Running with the Wolves
The Carole LaRoche Gallery is a virtual menagerie. A bronze polar bear greets visitors in the foyer; the white walls are lined with vivid paintings of zebras, elephants, and pandas. And then there are the wolves, the animals that have helped make Carole LaRoche famous. Simply drawn in bright pastels that pop off black paper backgrounds, the wolves look almost sweet enough to decorate a child’s bedroom—almost. Like most of the critters LaRoche creates, they have glowing, ominous eyes that stare out at viewers, causing some to squirm and others to feel a sense of connection.
There’s certainly something about LaRoche’s work that draws people in. After 26 years as a Santa Fe–based painter and gallery owner, LaRoche is a Canyon Road legend who remains one of the top-selling artists in the city. By her count, LaRoche sells more than 100 original pieces a year, plus dozens of giclée prints, monotypes, and bronzes. Almost as popular as her wildlife portraits are what she calls “spirit people,” earth-toned acrylic paintings featuring primitive, mask-like faces. Like her animals, they are simply composed and have a strong mystical quality—a reflection of LaRoche’s interest in shamanism and, for lack of a better term, New Age spiritualism.
“They just come out of me,” LaRoche says, shrugging, as she surveys the paintings in her gallery one recent December morning. “I feel like I’m supposed to do them. The images come to me and I paint them.”
LaRoche sees the characters in her art as spiritual guides—messengers from a parallel universe she’s tapped into that combines elements of Egyptian, Native American, and other mythologies. “People can look at them and find answers,” she says.
The wolves, she explains, are not predators but guardians; her polar bears “are here to remind people to take care of the earth.” She uses the term “channeling” to explain the way animals and other images pop into her head, but she is clearly uncomfortable trying to verbalize her creative process. “I feel it,” she says, “but I can’t put it into words.”
A few days later, LaRoche offers a quote she’s recently come across, something written by Albert Einstein that comes close to describing her view of life and art.
“ ‘The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,’” she says, reading it aloud. “Those words fit how I feel.”
Like so many Santa Fe transplants, LaRoche was originally drawn here by the art scene. It was 1983; she was 44, divorced, and tired of selling real estate in Boston, where she’d grown up and raised her family. With the oldest of her three children off to college, she recalls, she “felt free for the first time in years” and hoped to rediscover her passion for painting. She’d had little time to be creative since the late ’50s, when she dropped out of the Massachusetts College of Art to get married. LaRoche was intrigued by a magazine article on Fritz Scholder and the artists’ colony in Santa Fe, so she bought a one-way plane ticket to New Mexico. “You are what you think you are,” she says. “So I decided I was going to think of myself as an artist.”
LaRoche found an apartment at 622 Canyon Road and began painting, displaying her finished pieces on the walls. A few months later she hung a sign outside—carole laroche gallery—and started stuffing her futon bed into the bathroom each morning to make room for curious visitors. “The things on my wall started to sell!” she says, still sounding surprised more than two decades later. “It was like a miracle.”
Inspired by the artists Cy Twombly and Franz Kline, LaRoche initially focused on abstract painting. But thanks to her increased exposure to Native American cultures, her style took a radical turn about six months after she came to Santa Fe. “I started seeing animals in my abstracts, and faces—they looked like kachinas—so I started to bring those things out,” she says. She created her first wolf painting that summer, after a pack of the animals appeared to her in a vision while she was relaxing on her gallery’s patio.
For the first few years, LaRoche wintered back in Boston, selling real estate there to make ends meet. But by 1988 she was selling enough art to stay in Santa Fe year-round. Today her many collectors include Ralph Lauren, actor Judge Reinhold, and shoe designer Donald Pliner, who displays two LaRoche paintings—one of them featuring her iconic wolves—at his Miami home. “Her work is mysterious and gripping,” Pliner says. “Those eyes follow you around. I have two rooms basically devoted to those paintings.”
LaRoche has run her own gallery since 1984, showing her work along with pieces by six other artists who, she says, “are on the same wavelength.” She’s rented gallery space on Canyon Road and West Palace over the years, but she found a more permanent space in 2004, when she bought the gallery building that formerly belonged to artist William Vincent, at 415 Canyon.
“To come here with nothing and end up owning a building on Canyon Road, after 20 years of renting space?” she says. “That was a big deal to me.”
Though LaRoche stops in at her gallery almost every morning, she spends most of her days in as beautiful a spot as any to be found in Santa Fe: her adobe home and studio, which sit on a wooded, two-acre lot off Cerro Gordo, along the Santa Fe River. The 200-year-old building was run down when she bought it ten years ago, but LaRoche could see its potential, having already remodeled three East Side adobe houses.
“I love adobe—you can work with it,” she says, gently patting a double-thick wall. “You take off the plaster and find brick and straw that’s been standing for more than a hundred years. You can carve it or shape it. or knock out a couple of bricks to make a window.”
LaRoche didn’t add exterior windows—historic guidelines prohibited it—and she preserved the home’s original footprint. Inside, though, she tore down and replastered walls, raised ceilings, and put in skylights to create the open, expansive feel she craves.
While LaRoche is known for her vivid paintings, at home she gravitates toward neutral hues and an aesthetic she calls “primitive but comfortable.” “I’m constantly surrounded by color when I’m working, so I like a peaceful, calming background in my house,” she says. Her collections of African tribal art and pre-Columbian pottery are displayed unobtrusively on built-in shelves and atop cabinets, all set quietly into the background.
LaRoche’s airy and open living room, with its 11-foot-high ceilings, doubles as her studio. “Friends come over and like to see what I’m ‘working on, so it’s a gathering place,” she explains. Her eight-foot-high easel is one of the room’s focal points, displaying her latest work in progress, a pair black, white-maned horses.
Always ready for a new creative project, LaRoche is thinking about building a small stone house near the old garage that sits at one end of the property. She’s planning her fourth book, a self-published collection of her paintings, to be titled Mystery. She’s working, too, on a whimsical series of computer-generated images—ants, monkeys, and aardvarks—which she may eventually use in a children’s project.
And still, after nearly three decades in Santa Fe, she marvels at her success. “I never dreamed I could make a living as an artist,” she says with characteristic modesty. “That first red wolf, it was like my gift from God. It was a good luck symbol. It brought me luck.”
“When I meet a new artist,” she adds, “that’s what I tell them: ‘I hope you find your red wolf.’”
