Light of the Southwest: Paintings by Cynthia Littlefield features eighteen works of art created by Cynthia Littlefield (b. 1929) between 1990 and 2004. The paintings were inspired by a visit to New Mexico in the late 1970s, which evoked in the artist memories of her childhood in Arizona and the exaggerated light that cuts across the deserts and banded canyons of the Southwest. When developing the paintings, Littlefield felt her way through those early impressions to create a personal atmospheric language for the southwestern landscape. The works convey the artist's emotional response more to the light of the Southwest than to the landscape itself.

Born in Arizona, Littlefield took art lessons as a young girl and excelled at painting. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, where her teachers included Seymour Fogel and Everett Spruce. Moving to Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s, she took drawing classes at the Corcoran School of Art and eventually enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at American University, completing her degree in 1980. While studying at American University Littlefield taught adult sculpture, painting, and watercolor classes at night and also worked at the front desk of The Phillips Collection. There, she was influenced by one-on-one discussions with such artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Philip Guston and by the thick, textural work of Nicolas de Staël.

Included in this exhibition are works from three of Littlefield’s series--Desert, Acequia Madre, and Canyon. In the Desert series, she sought to come to terms visually with the space and color of the desert. The resulting paintings are big, bright, and radiantly colorful, bursting with warmth and sunshine.

The Acequia Madre series focuses on an irrigation canal system--the Acequia Madre, or Mother Ditch--built by the Spanish to supply water to a fortified plaza area and farmlands that developed along the Santa Fe River. In a manner similar to her formatting for the Desert series, Littlefield used bands of color to represent the landscape. However, the widest bands in the Acequia Madre paintings depict the expanse of the ditch itself.

The Canyon series represents the widest ditch of all, the Grand Canyon. In these works, she sought to depict the canyon as if it were a stage with three distinct settings. She wanted to added thickness and texture to the works but knew that building up too much paint on the surface could cause problems. Paint can dry, crack, and, even worse, flake off. To avoid these problems, Littlefield rolled paint into small beads, allowing them to partially dry before manipulating them into small concave structures that she then attached to the surface. These small, dished-shaped beads give the paintings a three-dimensional quality. And in the pictorial sense, they give the illusion of markers far off in the distance, so far that the viewer cannot make out the specifics, but only the sense of structure and shadow.

Littlefield’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the mid-Atlantic region and has been included in group exhibitions at the Marianne Deson Gallery in Chicago and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., among other locations. Her most recent solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1998, featured her Canyon series. This exhibition showcases some of her more recent work.

Light of the Southwest: Paintings by Cynthia Littlefield is open to the public Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., except federal holidays. Reservations are required 24 hours in advance. For reservations and further information, please call (202) 452-3778 or fax (202) 736-5680.