Image Source: ADDISON ROWE GALLERY (Matthew Rowe, left; John De Puy center; Victoria Addison, right.)JOHN DE PUY
1927-2023
Born in 1927, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, John De Puy's original roots were in New Mexico, with his grandfather, who owned a ranch in Mora in the late 1800s. In the early 1950s, De Puy studied with artist Hans Hoffman in New York, following service in the military as a medic during WWII and the beginning of the Korean War.
De Puy visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1949 and returned in 1952 to study with Louis Ribak at the Taos Valley Art School through the GI Bill. De Puy, along with Louis Ribak, Beatrice Mandelman, Agnes Martin, Robert Ray, Earl Stroh, Cliff Harmon, Ted Egri, and several others, would become a group of like-minded modern artists known as the Taos Moderns.
During the 1950s, De Puy and author Edward Abbey made a pact they would fight to protect and conserve the previously wild landscapes of the American Southwest-- one through a paintbrush, the other through a pen. Today, we now see many of these lands the artist painted throughout his career protected by park status or returned to their original caretakers.
A solo exhibition of De Puy's work was held at the Roswell Museum & Art Center in 2006, titled The Ground of Being, and more recently, a 2016 retrospective of his work was shown at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.
In March of 2023, De Puy passed away peacefully in his off-grid home in Ojo Caliente, NM.
JOHN DE PUY BIOGRAPHY
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John De Puy is a third-generation New Mexican. His grandfather, Chester De Puy, came to the Southwest in the 1880s and ran a grain mill in Mora, New Mexico. John’s parents moved east during the early years of the Great Depression, and John was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1927. The family soon returned to New Mexico, where Taos, with its surrounding area, became the home that John would always return to; it is where he lives today.
In Johns words, “the two greatest influences on my work have been Expressionism and the Southwest. Expressionism has influenced me as a tradition, beginning with Edvard Munch and Van Gogh and continuing through German Expressionists. In this tradition, I translate visual perception to an inner experience, which is manifested in paint.
The Southwest and its native peoples are the immediate source of my work. This land speaks of a time sense other than our western European lineal time. It is this land, its beauty, its myths and its dreams of wholeness that nourish me.
Finally, I owe more than I can ever express to the support and love of my wife, Isabel, who is in her own right a fabulous artist.”
1998
Oil on canvas
40 x 28 inches
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