and poster shops. I was on the Board of the Santa Fe Society of Artists for five years. My paintings have been reproduced on the covers of catalogs, a music CD and in a calendar. I've shown in many juried art shows all over the Southwest and have received several awards for my art.

We live in the foothills southeast of Santa Fe in an adobe house I designed and built with my family. Here we're surrounded by aspens, ponderosas and pinons, the gardens in summer, and always the mountain vistas to the north, east and west.

After painting in a number of mediums over the years, I now work only with oils. I'm primarily a studio painter but do some plein air work, especially in the summer when I love being outdoors. I paint from photographs, small plein air studies, memories of a place and imagination. When I'm not painting, we travel, sometimes to foreign countries, but often over the back roads of northern New Mexico looking for new scenes.

My landscapes are warm and bright, yet quiet and peaceful, and my style is impressionistic realism. I'm always striving to show the effect of the pure light on the landscape.