Nature’s Language

ONY ABEYTA PAINTS remote regions, but his landscapes are neither still nor silent. They seem to pulsate with activity, and one can almost hear a sort of sound when looking at them, as if they were emitting vibrations. Abeyta’s skies are striated with zigzag brushstrokes that seem to depict lines of force that are always there but normally invisible to the eye. And when the skies let loose with rain, drenching the mountains, trees, or desert beneath, the rain comes down in stylized bolts that look like extensions of what has been going on up in the clouds. Abeyta does a lot of his work in the Santa Fe area, where he has a home, and his approach captures the special dynamism of the New Mexico landscape, in which the light is quick to shift and the weather sweeps