West Wind

West Wind is a painting by artist Joseph Fleck. It’s almost four feet tall and three feet wide, painted with oil on canvas.

In this full-length portrait, Joseph Fleck monumentalizes the figure of a Pueblo woman, depicted at an oblique angle that exaggerates her proportions against the backdrop of the landscape. This creates an overall effect that evokes the perceived mythology of its Native subject. For more on this painting style and the history of the artwork, read the “About this Artwork” section above.

The painting depicts a young woman, most likely from Taos Pueblo, with brown skin and chin-length straight black hair. She wears a light peach-colored dress that falls to her knees, with a black shawl draped around her shoulders and arms. She also wears Taos-style white knee-high deerskin moccasins, with leather strips wrapped around the calf and folded over at the knee. The wrapped leather straps get wider and wider as they go up the calf, creating a shape we might think resembles puffy snow boots. She balances a large clay pot painted with black-colored deer designs on her head, gripping its rim with her right hand. Her left hand loosely rests across her middle.

The woman stands in the foreground of the painting, her body turned slightly to our left as she gazes into the distance. The size of the objects in the background provides perspective for the woman’s figure. Below a small section of dark blue sky, billowing clouds in shades of pearl white, steel gray, and ice blue cover the horizon, serving as a dramatic backdrop from the woman’s head to her knees. This emphasizes the vastness of the horizon and gives the woman a heroic stature. Behind the woman’s knees and shrinking in size from left to right, the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range traces the horizon behind her in a dark blue or black silhouette of wave-like peaks. The woman stands on a field of light beige and green, towering above a similarly dressed woman and child walking into the distance on the right, as well as the multi-story adobe buildings of Taos Pueblo, which appear in the far background at the base of the mountains.