The Lure of the Exotic

 Home-Grown Exotic is a 20x24 oil done from life by Shirley Fachilla.

So what do you find exotic? Surely, it all depends on your point of view. To Georgia O’Keeffe, New Mexico must have seemed quite foreign after New York and before she adopted its red rocks as her new home.

The Impressionists, of course in their love affair with Japanese art, found it to be delightfully different not only in technique but in subject matter as well.

Remington’s cowboys were as strange to his collectors back East as the harems of Delacroix were to the Frenchman who bought his Romantic canvases.  

And for Europeans, the vast landscapes of the American Hudson River School , like Asher Durand's Progress, must have seemed worlds away from their safer, more comfortable scenes.

What do I find exotic? Our very American model who came in gypsy gear and seemed a world away from the usual… and was so fun to paint.