Robert Hooton: Albuquerque Elders May 7, 2009

Robert Hooton is a visual poet who recreates spiritually fantastic experiences. His paintings evoke a spirit of Southwestern enchantment and mysticism and transcend the temporal world. During the 1980s, in his acrylic, pastel, and colored pencil works, Hooton simplified nature's complex forms into elegant shapes that hover in imaginative landscapes. The work calls to mind the sublime encounter and graceful sensitivity of Mark Rothko's color field paintings, the synthetic cubist collages of Pablo Picasso, and the philosophy of Zen, which emphasizes experiential wisdom realized through meditation.