October in Santa Fe

 

Norma Bassett Hall

  1888 - 1957 (biography)

1948  

color woodcut 

10 x 8 1/16" image 

pencil, lower right 

circa 100 

pencil titled 

Ninth Presentation, American Color Print Society 

antique-white laid hosho 

published 

American Color Print Society 

CAAL106 

SOLD

This color woodcut of a Santa Fe, New Mexico adobe in autumn was commissioned as the ninth presentation print for the American Color Print Society in 1948. Most remembered as a woodblock printmaker, she was born and raised in Halsey, Oregon, and took her first art lessons at the School of the Portland Art Association. Later she attended the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1918. There she was an assistant teacher for one year, and met her future husband, Arthur William Hall. Her interest in woodblock printmaking dated from 1922 when the couple decided to make a pictorial visit of their honeymoon trip by copying block prints from a book, and she saw what she described as the "real possibilities" of block print making. She used the Chinese method, which is the mixing of dry color with water and rice-flour paste. She had a residency in Kansas in 1923, and furthered her interest and skills in color block prints. She and her husband spent two years in Europe, studying and sketching. In 1942, the couple moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where her reputation as a woodblock printmaker was established for her prints of the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. After a short time, the couple settled in Alcalde, where they continued painting and also opened a summer art school. Hall began to devote much of her time to serigraphs of local scenes and also did watercolors. Her subject matter often included Kansas farm scenes, Oregon landscapes and New Mexico pueblos.