The Lake

This vivid depiction of the New Mexican landscape displays the artist's interests in modernist aesthetics and the symbolism of Pueblo visual culture. The looming storm front over the mountains is reduced to stylized ovals of clouds, radiating lightness upward and weighing heavily downward on the valleys below. The artist's rich palette in the foreground addresses agricultural bounty in contrast to the powerful force at work in the distance. Blumenschein's work adheres more closely to an earlier form of symbolism than to the purely evocative scenes of his contemporaries.