Mesa Verde

Location

Country: Other
City: other locations abroad

This etching with aquatint by Valerie Thornton is composed of sandy-coloured textured vertical and horizontal blocks, with a dark brownish-black band running across the top. Its title, Mesa Verde, relates to Mesa Verde National Park, in the state of Arizona, United States, which was established in 1906 to preserve and interpret the archeological heritage of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from 600 to 1300 CE. Today, the park protects nearly 5,000 known archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. It is these unique dwellings that Thornton appears to have focused on, as if viewed frontally – the vertical blocks in the middle ground indicative of the walls of the carved out habitats, with the horizontal blocks further up pointing to the overlying natural rock face, while the dark band at the top of the image would suggest a night-time sky.
This etching is one of several works produced by Thornton in 1964–65 while she was in residency in New York, capturing her impressions of the city’s grey skyscrapers and arid sandy landscapes on desert excursions, including Navajo Canyon in Arizona. Speaking of her working methods, Thornton said:The starting point is always a response to something seen – usually an architectural subject. It may be a cathedral, a stone wall or a skyscraper ... The attraction of architecture as a subject is its essential stillness and order.

Born in London, Valerie Thornton was evacuated to Canada during the Second World War, before returning in 1944, following which she trained in art at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting from 1949. In 1954 she undertook an eight-month residency with S. W. Hayter at the Atelier 17 in Paris. On her return to England she purchased her first etching press. After a six-week grand tour of Italy in 1955, she succeeded Howard Hodgkin as Assistant Art Teacher at Charterhouse School, also teaching at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, Hadleigh. She did a ten month residency at the Pratt Graphic Art Center Workshop in New York and a trip to Mexico in the early 1960s, where she experimented with woodcuts. In 1965, she became a founder-member of the Printmakers’ Council. Thornton moved to the Minories in Colchester in 1966, after marrying Michael Chase, who had been appointed curator there. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter/Etchers and Engravers in 1970. In 1974, she settled in Chelsworth, West Sussex; thereafter followed regular summer working trips to Spain, France and Italy in search of Romanesque material for her etchings.

Places

United States of America, Colorado

Subjects

abstract, landscape C20th

Materials & Techniques

etching, aquatint

Artist

Valerie Thornton (1931 - 1991)

Title

Mesa Verde

Edition

10/30

Date

1965

Medium

Etching and aquatint

Acquisition

Purchased from Editions Alecto, 1966

Inscription

below image: 10/30 / Valerie Thornton

GAC number

7483