By Frank Zoretich

Many of the Sunday brunchers at Java Joe’s Downtown in Albuquerque are not aware that one member of the group entertaining them with folk songs in Spanish and English is known internationally as a painter of New Mexico landscapes.

Los Viejos Con Sus Amigos, as the musical group calls itself, provides acoustic music from 11 AM to 2 PM most Sundays. The players include Bob LaPlante, Luis Campus (often, but not always), Melody Mock and Frank McCullough.

“Three of us have white hair or no hair,” jokes McCullough, 75, singer and guitar player, and he’s not talking about violinist Mock, who is very much the youngest of the group.

On Friday, April 7, during the opening preview of the MasterWorks of New Mexico Spring Arts Show at Expo New Mexico (formerly known as the New Mexico Fairgrounds), McCullough will be presented with the Outstanding Achievement Award not only for his skill and success as a painter but also for his many years of service to the New Mexico arts community, including 30 years of teaching art at Highland High School in Albuquerque.

This award is one of many honors that have been bestowed upon McCullough, who was born and raised in Gallup and started taking private art lessons while he was still in elementary school. Although he decided to become a scientist during the Sputnik era of the late 1950s, earning his college degrees in biology and chemistry at the University of New Mexico and Highlands University, McCulloch says he never stopped painting.

He started his teaching career as soon as he graduated from college, he recalls, “But then I got back into art, teaching but also full-time painting.” Ten years later, he earned his Master in Fine Arts degree at San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico.”

McCulloch retired from Albuquerque Public Schools in 1985. “I really enjoyed teaching,” he says. “It fed the artwork and vice versa. I always produced quite a bit.”

And he’s helped produce quite a few painters. More than 100 of the students he’s helped train have gone on to become professional artists.

McCulloch’s paintings have been acquired by many museums and private collectors. He’s had about 35 one-man shows around the nation, and also in Mexico and Italy.

In Albuquerque, his paintings are sold at the Dartmouth Street Gallery (DSG), which is no longer located on Dartmouth Street. It has been moved into the new DSG space in the home of gallery president John Cacciatore, who fi rst met McCulloch in 1972 when he was a student of McCulloch’s at Highland High School.

At DSG, Cacciatore said, McCullough is “number one in terms of quantity and dollars.” Although the gallery, now at 510 14th Street S.W. is open to visitors only by appointment (266-7751), dozens of McCulloch’s paintings can be viewed on the DSG website at www.dsg-art.com.

Most are large oil-on-canvas landscapes - the most expensive of these currently offered at DSG measures 48 by 66 inches and is priced at $8,000.

The least expensive McCulloch painting at DSG is an abstract oil-on-panel still life that measures 4 inches by 5 inches and is priced at $350. (Oops, just checked: that one’s sold.)

The most expensive of his non-landscapes offered by the gallery is an abstract triptych, for $15,000, that McCulloch painted years ago (during his abstract period) and that he says he’s “just reworked again.” He calls it “Homage to Garcia Lorca, 1970- 2005.”

Cacciatore says DSG is opening a gallery space in a condo in Beijing, China. He thinks McCulloch’s paintings, which capture the sense of vast space in New Mexico’s landscape, will be popular in that booming Chinese art market.

McCulloch’s paintings are also sold by Cline Fine Art, with galleries in Santa Fe and in Scottsdale, Ariz. The Scottsdale gallery will feature his landscapes in a four-man show entitled “Looking West” that opens on April 6.

McCulloch works in a studio on Sixth Street Northwest at Mountain Road that’s not much bigger than a one-car garage, although he has built a loft-area against the back wall to provide extra storage space.

“I hit the studio every day and spend at least a half-a-day here,” he says. “But I actually paint only a small part of the time. There’s not much glamour to it. I have a puritan work ethic. You need daily communication with the work you’re doing. As an artist, you have to unlearn everything from your last painting to start the next one. But the painting calls you along. It’s exciting, as if you’re working on the unknown. It’s comparable to match play in golf. You have to forget yesterday. Every start is almost like beginning again as an amateur. It’s the opposite of formula.”

Most people, he adds, “think of an artist’s career as a sort of linear progression. But mine has been more of a circular thing. I started out as a pretty realistic painter - landscapes and faces and figures. In the 1960s I moved into non-objective abstract painting, and in the 1970s into hard-edged abstract and now I’m back into more realistic landscapes.”

Wesley Rusnell, who retired a year ago as curator of collections at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, became friends with McCulloch in 1979, when McCulloch worked there for a year on a state artist-in-residence grant. It was near the end of McCulloch’s hard-edged abstract period. Of the McCulloch paintings and lithographs the museum has from that year, Rusnell says, “all are very formal.” But like the work McCulloch has done since, they seem to “shimmer” and “give off a lot of light.”

Rusnell says he suspects that frequent drives between Roswell and Albuquerque may have helped nudged McCulloch toward his current realistic (yet still abstract) style of landscape painting.

“I think spending time down here in the southeast part of the state - I call it the empty corner - and driving back and forth for several hours on the road north out of town when it essentially was a 1930s highway, Frank may have come to a deeper appreciation of the space and light. I’m inventing Frank’s reason, but we’ve talked about and shared our pleasure in the open, clear, radiant landscape of the high plains. Frank appreciates something the great writer Wallace Stegner said: ‘Westerners are haunted by space.’ ”

McCulloch doesn’t dispute Rusnell’s “invented reason” for his moving past the hard edges. After Roswell, he adds, he did - in his painting - “return to a different kind of landscape, I suppose.”

Rusnell also noted how McCulloch absorbed the work of other artists. “Whenever Frank is in a museum or gallery or studio, he plants himself in front of a painting. Frank devotes himself for hours at a time to becoming saturated with the painting. It’s another way in which he reflects his devotion to and fascination in painting as an immediate experience.”

McCulloch says his wife, Pat, a retired APS reading specialist, is the “art critic” he values most. “She has a better eye than I do,” he says. “She’s always on the button in her opinions.”

They have three children, all now living in Albuquerque - daughters Cara, an architect, and Claudia, a theatrical costumer, and a son, Frank, who is a musician and a teacher at Amy Biehl High School. McCulloch said he has no special plans for the future, except to keep painting.

And he has some advice for Prime Timers who want to try their hand at art. “When people start out, particularly seniors, they feel they have to get a lot of paints and do painting. That’s not true. But you do need someone guiding your hand. You should go to a life-drawing group or class that meets weekly for two to three hours. Anybody can learn drawing. Color - that’s another story.”

Although human figures rarely appear in McCulloch paintings (except for some of his early paintings of Mexican horsemen called charros), McCulloch and several other artist friends have met weekly for decades for figure-drawing classes, chipping in to hire a model.

“I never show my figures,” he said. “But I’ve done figure drawing every week year after year.” He keeps the drawings in a drawer in his studio. “I’ve got them from the 1970’s on up,” he says.

He compares his drawings of nude models to the drawings of Renaissance artists. “Now their drawings are worth so much,” he said. “But they were not for final product. Those artists just threw them on the floor as they went to paintings.”

Frank Zoretich is an Albuquerque freelance writer and editor.

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