An Old Guy's Random Rememberings #10

NEW MEXICO’S BABES
8/8/00

A year or so ago, some people in Taos took a perfectly good trinket shop and replaced it with a gallery called the Blue Rain Gallery, a very high-end establishment that I’d never be able to patronize. I swore that just for spite, I'd never set foot in that gallery. That should surely teach them a lesson.

Thursday morning, however, I was looking at a New Mexico magazine while waiting for my wife to get ready to go to our daily dose of “Georgia O’Keeffe Country”, and noticed an article about an artist by the name of Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel who would be visiting at the Blue Rain later this month.

Forty years ago, at about this time of year, after my wife and I, along with our very young first daughter, had made a trip to Albuquerque and become enchanted with the "Land Of Enchantment", I had seen an article about a Santa Clara Indian artist named Pablita Velarde, who did not impress me all that much as an artist, but she certainly was a looker! We later moved to Santa Fe, and I began to hope to run into Pablita Velarde in person some day. It never happened.

About fifteen years later, in 1975, I read an article in New Mexico magazine about another artist, Helen Hardin, who was Pablita's daughter. I can't remember Helen's art at all, only that she was even more a beauty than her mother.

Now we are at last Thursday, and I'm looking at the article which shows Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel, Helen's daughter, with her grandmother, Pablita, who is now 83 years old. Not only is Margarete a fine looking woman, but she is an extremely talented artist that I'll always remember.

When it came time to “discuss my feelings” about Georgia O’Keeffe (I was in a class with about seven women, and no other men), I revealed that I had first seen Georgia in an Ansel Adams photo with some man (Orville Cox) whose name I can never remember, and was not sure I knew which was which.

I told my "classmates" as we sat around a table at Abiquiu Inn, a couple of miles from Georgia's winter residence, that if Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel had been painting her kind of work at the time I was in college (which would have to have been when her grandmother was 38 and her mother was 12), I would have understood what my instructors were trying to teach me, and I’d be a better man today.

They all giggled, but I really was serious. With access to those paintings, I could have gotten the insight I needed to better understand what I was doing in college.

And as a bonus, Margarete Bagshaw-Tindel was a babe, just like her mother and grandmother.

Added Jan 31, 2009

As I contemplate these three generations of New Mexican beauties (and surely by now Margarete should also have a grown daughter), I have to marvel at what an old guy I've become.

Post Script

Research indicates that Margarete's daughter Helen will be about 20 now, and without seeing her, I'll have to believe she's continuing the family tradition of beauty. She has no interest in becoming an artist (but she's still six years younger than her mother was when she decided to try her hand at art, and that had been only nine years before Margarete came to my attention).