Susan Hertel + a few musings
Babes and bots, Ever heard of the painter, Susan Hertel? As you can see, she painted cats, horses, and women in earth tones, and lived in New Mexico. My dad appears to have liked her work quite a bit. My dad was born in New Mexico in 1949, 19 years after Susan Hertel. Hertel spent many years in the Southwest and opened up a ranch where she and her husband, Carl, raised five children in addition to a number of farm animals. Her work from this period is marked by images from their farm, as well as a number of self-portraits. After divorcing her husband, Hertel dedicated her life to writing poetry and painting, and found family everywhere she went. Some of her poetry is collected and published posthumously in All This Change two years after her death in 1994. There are a number of lines that strike me... Riding on a mesa I put my mouth a certain way and my face feels like it looks like yours. When I was eight or nine we went to Taos, New Mexico for a week. We ...