Song of My Life: Rod Hubble’s Fifty-Year Retrospective

With 125 paintings spanning a 50 year career, "The Song of My Life: A Retrospective for Artist, Rod Hubble," features the landscapes of Northern New Mexico. The focus in the art is as natural as the space around us. You're watching "The Local News Network," brought to you by CMIT Solutions and Sunbury Park and Casino. I'm Hayley Opsal. Hubble, who grew up in Farmington, is a seasoned professional of landscape painting and oils, and often paints in Plein Air. Water is a favorite theme in his work. The manner in which it captures what it reflects, it's as if the water, he says, is the artist itself.

I love the rivers. I love the the San Juan and the Animas River, particularly when they have come together and they've become one big river. I love the little La Plata River. I've painted many paintings in all of these rivers, but I think my new favorite place to paint water is Farmington Lake, and that's a painting here that I'm working on, and really want to work a great deal this summer at Farmington Lake. I did this small painting on the top a couple of weeks ago with a group of painters, the Plein Air Painters of the Four Corners, and now, I'm doing a little bit larger version. The pink is the beginning of the painting, the drawing, and I draw all the time. I draw, when I paint a painting, it starts with a drawing.

Clever, calm, and confident, Hubble has set up a studio in the middle of his retrospective at the Farmington Museum where he paints several days a week and talks about his long collaboration with nature.

I think that maybe nature is the artist. Maybe water, the way it reflects, or captures what it reflects, maybe it really is the true artist, maybe God is the artist, and so I'm just a human being, and maybe I'm a painter, and that really makes more sense to me, to be a technician, to be a conduit, a thread of that genius of God, might somehow filter through and end up on my canvas is what I would hope.

Working in Plein Air compliments his major studio paintings, which are on display at the museum through October. In the meantime, he'll be hosting several paint-outs this summer and fall with the Plein Air Painters of the Four Corners.

And now, I'm looking forward to painting mostly in Plein Air this summer, and any painters from anywhere, from New Mexico, or anywhere in the United States or the world, they're even welcome to join me and discover this beautiful place.

The Plein Air Painters of the Four Corners is a group of more than 30 painters representing New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. For 16 years, the group has been dedicated to creating art outdoors. For more information about this and other stories, go to farmingtonlocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of "The Local News Network." I'm Hayley Opsal.