Best known as a printmaker, Gene Kloss was a multitalented and prolific artist for whom Taos, NM, was an ample and consistent muse, providing a career’s worth of inspiration. Writing that “an artist must keep in close contact with nature and man’s fundamental reliance on nature in order to produce a significant body of work,” 1 Kloss was interested in rendering the changing seasons of the Taos landscape. In Aspens, she captures the blazing yellow of fall in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the foliage set alight by the slanting, intense rays of the late afternoon sun. (See her 1936 painting Midwinter in the Sangre de Cristos in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection for a compelling comparison.)
