Spotlight on Maggie Muchmore
Maggie Muchmore has the blues – drawers full of blues – as well as rainbows of other pastels filling cabinet drawers in her studio. Those varied blues are essential for capturing the New Mexican skies that feature prominently in her landscape paintings, some of which more aptly could be called “cloudscapes.” One recent painting of the Santa Fe Opera’s stunning Crosby Theater nestled in its equally majestic landscape beneath towering clouds graces the April cover page of the Santa Fe Opera Guild’s website (www.santafeoperaguild.org)
photo: Brian M. John
She’s loved those skies since first encountering them while traveling through Ghost Ranch in the late 1960’s. Maggie and her husband John, after starting out in California after college, soon moved eastward to New Mexico and settled in El Rito before finally migrating southward to Santa Fe in 1971. After her children were grown, she worked with the Education department of the new Georgia O’Keeffe Museum teaching drawing to young girls. (Her employment path there crossed that of Jackie M, subject of the Operagram’s March 2024 “Member Spotlight.”)
While not a “born here all my life” New Mexican, Maggie made an early choice about where to sink her roots and bloom as a professional artist, and has never regretted it. Her talents, and the beauty of New Mexico as seen through her eyes, have been shared with gallery patrons in Houston, San Francisco, Denver, and Los Angeles as well as here. You can see a sampling of her works on her website, www.maggiemuchmore.com, and – at the Opera’s giftshop -- purchase greeting cards of some of her paintings featuring Santa Fe Opera’s grounds and vistas.
While growing up in New Jersey, Maggie recalls helping clean the house on Saturday afternoons while listening to the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcast. The first opera she remembers seeing was Il Trovatore with Richard Tucker, although the most memorable part for her at that time was the famous “Anvil Chorus” performed with actual anvils stretching across the stage. History repeated somewhat when she introduced her grandson to opera with a production of Don Giovanni. Thinking that a three-hour opera was too long for an eight-year-old, they left after the 90-minute first act. On the ride home, while recounting the final act’s graveyard scene replete with a moving statue and demons, the little boy responded with the disappointed wail “We left too soon!” But, she says, “It stuck!” just as those beaten anvils did with her, and her grandson also became interested in opera.
As a drama major at Carnegie Mellon University, Maggie focused on the technical side of theater. Flashing forward a few decades, she taught a self-portrait class to technical apprentices at the Santa Fe Opera. Now you’ll find her volunteering in SFO’s costume shop, relishing the creation of tiny details that enhance sweeping productions. Early in her volunteer work there she was thrilled, after laboriously pick stitching a decorative finish on a costume for La donna del Lago, to read the label inside: “Joyce DiDonato.” Although the audience can’t see such painstaking details, the singers can. Donning a meticulously fashioned costume often helps a performer submerge into the character.
A singer finding a dramatic key to a role, a child excited by a detail in operatic spectacle, a budding artist gobsmacked by the mystery and glory of Abiquiu, a young girl in her first art class, or a gallery goer entranced by the layers and blending of pastels that create a landscape painting – all may experience a basic question piquing Maggie’s curiosity throughout her life: “What is really going on here?”
At this stage in her life and art, Maggie endeavors to find the answer at the same time as she intrigues others to ask it. She continues to work on an original opera, Queen of Jesters, which may never be finished, but “what is really going on here” is of course the journey, not the destination. With her constantly evolving and expanding libretto, hand-crafted miniature scene sets, pages of charcoal drawings of story and character inspirations, and dozens of costume sketches, Maggie strives to recast the classic “hero’s journey” as a feminine journey – a journey she, her grandmothers, her daughter, her granddaughter, and her friends past and present have undertaken.
As you view some of her sketches in “Patterns in the Fabric of Time” on her website, see if you can tell what is going on, and then perhaps look deeper into them and your experiences to discern, as Maggie Muchmore does, an answer to the artist’s query of what’s really going on.