Against the grain: The art of Harold Joe Waldrum

While the fire makes for a good story, it hints at the kind of mythic legacy that Waldrum left behind — a legacy that seems, at least in part, to have been intentionally cultivated. He left lasting impressions not only in his marks on paper, but also in the hearts and minds of his acquaintances. He had a penchant for painting in the nude, for instance, and titled one autobiographical monograph Ando en Cueros (I Walk Stark-Naked).

Waldrum was born in Savoy, Texas, and arrived in New Mexico in the early 1970s after a career as a music teacher. He spent a brief period in New York, where he was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, and then returned to New Mexico in the mid-’70s, developing a signature style that straddled representation and abstraction, focusing on New Mexico’s historic Spanish missions and moradas as his primary subjects. He was also an advocate for their preservation. “I didn’t work with Joe for too, too many years,” Costello said. “He used to work in Albuquerque a lot, but the printer he was working with, Robert Blanchard, retired from printmaking. I had a studio downtown, and he came in to check me out, to see if I was going to be able to do what he wanted me to do. All the works we were doing were multi-plate, aquatint etchings.”

Waldrum and Costello worked on progressive prints in which each color is printed separately on copper plates in a series of runs through the press. “With these etchings, you print them one after the other,” Costello said. “It’s all wet into wet. We would build up different layers, even though in the final print, they’d get hidden. But it builds up different density.” Though the shadows of Waldrum’s compositions read at first as solid black or some other dark tone, one can see faint lines designating different architectural features — but you have to really look, as though actually peering into three-dimensional space, until a form like a window, perhaps, or a jutting buttress, suggests itself. “He knew exactly what color he trying to get to, and he would sit there and direct us like he was conducting his band. ... It was a different type of abstraction. He saw the world in an abstract way and was very precise in going after what he wanted.”

“He experimented with color all the time,” said friend and fellow artist Delmas Howe. “He was a real precisionist. He demanded the very best from himself and others.” This perfectionism got under some people’s skin, and it seems, at times, that Waldrum took some pleasure in pushing people’s buttons. “He would do things that were strange, like an edition of 63,” Costello said. “Not 50. Not 65. An edition of 63. Then he would do an edition of 54 or 72. Then he would make these titles in Spanish, and the titles would be like three sentences long. He was just doing it to mess with you and because it bothered people.” But Waldrum always knew exactly what he wanted in terms of color. He and Costello would work at a piece until the hues in the prints matched exactly what the artist had in his mind’s eye. “For a professional printmaker, that’s what you want in an artist. If you have an artist who knows what they want, then you’ll get there. So for me, that was really kind of wonderful.”

Throughout his career, Waldrum tended to keep his distance from Santa Fe, removing himself to locations south of Albuquerque. “He used to tell me it was so he could lob bombs at Santa Fe,” Costello said. In town, Waldrum was represented by a number of different galleries at various points in his career: Zaplin Lampert, Copeland-Rutherford, and Gerald Peters, whose gallery he once pulled all his work from. “I think they requested he change something in one of his paintings to make it more salable, and he removed himself from the gallery at that time,” said Howe. “He did retreat. He moved to a ranch near Socorro. It was a really neat little ranch.” In the late 1990s he made the move from the secluded mountain ranch to Truth or Consequences, a town with a small but active and vibrant arts community. In T or C, he opened a new gallery space, Río Bravo Fine Arts, and the space remains under the management of a former assistant, Eduardo Alicea Moreno. “Joe put out an ad on the internet for an assistant, and Eduardo, who lived in Puerto Rico at the time, answered the ad,” Howe said. “He was a very good assistant to Joe — and Joe was not easy to deal with. But Eduardo stuck with him. Joe really appreciated that.”

The T or C gallery’s first show was of Howe’s Stations: A Gay Passion, a homoerotic reinterpretation of the Stations of the Cross. “The gallery wasn’t quite finished,” Howe said. “We didn’t have electricity and lights installed yet, and I thought it would be great to light candles, and everyone could sit around, and it would be a different experience. However, there was a man whose car broke down, and he had to wait for parts. This man was an electrician. We called him an angel because he showed up one day, put in all the lights, and then kind of disappeared.”

Waldrum was dedicated to studio work, even toward the end of his life. “By the time he was coming up here to Santa Fe, he wasn’t very well,” said Costello. “He traveled with an oxygen tank. He’d drive up in a Cadillac and hang out all day. Sometimes he had to lie on the floor to keep going.”

“It was very unfortunate that he died when he did,” Howe said. “He would have been quite a local character. We buried him in a little cemetery he found and loved in Columbus, right near the Mexican border. There are little hills nearby and a forest of cactus. He wanted us all to come down on a bus with someone on the roof with a banner — similar to the Australian film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. We didn’t quite accomplish that.” ◀