Fall Group Show with focus on George Hallmark

September 4, 2018 - September 21, 2018
Magdalena and the Cowboy by Michael Ome Untiedt

  • Michael Ome Untiedt

  • Magdalena and the Cowboy
  • 30 x 40 in.
  • Oil
  • Price:$16,950
    SOLD
  • Chacuaco (Cha qwock) Canyon is like an ancient highway leading into the Purgatory Country of southern Colorado. Everything from dinosaurs and mammoths, ancient man, Spanish explorers, cowboys, settlers, and mountain men have used its route through the Purgatory, back and forth between the Llano Estacado and the High Plains.
    Near where Chacuaco Creek flows into the Purgatory River (El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatoire) are the ruins of an ancient Spanish/Mexican settlement known as Cordova Plaza. Today only a hidden cemetery, mounds of stone rubble, and the crumbling stone walls of a church mark its location; it has been abandoned for more than a hundred years. The water is bad in this remote area, unfit even for cattle to drink. Several hundred yards from the site of Cordova Plaza is a cleft in a magnificent red-rock cliff. Within this cleft is a natural cistern that collects several thousand gallons of rainwater. This was the drinking water source for the people of the Plaza.
    For fifty years, Magdalena Cordova, wife of Plaza founder Juan Cordova, carved her name in the stone around the cistern. I must assume she did so while retrieving water for the Cordova home; a brief respite in what was otherwise, I am sure, a very hard life. I have found seven of her cliff inscriptions, some of them large and ornate and requiring a lot of work to complete.
    This painting is about Magdalena Cordova. Even in her isolated primitive life, Magdalena found a way to stir the pot, break the clock, with simple musings in stone. I sit on sun-warmed stone in the solitude of the Red Rock Country and think about Magdalena, her dreams and desires, her fears and tribulations. I think about how Magdalena "made her mark", rose from the vast number of faces of humanity and left inscriptions to ponder over, now a century since her life-time. Her "Marks" are simple, elegant, and long lasting and because of them her memory will run long through the river of time we call history. Would it be that we all did the same, a simple, elegant, long lasting act of "I am here".
    I think this is something important for all of us to think about; where, what, when, and how we each "leave our mark" for posterity. That is what this painting is about, how despite the enormity of the cosmos and the passage of time, we find ways to 'mark our turf' with "Here I am and was!"
Magdalena and the Cowboy
Michael Ome Untiedt
Oil
30 x 40 in.
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