Hasta la Vista

the ordinary magic of life

The magical world found in artist Carolyn Barford’s work often draws inspirationfrom the landscape around her northern New Mexico homestead.

By Lesley Poling-Kempes
Photography by Julie Dean

This article first appeared in Spring 2008 Su Casa

People who see the art of Carolyn Barford seem to have a universal response to the wonderful, whimsical scenes of land and animals she creates: we want to step right into her paintings and be part of her world! Barford’s cliff-house-dwelling bears and cloud-hopping rabbits, tree-trimming foxes, and bread-baking bobcats are all part of a harmonious, benevolent community that embodies a perfect balance of wilderness and domesticity. Like a great book, Barford’s illustrations introduce us to a place, time, and characters we want to visit again and again.

Barford’s paintings capture what she calls “the ordinary magic of life.” The delightful fantasy world found in Barford’s images swirls around the creative imagination of Barford’s head, but it also is grounded in the places Barford has known and loved in her own life. “I see my animal characters doing things I’m doing, like cooking or gardening. Or I find their tracks in my head and follow after them! Other times the animals and the places I paint are like memories of things that may or may not have happened.”

It seems only fitting that Barford lives on an old homestead, El Ojito (the Little Spring), in an almost mystically remote and beautiful part of New Mexico that sparks and nourishes her creative life. Tucked above a small valley in the rugged Ortega Mountain country near the village of Vallecitos, the historic homestead ranks among the most isolated properties in northern New Mexico, surrounded on four sides by the deep canyon and steep mesa country of the Carson National Forest. El Ojito has known many incarnations over the centuries, but for the past few decades it has been the cherished home of Barford and her Shooting Star Studio cast of characters.

“This is the backdrop to my life,” Barford says. “Of course it has become the backdrop for my characters’ lives, too!”

A resident of New Mexico for more than 30 years, Barford was formally trained as a sculptor and painter at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. After college, Barford relocated to the Southwest where her deft and fanciful illustrations soon focused on the desert and mountain environment that surrounded her. Those familiar with the characters that inhabit Barford’s paintings—sentient bears and sociable coyotes, playful ravens, affable snakes, gardening cats, and star-gazing jackrabbits—know how her illustrations capture the real and imagined stories of New Mexico in paintings that are at once astonishingly colorful and detailed images and lively, multifaceted narratives of a beloved place.

El Ojito is a place deserving of an artist’s adoration: the homestead is named for a spring that bubbles up from the light-brown sand of a remote mesa several miles above the Vallecitos valley. Because the spring is warm—water reaches the surface at a constant 87 degrees Fahrenheit—a lush and unique microcosm of flora and fauna thrives in an otherwise arid topography. In this rocky mesa country of juniper and piñon, yucca, prickly pear cactus, and scrub oak, deciduous trees are uncommon. At El Ojito mature cottonwoods follow the water’s descent down the mesa, and cattails and grasses surround the springhead where the water emerges in rhythmic bursts from the fine sand at the bottom of an aquamarine pool.

In high desert New Mexico such a mild, moist environment is a rare and wonderful gift. We can only imagine the power this spring held in the landscape of the people of prehistory. Springs are considered sacred sites to the region’s native peoples. The large hot springs 10 miles to the east at Ojo Caliente are of particular importance to the spiritual traditions of the Rio Grande Pueblos. El Ojito may be one of the springs ethnologist J. P. Harrington located in these sierras in 1919, called the “owl point pools” by his Tewa-speaking guide from San Juan Pueblo.

The country of the Vallecitos River in Rio Arriba County was once part of the homeland of the prehistoric Pueblo people who built villages to the south and east. Later the nomadic Jicarilla Apaches had summer hunting camps in these mountains. The 20th-century timber industry established the modern communities of Vallecitos and La Madera. The first road between these lumber towns and the larger communities of Española and Santa Fe wound up and over the mesas and passed the lush pool at El Ojito. The shaded springhead provided a natural rest stop for travelers crossing the mountains by wagon and horseback, and using the travertine made by the mineral water, a shrine was built for Our Lady of Guadalupe beneath the cottonwood trees.

There have always been more animals than people using the warm spring. Bear, fox, badger, deer, elk, bobcat, mountain lion, and jackrabbit frequent the warm pond; hawks, eagles, ravens, and the owls that may have given this place its first name circle the sky and stand watch in the high branches of the old cottonwoods. Game trails crisscross the foothills and mesas, connecting El Ojito with the upper sierras. These ancient pathways are littered with the prints and scat of the region’s wildlife, as well as the arrowheads and pot shards of long-ago hunters and gatherers.

Barford is deeply respectful of the people who settled upon or traveled through this place before her. Her paintings incorporate elements from their daily lives and often place the ancient stories alongside the contemporary ones, her images allegorical, perhaps, for life in modern New Mexico.
The first patent for the quarter section (160 acres) of land that included the warm spring under the cottonwoods was filed in 1912, the year of New Mexico statehood. The first dwelling on the homestead was a two-room casita built with ponderosa beams placed on end, side to side, and packed with mud. Called jacal or jacalita, this construction style was used throughout New Mexico from the 1700s until the early 20th century.

The homesteaders built a system of wood irrigation troughs that carried the spring water to the upper end of the canyon. This enabled them to plant fields of corn and alfalfa west and north of the house and to establish an orchard of apple, pear, and apricot trees.

In the next decades, the homestead at El Ojito changed hands several times. By the late 1920s, it was owned by an out-of-state family who most likely never visited the rustic dwelling and its miraculous warm spring. In the 1930s the homestead was given as a birthday present to Alice Johnston Kizer from Albuquerque. Like her predecessors, Kizer never lived here, but the land and its abundant water was used by local farmers who leased the fields and seasonally occupied the house.

In the early 1970s two brothers from Santa Fe bought the abandoned homestead. The old road that once connected Vallecitos to El Rito had been closed down for decades, and the homestead was surrounded by the land of Carson National Forest. Access to the property was via an unimproved, mile-long road of sand and stone that doubled for an arroyo in the summer monsoon season. The original casita had no roof, windows, or doors, no plumbing, no electricity, no telephone. For miles.

In the 1970s Santa Fe style was emerging onto the national art and design scene, but this part of northern New Mexico was still the undiscovered hinterlands. Barford was living in Santa Fe when she was introduced to the silence, space, and simple life found in the pristine landscape of El Ojito. She became a part-time resident at the homestead by the mid-1980s. Wanting to keep the homestead’s grassroots persona, its residents performed minimal renovations and additions to the historic jacal structure. In 1997 Barford became co-owner of El Ojito and moved full time into the rebuilt house that now included a kitchen, bathroom, and upstairs master bedroom and bath. Solar panels provided electricity, and the water from the spring was piped down into the house’s plumbing system. Telephone service didn’t reach the homestead until recently, but except for a few weather- or road-related emergencies, Barford didn’t really miss the connection to the outside world.

Over the years, the springhead was opened to allow a deeper, wider pool, and new irrigation pipes were installed, carrying the water to cultivated fields on the far corners of the ranch. A cement-lined holding pond was built below the springhead and became the year-round home for dozens of colorful koi, which thrived in the warm blue-green pool. More trees and flower beds of native bushes and flowers were added to the property, and exotic iris bulbs were planted in the field below the orchard.

Living on and with such an active, fertile piece of land is a full and rewarding way of life. The house, springhead and pond, irrigation system, and fields demand a lot of time and energy: even with modern equipment, the maintenance and upkeep of the homestead is often a full-time job. But it is time well spent, as the place is a bountiful source of inspiration: Barford’s work is imbued with the flora and fauna, colors, light, sky, space, and earth of El Ojito. Shooting Star Studio makes its home in the oldest part of the house. In a room built a century ago, with a view of the fields and mesas where bobcats, foxes, elk, and deer wander casually across the landscape, Barford merges the images surrounding her and the images of her imagination with paint and ink on canvas.

The home near the warm spring of the owls remains one of those gems untouched by time still found in the New Mexican outback. From the property’s highest ridge the view is still of an unpeopled wilderness—La Madera Mountain rising to the west, Taos Mountain and the Truchas Peaks 40 miles to the northeast. For now, the greater world is held at a distance, and only the resident wildlife and Barford’s friends come and go. However, everyone can step into and wander about the ordinary magic of El Ojito through Barford’s lively and inviting illustrations of her adopted home country. Again and again.

Lesley Poling-Kempes writes from the solar adobe home she and her husband, Jim, built near Abiquiú, New Mexico. She is the author of four books about the Southwest and is completing her second novel.