In Rolling Hills, artist Andrew Dasburg depicts the beauty that ultimately convinced him to make his permanent home in New Mexico.Dasburg thought New Mexico's Taos valley “seemed like the first day of creation.” 
Timeless Landscape with a Modern Twist
In Rolling Hills, artist Andrew Dasburg depicts the beauty that ultimately convinced him to make his permanent home in New Mexico.Dasburg thought New Mexico's Taos valley “seemed like the first day of creation.”
Committed to a modern, abstract style of painting, he often used the patchwork pattern of cultivated fields to contrast with the open, natural spaces of the desert landscape.
Dasburg tipped the quilted middle ground upward, flattening the composition, and bridged the gap between near and far. The mass of the Sangre de Cristo range sits on the painting's top edge and the modeled foothills are sharply distinguished from the flat middle ground.
See this painting in Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum now on view at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, through September 4, 2001.
Source: Merry Foresta. Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured: Andrew Dasburg, 1887 France–1979 USA, Rolling Hills, after 1924, oil, 13 1/8 x 16 3/16 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Arvin Gottlieb.