Oil rub-out technique creates a feeling of history in the scenes and buildings painted by artist Tiffanie Owen.





“My mentor said I’m a historical painter,” Tiffanie Owen said about Lou Maestas, the artist who taught her the technique known as "Oil Rub-Out." “I do get inspired by places that have a sense of history. I love squeaky floorboards and crumbly, old, adobe buildings, but not everything that I paint is historic. Although the sepia look of this technique does tend to make even modern structures feel historic.”
Ten of Owen’s pieces are on display at the Capitan Public Library through August. Hours at the volunteer-run library at 101 E. 2nd Street in Capitan are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Friday and Saturday, closed on Monday and Sunday.

Owen first met her mentor in San Patricio, although she didn’t know it at the time.
“I went through a very traumatic and emotional life event and needed something to look forward to, so I researched an artist whose art I had seen in both Taos and Ruidoso,” she said. “He was hosting a seminar in Tucson, so I signed up. Whenever I would correspond with him, I would sign my e-mails, ‘Tiffanie from San Patricio.’ Well, when I met Lou at the seminar, I said, ‘Hi Mr. Maestas, I’m Tiffanie from San Patricio.”
Maestas surprised the young artist by telling her that they met before at the Silver Dollar restaurant.
“You had a green-chile cheeseburger,” he told her.
Although he lived in Albuquerque at the time, Maestas had ties to the Hondo Valley. He is a Master Artist in oil-rubout technique. The origins of the technique are unknown, but what is known about oil rub-out is that it once was a training requirement of the Old Masters. Before learning color theory, students were trained to use a limited palette, which forces the painter to study values without the distraction of color. Using only two pigments, darker values are placed first, then the lighter values are revealed as the artist “rubs out” the highlights, usually with a rag or other unconventional tool, Owen explained.




“I am attracted to this technique, because of my life-long love of photography, particularly historic sepia photos,” Owen said, although she clarified that she has modified the technique significantly from the style typical of Maestas’ work.
“He is much more loose and free in his style,” she said. “I’m a Virgo, which supposedly makes me detail-oriented. After studying these places, I suppose I just don’t feel I’m doing justice to the old building, if I leave out the details that make it interesting to me.”
Much of Owen's work features locales familiar to anyone who lives in Lincoln County or on the nearby Mescalero Apache Reservation. She painted St. Joseph’s Apache Mission in Mescalero, the old mill in Ruidoso, the historic church in San Patricio, as well as the historic train depot in Alamogordo and several sites around the Hurd Ranch. Her painting, “Raven’s Gate-Santa Fe” features a gate in front of a home several blocks off the Santa Fe Plaza. The painting was hung over the fireplace mantle in the Capitan Library during the show, because the raven is the library’s mascot.




Owen has plenty of historic inspiration to guide her work. In November, she accepted a position with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs as instructional coordinator for Lincoln and Fort Stanton Historic Sites and she now resides in Lincoln on what was once “the most dangerous street in America.”
“My great-great grandfather was elected sheriff in Lincoln In 1902, ’04 and ’06, so I’m really in my family’s old stomping grounds, which is pretty exciting,” Owen said. “But interestingly, I felt more like I had come home when I lived in San Patricio and quite a few of my paintings are locations at Sentinel Ranch.”
As director of the Hurd-La Rinconada Gallery & Guest Ranch from 2008 to 2012, Owen absorbed not only the environment around her, but the business side of the art world.





“Someone once told me to paint what you know,” Owen recalled. “During my four years there, I wandered all over that land, the same way the Hurd family has wandered those hills for decades. And I really feel connected to every adobe brick, every blade of grass, every animal and the water; not only connected, but protective of all of it. When you live in the country, you witness everything, and life is so fragile. The land gets developed, the water gets diverted, the animals get hunted and the old adobes just return to Mother Earth. I try to capture everything before it’s too late, both in paintings and photography.”
Owen treasures her years in the Hondo Valley and retains vivid memories.
“It was the most ‘New Mexican’ I have ever felt,” she said. “I had grown up in Alamogordo, which is pretty normal. But in San Patricio, the people still celebrate old traditions and tell stories and take care of their animals and plow and plant their land and you smell green chiles roasting in the fall without having to go to the grocery store parking lot. It was just a constant bombardment of real, sensory experiences that enhance life and maybe that’s why it has all stayed with me so familiar in my memory.”