New year, new studio and ever-renewing inspiration

“It’s full of light.” That’s the first thing our founder Aleta Pippin says about her new studio in the Railyard district. “The north-facing windows bring in enough sunshine that most of the time I can work only by natural light.”

One look at Aleta’s paintings and you’ll see why that’s a priority. Think of the abstract artist’s brush as a prism that unleashes the full spectrum of sunlight, and her canvases as portals into galaxies of shimmering color. These are works created in close collaboration with nature, so it was important for Aleta to find a window of her own.

As a new year dawns, Aleta is putting the finishing touches on the new space. It’s a perfect time to look back at the artistic transformations that brought her here and forward to an exciting year at Pippin Contemporary.

“New starts are about finding fresh directions for your work, moving freely with your creative flow,” Aleta says. For a process-oriented artist like Aleta, art making is a form of meditation on the past, present and future. “Abstract painting isn’t an isolated genre… it is, at its very core, derived from life itself,” she says. As Aleta knows well, when art and life so closely intertwine, artistic passion can manifest in many different ways.

Aleta started her artistic career at four. Back then she was focused on the figurative, sketching horses in pencil and crayon. In her teen years she was an avid figure drawer and designed posters for her high school. Aleta’s creativity turned to the profound art of marriage and motherhood in her early adult life, and then to the business world in 1984, when she founded her own company.

“Business is creating,” she says. “The same as creating a painting. It’s first having a vision that excites, then considering that vision long enough to be inspired, focusing long enough for the inspiration to move you into action, holding the vision until the action manifests into a business.”

In the mid-1990’s, Aleta felt the impulse to channel this ingenuity back into art. Remembering her early years, she started painting figurative and still life pieces, but it wasn’t until she ventured into the boundless universe of abstraction that her inspiration was truly unleashed.

“My paintings are spontaneous expression, flowing freely through me in rhythm to the music I’m listening to,” Aleta says. She creates her work under elemental conditions, wielding wind, heat and brush to direct swirling constellations of color across her canvases.The paint will dry, but the feeling of dynamic motion never settles.

Aleta’s perpetual metamorphosis took her down another path in 1997. She’d secured representation from Gallery 821 in 1996, but followed her intuition and took a sabbatical from art making until 2000. Upon her return, it was immediately clear that something had changed. She felt a new connection to her work, and the canvases responded with resounding joy. “Color is vibrational. It has an effect on your physiology,” Aleta says. Artist and art were keenly in tune.

Aleta was prepared to fully immerse herself in the fiery sphere that had opened to her, and in 2006 founded Pippin Meikle Fine Art with business partner and painter Barbara Meikle. In 2011, she opened Pippin Contemporary.

Our downtown gallery has been a continued source of inspiration for Aleta, combining the invigorating roles of businessperson and fine artist. In 2012 we put on 11 shows featuring all of the artists in our studio, including Aleta’s ethereal solo show “Spontaneous Combustion” that pushed her high key paintings to new intensities and also intriguingly dipped back into the figurative. 2013 looks to be equally as transformational, with 7 shows lined up and a refreshed commitment to reaching out to you via blogging and social media.

When Aleta’s easel is finally in place, it’s easy to see why she chose this studio space. It really is full to the brim with New Mexico sunshine, and with all that light comes an uplifting sensation of swirling fresh air. It’s tempting to wish that it could stay pretty as a picture, but when the paint starts flying, it will take on yet another kind of beauty. Aleta knows this sort of beauty—that of endless creation and rebirth—better than most.

Check out our Twitter and Facebook pages to learn more about all of the artists at Pippin Contemporary.