A Creative Retreat in Santa Fe This Fall
People have been coming to Santa Fe for something different and inspiration in creativity for more than a hundred years. Writers who couldn't find the shape of a book. Painters who were tired of the cities. People who didn't know they were artists until they arrived. Each of them figured out something about this place. Here are a few of their stories, and how you can try the same thing yourself this Fall.
Willa Cather: Let the Place Give You the Story
In 1925, Willa Cather checked into La Fonda, the old adobe hotel on the corner of the Plaza. She'd been circling a novel about the Southwest for years and couldn't find its shape. Then, she later wrote, it came to her all at once in that room, like a picture projected on the wall. The book became Death Comes for the Archbishop, still one of the great American novels about New Mexico.The lesson: sometimes you don't need more effort, you need a different wall to stare at.
Try it: Book a ReWild Your Words Experience session, a nature-based writing experience led by a writing instructor, author, and nature therapy guide. It starts outside with the senses (the smell of crushed sage, the sound of wind in the piñon) and lets the writing come from there. Then go have a drink at La Fonda, where Cather stayed.
Gustave Baumann: Small Is Fine
In 1918, a woodblock printer named Gustave Baumann headed to the artists' colony in Taos. He found it, by his own account, too crowded and too social. So he got back on the train, and when it stopped in Santa Fe, he stayed for more than fifty years. Baumann hand-carved woodblock prints of aspens, pueblos, and orchards, pressed one color at a time. He crafted and carved wooden marionettes, he even made the head for the very first Zozobra. None of it was grand, and all of it is still loved in Santa Fe over one hundred years later.
Try it: Make one small, beautiful thing with your hands. Doña Luz guests can book a stained glass workshop to make a sun catcher or ornament, or a jewelry and metalsmithing workshop on Canyon Road. You'll leave with something you made, which is a better souvenir than anything you can buy.
Los Cinco Pintores: Build Your Own Studio
In the early 1920s, five young painters in Santa Fe wanted homes and studios of their own. So they built them. By hand. On Camino del Monte Sol, just off Canyon Road, they mixed mud into adobe bricks, stacked their own walls, and hauled timber down from the mountains for their roofs. Locals called them "the five little nuts in five adobe huts." One of them, Will Shuster, went on to create Zozobra, the giant puppet Santa Fe still burns every September.
Those homes are still there. Walk Camino del Monte Sol and you're walking past the reason Santa Fe became an art town.
Try it: Spend a morning in a working adobe studio. A private pottery class on Upper Canyon Road puts you at the wheel, a few minutes' walk from where the five little nuts built theirs. Your pieces are fired after you leave and shipped home four to six weeks later, so sometime in November, a box arrives and you're back here for a minute.
Georgia O'Keeffe: Go Where the Land Pulls You
O'Keeffe first passed through Santa Fe in 1917 and couldn't stop thinking about the sky. She kept coming back, summer after summer, until she bought an old adobe in the village of Abiquiú in 1945 and, a few years later, left New York for good. She spent the rest of her life painting the red and gold cliffs of the Chama River Valley.
Try it: Drive the hour north to see that country for yourself during the Abiquiú Studio Tour, October 10 to 12, now in its 32nd year. Artists across the village and the valley open their homes and studios to visitors. You follow a map, pull into a gravel drive, and walk into somebody's working studio, paint on the floor and tools on the bench. It's the land O'Keeffe loved, and the people still making art in it.
And Then There's You
You don't need to write a novel or build a house. Maybe you just want to remember what it feels like to make something without checking your phone every four minutes.
Try it: Painter Bobby Beals will set up right outside your rental and teach you to paint what's in front of you, in oils or acrylics, in the long fall light. No experience needed. That's what Bobby is for.
A House to Make Things In
Every artist in this story needed the same thing: a room of their own in a place that inspired them. For your retreat, it’s Casa Galeria, a getaway located in a private nook in the South Capitol district just south of the Plaza, a reading corner under the vigas, a courtyard with good morning light.. It's close to Canyon Road and about an hour from Abiquiú. Bring the sketchbook you haven't opened since spring. We'll take care of the rest.
