MVC is home to pair of special landscape paintings

  • Published
  • By Lee Ross
  • Nucleus Editor
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. --  Kirtland's Mountain View Club is home to two pieces of serious art.

The club has two landscape paintings by Wilson Hurley, an icon of American landscape painting who died in 2008.

The paintings date back to the 1960s, according to Stuart Purviance, executive director of the Kirtland Partnership Committee.

In 1963, after a raucous party, members of the Air National Guard were in danger of being barred from the Mountain View Club, Purviance said. Hurley, who was part of a military family and had served as a pilot, donated a roughly 9-by-9-foot oil painting -- an image of blue skies rolling, Southwestern clouds -- to smooth things over for the Guard.

He said the other painting was donated later.

The son of Patrick Hurley, who was secretary of war under President Herbert Hoover and U.S. ambassador to China in the mid-1940s, Wilson Hurley stayed away from politics.

Born in Tulsa, Okla., and raised for some years in Virginia, Hurley's parents moved to Santa Fe in 1935. Hurley attended Los Alamos Ranch School.

His early aptitude led to apprenticeships with New Mexico artists such as John Young-Hunter and Doel Reed.

As a young man he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and graduated in 1945. Trained as a pilot, Hurley served for 30 months in the Philippines and the rest of his four-year military obligation in the United States. He earned a law degree from George Washington University in 1951, practiced law in Santa Fe and Albuquerque for 12 years and worked briefly as an engineer at Sandia Corp. At that time, he was a pilot in the New Mexico Air National Guard, service that ended with a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968-69.

Hurley closed his law practice in 1964 and devoted himself full-time to painting. He soon became one of the most well-known in the Western art world. Local gallery owner Robert LaPlante called Hurley "the best painter of the Southwestern landscape."

LaPlante added that Hurley was a good man, as well.

"He was a fine gentleman," Hurley said.