Work

Growing up during the Depression in Topeka, Bud saddled his horse each morning, riding the open plains and collecting arrowheads left by the Shawnee. These years of solitary observation formed his deep instinct for landscape - not the landscape as scenery, but as emotional fact.

Bud's first glimpse of the Southwestern desert was in the early 1940s aboard the Union Pacific Railroad, gazing out the window on two-day train rides from Kansas to California, where he spent summers as a boy. Those vast, mountainous landscapes sparked something deep down, germinating in his mind's eye for decades before they emerged on canvas.

Bud received his first formal lessons in painting from Marion Kavenaugh Wachtel when he was a young teenager visiting relatives near Pasadena. She was one of the leading women landscape painters in California, and from her he learned not only technique but also a deep admiration for her dramatic viewpoints, which expressed a love of the Southwest landscape.

At Stanford, he encountered Sarah Stein, sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, whose walls were covered in Matisses, Cézannes, and Picassos. The encounter was transformative. The early works show a young artist absorbing color and structure with extraordinary attention.

During the summers of his university years, Bud landed a job as an artist with Sunset, being paid to travel to remote areas of Mexico to sketch scenes of old towns and cathedrals for the magazine.

New York in the mid-fifties was the center of the art world and Bud was at its heart — showing at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery alongside Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, drinking at the Cedar Bar with de Kooning, attending Twombly’s last night before Rome.

The Sag Harbor and Sagaponack summers produced a sustained body of work — the Blue Mist series among the most distinctive — that captured coastal light with layered impasto unlike anything in his earlier work. Large works were acquired by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas

Three countries that have had the most impact in terms of color are Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco. He was heavily influenced by the swirl of action, the vibrant sense of color and color combinations, the patterns of tiles, and the traditional dress of the local people.

Collage was part of his New York experimentation. The work of one of the earliest masters of collage, Kurt Schwitters, inspired him to explore that medium.

Bud created a series of what he called "painted constructions," wherein, like an archaeologist, he used paint to "embalm" bits of cinder rock, rope, wood, toothpicks, nails, spoons, and gravel. "I sat on the floor and worked on these for years," he said - which explains why he later dated many of them 1964.

In 1974, drawn to the freedom and open spaces of the Southwest, Bud moved to Santa Fe, purchasing a 225-year-old adobe hacienda on Canyon Road. He spent years visiting the pueblos along the Rio Grande and Acoma, observing Native American dances and rituals.

His works of this period subdue the role of the sky in relation to the vast expanses below it. Bud instead asserts the mountains and hillsides for the leading role in his landscapes. The energy he finds in their great mass is reflected by a myriad of colors applied with bravura brushwork that invite us to delight in the greens, turquoises, and blues among the yellow ochres and burnt umbers of the arid soil and rocks.

Finally, the eye finds relief from all of this vibrant activity in the high horizon bands that crown his landscapes. They draw the eye up to them rather than allowing it to search for a path deep into the scene - a resting point after so much visual activity below.

Three of Bud’s paintings from this period were acquired by the New Mexico Museum of Art and remain part of their permanent collection. The palette shifts dramatically — earth reds, sage greens, the particular blue of desert sky.

Bud had found Santa Fe too crowded and his hacienda too cold in the winter, so he moved farther southwest to Tucson. The region is very hilly, and he fell in love with the nearby Catalina, Santa Rita, and Tucson mountain ranges rising above the desert - all with their atmospheric beauty.

Bud continued to experiment with his landscapes using vibrant colors. The compositions were becoming more abstract and few if any man-made structures. Even the most abstract retained the horizontal sky at the top.

Four of Bud’s paintings from this period were acquired by the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson AZ and remain part of their permanent collection.

The Nogales years produced Bud’s most intensely colored and physically dense work. Painting in his studio surrounded by Zapotec rugs, pre-Columbian objects, and decades of his own canvases, he developed a “pentimento” approach — layer upon layer, older paintings visibly breathing through newer ones.

Bud went through several phases of composition in his time in Nogales, trying larger canvases and multiple color combinations. The thick oil paint required drying between sessions, so a new painting would be started and in time Bud would have over 20 paintings in progress.

The colorful buildings on the hills on the Mexican side of the border inspired compositions reminiscent of paintings from Long Island in the 1950s. These compositions contain vertical rectangles of color in the middle of the landscape.

The Sonoran desert and the colored hills of the US–Mexico borderlands gave him a subject equal to his ambition. He painted here until the end, completing works in his nineties that show no diminishment of vision or energy.

After attending his last show in his home town of Topeka, Kansas the The Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas acquired five works and remain part of their permanent collection.