Within sight of each other in Santa Fe, N.M.,
are buildings housing the works of two great American artists.
One is the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who has a museum dedicated to her work.
The other is the animator Chuck Jones, whose work is among those sold at a
gallery down the street from the O’Keeffe Museum.
O’Keeffe is known for her paintings of the New Mexico desert, especially
sun-bleached animal skulls.
Jones is also best known for his depictions of the desert. His desert is
different from O’Keeffe’s, though. The Jones desert is full of towering mesas and deep gorges, and the
Roadrunner is always speeding through the landscape with Wile E. Coyote in full
pursuit—often with the help of Acme Rocket Powered Roller Skates, Acme Earthquake Pills,
Acme Rocket Sleds, and other pinnacles of product design
We were in Santa Fe mainly because Sharon is a great admirer of O’Keeffe. There was a special exhibition of her abstract work, which I won’t even attempt to describe in words, because the whole point of abstraction is
that it’s saying things that words cannot. But we went through the exhibit twice on two
different days, the better to drink in the images and feel the color and to see
the world a little bit through the eyes of a great artist.
But here’s where my inner Mr. Lowbrow comes out.
I think Chuck Jones is a great artist, too.
He created indelible comic characters out of drawings on a page and sound
effects.
It is really hard to be consistently funny, and Roadrunner cartoons are.
And, if you turn your head a squint just right, Roadrunner cartoons are even
profound.
I’m not kidding. Think of it: Wile E. Coyote is absolutely convinced that the only
thing standing between him and the achievement of his dream is finding the
right thing to buy, the right technology. If he just buys the right thing (from
Acme, of course), he can be happy. And when the technology fails him, and the
Roadrunner sticks out his tongue and zips away, Wile E. picks himself up from
the bottom of the canyon and—what? Questions his approach to life? Nope—he orders something else.
Chuck Jones manages to say something about human nature in a seven-minute Looney
Toons cartoon that it would take a French existentialist 350 pages to say.
Without a single laugh.
There’s also this: when you enter the Chuck Jones Gallery, there’s a bench that has life-size figures around it: to the left, Wile E. Coyote; to
the right, the Roadrunner; and behind, a cutout of Chuck Jones.
Chuck Jones, American artist. Sharon took my picture on the bench.
Trying to describe Santa Fe may be almost as futile as trying to describe O’Keeffe abstracts. Clear blue desert skies, intense sun, cool at night,
moderately hot during the day, but not the kind of Nashville heat that sits
outside the air conditioned house licking its chops.
People in Santa Fe may have gone a little overboard on the adobe-style
architecture, though. Everything seems to be adobe-style. There are adobe
structures hundreds of years old, but there are also faux adobe structures that
were put up last week. This creates an oddly flat architectural landscape in
which a beloved historical landmark looks remarkably like the Target, Hyundai
dealership, Walgreen’s, and the International House of Pancakes, all of which are also in muted adobe
colors.
What a minor quibble. One night we drove to a high point in the city’s Museum Hill area, which was pretty much deserted after dark, and, moreover,
actually dark. We watched the sun set, leaving a crescent moon and shimmering
Venus in the Western desert sky, and then we watched those setting, too. The
stars came out. Sharon even saw a shooting star. I was looking the other way
and missed it, so she got to make the wish.
