Writings
Atwill has just published his memoir about coming to Santa Fe and his history of refurbishing and building houses anew. It is illustrated with photos and his sketchy drawings of houses from long ago. Douglas Atwill Houses from Boxwood Press is available at local bookstores, Collected Works Bookstore, Garcia Street Books, The Museum Bookshops, OpCit Books and from Amazon and Barnes & Noble online.
He is currently working on another collection of short stories, most of them with the theme of artists with obsession. Sunstone Press will publish this book when it is completed as well as two new novels in the continuing series about the lives and misdirections of artists.
Northern Arizona University presented in November 2016 a monodrama opera based upon Atwill’s short story, Beethoven’s Slippers, from the collection, Husband Memory Pickles from Sunstone Press. Judith Cloud wrote the music and Eric Gibson directed the presentation. Soprano Jennifer Trost sang the role of the woman recounting a lost love. She is scheduled to present this at Penn State and the University of California in 2017 and perhaps in a venue in Santa Fe.
Since I’m not a proper horticulture expert, I just claim to have opinions of what makes a good garden. It is fun to write, brining in stories of how I got interested in espalier trees with a trip to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, how to plant a cold frame with lily seeds,and why I think delphiniums and peonies are the nobilities of the perennial border. I hope to have it written and published by October or November on 2021.
At the Easel: Selected Paintings from 2021
By: Douglas Atwill
In the Studio
By: Douglas Atwill
Atwill has lived in Santa Fe for many years, painting canvases of the New Mexico landscape and corners of his own garden. His current studio on Moonlight Drive in the Museum Hill area of town is newly built, and the place he made a refuge from the distressing events of the year 2020. In this book, he writes about each painting as well as the vagaries of an artist’s life.
Garden Poems
By: Douglas Atwill
Atwill is planting a garden at his new house and studio, with the usual mix of evergreens, fruit trees, flowering shrubs, roses, and perennial borders. These have always been motifs for his paintings, as well as an addition to the grounds around the house. In the process, he is writing a series of poems about, what is a joy in the start of a new garden, as well as the annoyances and difficulties. Also there are other poems about family, love and lovers. The book of poems will probably be ready by late winter, say March of 2020. He is planning to use one of his paintings for the cover design. What do you think of this first mockup?
The Wings of Morning
By: Douglas Atwill
A story of the group of painters and writers living in Santa Fe just after WWII, the years when so much in the creative world was coming into first bloom. This is Atwill’s sixth novel
June, 2018: Judith Cloud is composing songs based on four poems from the new book Seventy-One Poems. I have heard two of them from the poems, Steamship Ballroom and Grapefruit and English Muffin. She plans to present them at a concert in January. It is fun to be working with Judy again.
71 Poems
By: Douglas Atwill
19 May 2018 — this is a mockup of the book cover for a book of poems. Odd poems, but in reading the final text, I think some are worthwhile. Should be published sometime in June 2018, when Kathleen Dexter is finished with the technical design.
Bonfire is published now, available for $14.95 from the local bookstores —Collected Works Bookstore, Op. Cit. Books and Garcia Street Bookstore. It is also for sale at Amazon.com. It is an odd book, but I think a very interesting read, thirteen varied selections from novels to a libretto
Yellow Eyes in the Garden
By: Douglas Atwill
The title story concerns an old painter, whose Greek landscape canvases have lost their appeal with the buying public. That changes after a visitor arrives in his garden. Another tale is told about a doubting monk, who leads a horticultural rebellion in the far west country. Further skepticism in a third story is punished after a holy man’s passing in the Himalayan foothills. There is a touch of the other world in these stories, with unknown hands operating in the modern world.
Atwill is a Santa Fe painter and author of eight other books. He has lived in New Mexico for the last five decades, painting the landscape and motifs from his own gardens in Santa Fe. Over the years he has owned fifty-nine houses of all sizes, restoring the older ones and building the others from the ground up. He comments on each of them, and the many people involved along the way. There is a separate section of his choices when putting a house design together, what makes his houses distinctive from many others. Another section of this book describes the houses he almost owned and the ones he is happy to have avoided. This is a memoir of Atwill’s life in Santa Fe, with introductory chapters about how he arrived at this town of artists and writers.
Husband Memory Pickles and Eleven Other Stories
By: Douglas Atwill
The title story tells of Marian Nakamura who pickles the fallen pears to remember a husband who took a fatal fall from an upper branch of a pear tree. The story won a place on the final ten list of a 2010 The New Yorker magazine competition. In another story a Minnesota woman learns to paint in Santa Fe and finds acclaim for her colorful canvases, only to walk away from them. A native American artist paints a cathedral scene, loosing the powers of old spirits. An even more notable force breaks into a fourth painter’s life, the ancient Old Goddess wanting a place in the new world.
Douglas Atwill is a painter who lives in Santa Fe, painting the New Mexico landscape and gardens, often his own studio garden. His paintings are in collections coast to coast and he continues to have solo exhibits. Atwill’s observations accompany each illustration. His other books from Sunstone Press include: Why I Won’t Be Going to Lunch Anymore, The Galisteo Escarpment, Imperial Yellow, Creep Around the Corner, The Oyster Shell Driveway, Dinner in the Labyrinth, and Husband Memory Pickles.
Dinner in the Labyrinth, A novel
By: Douglas Atwill
Graham Obermann is an established biographer of the Post-Impressionists. He is married to Celia Prosper, a modernist painter well-regarded by critics and collectors. As Obermann organizes a birthday party for Celia, looking after all the details, he describes in a single day the odd Prosper family and his attraction to his novelist brother-in-law Karl. Several significant events test all the characters in this family saga with subplots of many generations, and a new generation making its mark.
A summer on the California coast calls to Mattox Williams, a writer wanting quiet days to do the finishing work on his novel. He leases his Santa Fe house for three months and finds an ocean-facing room at Glitter Bay. While meeting the other people of the beach community, a love affair develops as well as the surrounding strife. He makes a deep emotional mark on the neighbors, particularly on Hayden Danning and his sister, Sylvan. A surprise offer from a film producer opens his horizons and requires trips south to Hollywood and Laguna Beach. At the end of summer, Mattox tries to find a way to keep alive the love he has found.
Why I Won’t Be Going to Lunch Anymore:
Twenty-One Stories of the Santa Fe Painter’s Life
By: Douglas Atwill
Publisher: Sunstone Press 1-800 243-5644 or 1-800 243-5644
Hardcover: ISBN: 978-0-86534-426-6
ebook: ISBN: 978-1-61139-004-9
Sunstone Press book review:
Outsiders seldom understand the curious amalgam of artists, galleries, misfits and hangers-on known as the Santa Fe Art Scene. Douglas Atwill, a painter living and working in its midst for many years, writes stories with an insider’s eye, tales of facing the easel every day, as well as those of dealing with the commercial demands from collectors, galleries and their crabby owners. In this collection of stories, we witness a group of Santa Fe painters confronting their art and life in creative ways, solving the ages-old problems of painting the perfect canvas, making that obstinate muse smile.
Sunstone Press has Atwill’s new novel, THE OYSTER SHELL DRIVEWAY, in production and scheduled to be published later this year. They also have the manuscripts for BRUSHES WITH OBSESSION, a new collection of stories and DOUGLAS ATWILL PAINTINGS, a book about his recent paintings and commentary on each one.
Atwill has another finished manuscript for a novel, titled DINNER IN THE LABYRINTH, that is being considered for publication. It is the story of a large Santa Fe family of writers and artists who experience many misadventures in love and life. Atwill is also working on another book, FIFTY-FOUR HOUSES. It is a memoir about the houses that Atwill has owned, refurbished or designed and built from scratch, with drawings and photographs of each. Another collection of short stories is underway, so far amounting to eight stories
Please call Atwill directly at 505-983-2852 if you want to purchase a signed book from him. They will be available at no charge above the retail price, shipping extra.
Europe in the Cold War years was a dangerous place for Harold Bronson and his buddies, draftees commandeered into espionage and counterintelligence. Their low echelon escapades take them to Berlin, Ulm, the South of France, and Zurich. Bronson chooses this time of his life to explore a personal coming out, creating secrets within secrets in a disapproving military. In his off-time, Bronson paints portraits of the other denizens of Schloss Issel, earning money for trips and adventures to Paris and Nice.
Always on the edge of life, he taunts the higher-ups with a light-hearted acceptance of life in the spy world of 1957. Real danger is further off from his circle at the Schloss, but it is an insistent melody they can always hear
Imperial Yellow
By: Douglas Atwill
A scandal-colored death in Donovan Merrill’s family makes it necessary that he and his grandmother, Anna, leave the rectory in San Miguel. They move into her summer cottage in the midst of the artist community of Laguna Beach of 1938, starting life over. It will be difficult with their diminished resources, but Donovan and Anna prove up to the task.
They find friends and mentors among the painters and bohemians, Donovan early on deciding that he will become a painter himself. After the war years, Anna encourages him to study at the Beaux Arts in Paris; afterwards he paints for a summer in Provence and survives a difficult winter in Rome. On his return to the states, he finds a place for himself, Santa Fe, and starts his painting career there in a rented adobe.
When he meets Oliver de la Pena, a young Mexican writer, his life begins to tumble this way and that. Oliver’s efforts at writing are unformed, not so flourishing as Donovan’s painting career, so competitive troubles ensue. After building a house together, they must also face dealing with Oliver’s infidelities. Time in Laguna is good to Anna, happy in her growing circle of artist friends. A love affair and a later marriage to a German expatriate painter make a striking contrast to her old life as a minister’s wife in San Miguel. She worries as Donovan finds his way, supports him spiritually and financially.
But Donovan proves he can succeed on his own.
Neil Bronson, new from the Royal Academy, summers in Provence, teaching himself to paint outside. Before returning home, he and his friends, Sam and Carrie, rent a cottage on the coast, playing a langorous triangle of seaside sexual attraction. Neil’s uncle interrupts the idyll, urgently seeking their help teaching at his art school in Santa Fe. Their plans for big city art careers are put on hold.
A month later, Bronson and Sam move into Casa Marriner, the spacious, walled compound of adobe studios, houses and casitas that serves as home for the art school. They meet the other faculty members, several jealous and difficult. Bronson teaches the plein air classes, often at the Galisteo escarpment.
At first the students are confrontational and awkward, but they soon grasp his authentic enthusiasm with the New Mexico landscape. While they learn new skills, he refines his, taking the escarpment as a major motif for his own work. Crisis at the school involves Bronson in a curious project and a winter trip abroad to Greece. Besides discovering himself in Santa Fe, he explores the world of sex and love. New York must wait.