Prairie Homestead with Approaching Cosmic Storm

Jerry West's bird's-eye-view of the world lifts viewers into the air as if flying over this magical land is common experience for Westerners.  He writes, "To be born on the prairie to wander all your life, always being pulled back.  It means accident, incident, drama, movement.  It always means dream."  West, an Ohio born, New Mexico raised painter grew up outside of Santa Fe, the child of a subsistence farmer and painter.  He was educated in New Mexico and Colorado and became a visionary chronicler of the real and the fantastic in the unfolding human drama of the area.  His City Hall mural, Recuerdos y Suenos de Santa Fe, 1989, reveals a commitment to community and a natural love of storytelling.

At mid-career West began to explore the dark side and light side of his personal history in a series titled “Prairie Night.”  His dreams and stories came to life and human vulnerability took center stage.  Specific scenes bring to mind inspirations as different as Albrecht, Durer, Grant Wood, Francisco Goya, and even American animation classics.  Yet, West’s fantastic inventions are urgent ecological commentary as well.  They tell of the vulnerability of the entire planet and all of its people.  It is easy to see in this work that “the approaching cosmic storm” is not simply a threatening rain cloud.  The painting, in fact, comes from the land where Los Alamos, underground nuclear weapons storage and the White Sands test site make the notion of a cosmic storm something more than a fairy tale.