Growing up in Boston’s inner city, Tony De Luz became fascinated with the Southwest. “My mother was very interested in Native American artifacts, particularly turquoise jewelry,” he explains. “Along with the jewelry came the beautiful photos of Monument Valley, the wide-open vistas of Northern Arizona and the Grand Canyon, and the area where my wife Dana and I would eventually raise our four children—Sedona. It just looked and felt like something I had to see at some point in my life! Other than Arizona Highways and National Geographic,the only place I could see these scenes was in movie Westerns. Going to college at Eastern New Mexico University in the late ’70s, I saw that the wide-open spaces still existed, on Highway 70. While it wasn’t as classically beautiful as the mountains and villages of Northern New Mexico and the rock formations of Arizona, there was a certain charm to those small towns.”
Yucca Motel, gouache on watercolor paper, 20 x 13¾"
Casino, gouache on watercolor paper, 20 x 13½"
Still a Boston boy, he has been a Southwesterner for 28 years. “Southwestern art, as far as I’m concerned, is more than ‘cowboys and Indians,’ Kokopellis and lovely red rock landscapes. It’s those rusty cars; it’s old neon signs with chipped and fading paint and long stretches of highway. It’s small towns and motels that have seen better days. And it’s all beautiful.”
His gouache, Yucca Motel, displays his skill and his point of view celebrating the story of the often overlooked.
Rust Never Sleeps, gouache on watercolor paper, 15¼ x 24½"
Throughout his successful career in commercial art, he has painted the Southwest, not as picture-perfect postcard views but as if the viewer were experiencing the scenes along with him. “My compositions break the scene—cutting letters off in signs, parts of people and vehicles. To me, it creates the feeling of spontaneity,” he says. “Something that is neatly framed, placed right in the middle of the page? A lot of people do that. I like the composition to almost look like I’ve leaned out of a car to shoot it, as unposed as a metal neon sign can look.”
El Cholo, acrylic on Bristol paper, 10½ x 8"
He discovered neon signs on a trip to Los Angeles. “Even though it was daytime, and the signs weren’t lit up,” he says, “I found the shadows the neon tubes formed as they stretched across the painted letters to be much more interesting than the garish colored neon messages that they were designed to show. Complete words and sentences weren’t as important as the letterforms and shadows to me.”
An exhibition of his work, Tony De Luz: Old Signs, Rusty Cars and Some New Paintings, opens with a reception on February 16, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and remains on view through March 1. —
Blue Rain Gallery 544 S. Guadalupe Street • Santa Fe, NM 87501 • (505) 954-9902 • www.blueraingallery.com
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