Couple Turn to the Land--and to Luck--to Create Art : Enterprise: Frontier traditions of ranching and coal mining become the basis for successful wool and sculpting endeavors in nothern New Mexico.

By NANCY PLEVIN

Oct. 25, 1992 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

OJO CALIENTE, N.M. — On 120 isolated acres of northern New Mexico’s high mesa, Connie and Sam Taylor have turned the labor of their forefathers into the art of their contemporaries.

Connie Taylor raises sheep to make designer wool destined for chic boutiques, while her husband welds abstract steel sculptures for galleries worldwide.

Her father was a cattle rancher in the Sand Hills of Nebraska; Sam’s father worked the coal mines of southern Colorado--frontier traditions of self-reliance upon which the Taylors’ art is built.

“If all I did was make sculpture, I couldn’t last here a week,” says Taylor, 51. “You have to be able to haul water; you have to be able to fix fences. When you’re driving through the forest, if you see your neighbor’s cow stuck in the mud, you have to be able to pull him out.”

The couple, married 15 years, built their two-story, four-studio home from the ground up on sage-blanketed plains just west of the Rio Grande. The rough-cut pine house--equipped with TV, VCR and computer--runs on solar and wind power and collected rainwater.

Paintings, photographs, tapestries and sculptures by the Taylors and others fill the home. The blue peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains take up the outdoor canvas.

“Connie and I both have a real deep personal attraction to this piece of land here and both of us look at the whole 120 acres as kind of a work of art,” Taylor says.

The couple’s sheep pastures are the setting for several of his sculptures, which run the gamut from silly to searing: a Taylor version of the area’s ubiquitous pinon tree replete with cartoon-like creatures protruding from hollow branches; “Rainmaker,” a 12-foot rusted steel monolith with levers that move connected caps, giving it the appearance of a giant woodwind instrument, and “When Your Number’s Up,” a powerful tribute to fallen coal miners and the families they left behind.

“Back around the turn of the century--when my grandparents came to this country (from Italy)--they worked in the coal mines and they would carry a little ring that had a bunch of brass tags on it with their number on it,” Taylor says. “When they came out of the mine they hung their tags back up on a little rack.

“They had quite a few mine disasters in the old days and when the warning whistle would go off at the mine . . . the women and children would go to see if their husband’s tag was on the board. If it wasn’t, then they knew they were still underground.”

A larger version of the sculpture--a miners’ rack with two tags missing--has been installed in a park in Walsenburg, Colo., where Taylor grew up toiling in those same mines.

He eventually attended law school to follow in the footsteps of his father, Sam Taylor Sr., a Colorado state senator for 42 years.

But that was not to be.

“When I passed the bar, I just couldn’t do it,” Taylor says.

He ended up doing a stint as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, discovering art while aboard an aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea.

“It was monsoon season and we weren’t flying much. I was really bored,” Taylor says. “I was messing around in the ship’s PX and I saw these little paint-by-number sets.”

“It was the first time I’d ever even thought of making a painting. It was the neatest thing in the world.”

After the war, he spent eight years traveling through Central and South America “learning what art was all about.”

Then, with a degree in sculpture from the University of Southern Colorado, Taylor “stumbled onto” and purchased his original 40 acres, 7,600 feet up on the slopes of Cerro Mojina.

“I didn’t have a clue,” he says. “I thought I could live here and sell a painting once in a while.”

He built a tar-paper shack and about a year later married Connie, who quit her job teaching junior high school in Colorado.

The path from then to now, the couple says, was pure “arrogance and ignorance.”

Taylor’s art evolved from landscapes to paintings of colorful stripes to his present-day sculptures, which have been shown across the United States, Central America, Europe and Japan.

“We’ve had no plans about what we were doing,” Connie Taylor says. “We’ve had very few clues about what we were doing.”

“In the beginning it was really very hard. We did things like cutting firewood in the snow. We would sell a load of wood and all of that would go for truck repairs.”

The couple spent two years with only a kerosene lantern for light. They cooked on a wood-burning stove.

In time, Connie Taylor looked around, mustered her interests in art and weaving and her background in anthropology and ranching and wondered “what the land could do and what there was a need for here.”

She now has a successful business selling wool from rare Navajo churro sheep for rugs and from New Zealand perendales sheep for garments.

She shears the animals and washes, cards, dyes and blends the wool. Only the spinning is done elsewhere.

Without advertising, she has mail-order customers from Vermont to California, including contemporary Anglo and traditional Latino and Navajo weavers.

Connie Taylor also sells some of the sheep for butchering and has won awards for excellence in grazing management on land the federal government declared uninhabitable in the 1930s after a long drought.

“We’ve always had an attitude of ‘What can we do with this?’ and we really never thought about what we couldn’t do,” she says.

A weathered wooden plank posted at the entrance to the couple’s property reads “La Lucha Sin Fin.” (Struggle Without End).

While the sign is a firm warning of the philosophy of life that enabled the Taylors to achieve success, they are--for the time being--enjoying a cease-fire.