Nature's Lip

If it is the Second Coming, call me out. Otherwise, let me alone.

That sign, tacked up on Painter Peter Hurd's studio door, is slim protection from the friends, neighbors, admirers and tourists who frequently overrun his ranch. Last week some of the visitors were being diverted to the nearby town of Roswell, N. Mex. by the new Hard wing of the Roswell Museum. It contained 31 of his lithographs and six of his spacious, sharply detailed paintings. The collection had been financed by an anonymous California donor, who planned to add more Kurd pictures each year.

Kid About Town. Eventually, said Roswell's Record, "the home town of Hurd will have the greatest collection of Hurd productions in the country. A generation from now, young persons will view his work and be told that the man who painted the pictures was one time a kid about town the same as they."

Roswell (pop. 25,000) was a sleepy little cow town when Hurd was a kid. He left it for two happy but unbrilliant years at West Point, later spent five years with the late Illustrator N.C. Wyeth, at Chadds Ford, Pa., learning to paint. Hurd married Wyeth's artist daughter Henriette, then moved back to New Mexico, where the Kurds and their three children have taken joyfully to ranch life. Says Hurd, who has gone on painting junkets to Egypt, Hawaii, Nigeria, India, England, Italy, Brazil and Morocco: "It just happens that this part of the planet is where I feel closest to life."

An expert horseman and polo player, and a guitarist with a minor but determined talent, Peter Hurd looks, talks and dresses like a genial cowboy, is thoroughly the cow-country man no matter where he sets up his easel. A hard worker but a gregarious man and a sharp observer, he spends his few spare hours reading and studying astronomy with the help of a home-built telescope. "What motivates me." he says, "is a constant wonder. It's hard to tell anyone just how painting can be a religious experience, but it is with me."

Trying to Be Clear. Hurd keeps a changing show of other men's art in his studio (last week it was pictures of Picasso's ceramics), says that he has "no quarrel with any school of painting." At 45, he describes himself as "looking inside, trying to be clear as to what I want to say. There are a lot of young painters coming along now that seem to have no idea about that. They either feel they must paint every hair on nature's lip or deny the whole works."

His own pictures miss few of the hairs. Using the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting on wood panels, Hurd confines himself to precise portraits of people and places, dramatized by isolated figures, long shadows and cold, gleaming colors. The paintings that tell of the barren hills and washes, the deserts and clear bright light of New Mexico are as knowing and sincere as an honest man's praise of his own family.

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