In 1924, midwestern artist Raymond Jonson permanently moved to New Mexico, where he would later become a formative member of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), which sought to defend and promote non-objective and abstract art in the Southwest. Divorcing their art from the powerful desert landscape, a frequent subject for regional artists, members of the TPG took an introspective approach, expressing imaginative worlds and dreamlike vistas through modern methods of color and space light theory.

In this snowy landscape, Jonson’s use of sculptural elements, molded and stacked one atop another, results in a whimsical, abstracted winter scene. Jonson paints nature as highly geometric, using both line and color to create a sense of chaotic movement and rhythm. Ordered snowflakes fill the background, harmoniously maintained and directed by swirling linework, whose repetition likewise organizes the winter squall.

Excerpt from

Erin Pinon, DMA label text, 2016.

• The Raymond Jonson Collection, UNMAM
  View more works by Raymond Jonson at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.

• Raymond Jonson, Biography
  Read a biography of Raymond Jonson at the Smithsonian American Art Museum website.