Like Water on Canvas
Marcia Oliver (b.1939)
She takes a ‘Joe Cocker-ish’ stance as she stops to think before she speaks, she looks around and thoughtfully spills out what she wants to say.
Recently I’d been thinking about Marcia Oliver, that perhaps offering her an exhibition at Two Graces to show her paintings during Taos Fall Arts 2026. It could be a favorable opportunity for her to exhibit here in a space in the Taos Historic District. The last time I’d visited Marcia at her studio home was in 2018. We had struck it off through our mutual love of art, Marcia had at some point asked if I’d be willing to write a catalogue essay for a pamphlet she was considering self publishing. While this didn’t actually happen much of the information here is from my research to write something for her.
While considering a Fall Arts exhibit I mentioned it to a couple of local collectors who immediately became enthralled. To truly experience paintings by Marcia Oliver a studio visit is a must, it’s where she stashes away her best work. There were, however a few sticking points. To begin the process a new studio visit would be in order. This year (2026) with a bit of back and forth with phone calls and emails to Marcia to discuss a Fall Arts showing and a studio visit with people who would be overjoyed to visit her in situ resulted in a resounding, no.
TAAC Honors Marcia Oliver, video
“I was struggling with something on canvas, it wasn’t working. Agnes (Martin) stood there and looked at it… I mean she didn’t say much the whole time she was there, I don’t think she was in my cottage more than thirty minutes. She walked over to my worktable and picked up a watercolor brush, she said, ‘Give me some water’, she looked at the canvas. She handed me this watercolor brush and said, ‘Here, draw with a brush.’ Well, after she left, I did a lot of calligraphy drawings. They were wash drawings with that brush. I had a lot of paper, I remember how it freed me in some special way. In such a delightful way and it helped me to move along to where I eventually began doing these wash drawings.”
Marcia Oliver
Through the years I’ve encountered Marcia and her paintings at various venues across Taos, at the TCA or the Harwood Museum she becomes a presence without intention.
TAAC Honors Marcia Oliver, video
“They’re a non-narrative, I don't know where it comes from. It’s always new and fresh, unpredicted. I think that’s why I consider it a private matter. My work is really non-narrative, it's personal and mysterious. I really don't try to explain it. When do you know it's finished and that is the mystery of it all. It either feels right or it isn't quite right. That's what makes it fun, surprises, exploration and the interior life of imagery. That's essentially the context.” Marcia Oliver
If Agnes Martin’s arrival to Taos was considered an earthquake that shook things up forever, then Oliver’s arrival could be considered the aftershock, a direct result of Martin’s enduring presence on the art scene of the Taos art colony.
Martin made her mark in the art world through very little ‘mark-making’, Oliver through every intent consciously strives to make marks and shapes which flow in a natural manner. An Oliver painting checks all the boxes, composition, movement, texture, color, harmony, the thought she puts into the work shows.
The studio visit in 2018 resulted in a splendid time with her, a bit shy, a bit strong willed. It took her a moment to let her guard down as we both relaxed and discussed art.
A few weeks later I brought Marcia out to a petroglyph site here in Taos. It’s an enormous meandering cathedral of rock walls and strewn boulders. My belief was that she may find some inspiration among the marks.
I truly hope she was inspired that day.
The quotes here are from video recordings, written interviews and opinions by others, including Oliver in her own words.
TAAC Honors Marcia Oliver, video
“Visiting Marsha is like being inside an artists head. Marsha is surrounded by her work at her home. She has a kind of a bed propped up in the side of the house where she can just lay down and just look at her work and think about it and figure out how to develop it more. Looking at her work it’s like… Okay I see symbols, a type of hidden language, but I also see a spirituality there. I see more of that sense of trying to say something with very little, like water on canvas. I have an admiration for her because she is so dedicated.” Robert Cafazzo
“The drawings strongly imply that Oliver’s continuing preoccupation has been with form, or rather, forms, and their mutual alliances and quarrels. Her whimsically shifting shapes, their cousins, aunts and distant relations, a veritable cast of characters, have populated her work all along, restlessly meandering through variously colored aqueous suspensions.
They can seem almost as ripe with meaning as an alphabet, sometimes resembling letters, petroglyphs or runes.” Marilyn Gayle Hoff
M. Oliver New Drawings, Honoring the Tao, 2002, catalog
“The strong forms and subtle tones she uses come out of a desire to eliminate the romanticism and sensuality of color. Instead, Oliver’s intent is to establish content and form as the primary focus of her art to achieve clarity of vision. Her gestural technique comes out of an abstract expressionist background while the floating shapes in negative space suggests a kind of meditative sensitivity in keeping with the Taoist title of the series.”
David L. Witt, Curator, Harwood Museum of Art 2002
As is stated here, Oliver moved to Taos for a Wurlitzer residency in 1968 Eventually building a room and studio of her own in Des Montes.
Art and the Spirit or the Spirit in Art, article
“I then moved to Taos on a one year Wurlitzer residency award. That year, which produced a great new “window” of possibilities, I was able to buy some extraordinary land and build an adobe home. Virginia Woolf referred to a “room of one’s own” as a necessity in order for a woman to be creative, a place of one’s own that provides autonomy, boundaries as well as a retreat. There is a precious and unique sense of one’s person that can emerge from periods of detachment, reflection, and solitude. Some might say, a form of connection termed “self nurture” or prayer. From here an interior dialogue begins with facing the empty canvas… the void, where the process begins. For me, it is drawing upon an interior landscape. It is a question of a visual vocabulary emerging intermittently from a sea of choices, that some call “the dance of the imagination.” It is a playful game of risks and balances, a disciplined selection, a focused flow of fresh connections, a search for a precarious balance. Sometimes a new paradigm of beauty and order, a voyage into an uncharted interior self, a map of consciousness, and an uncensored place of play.” Marcia Lee Oliver, October 2004
Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, video
“The process of creativity and entering into the visual process has a way of transporting you to another place, to a better place or to an alternate reality. Which is very therapeutic.” Marcia Oliver
“But I do believe we unfold out of ourselves, and we do what we are born to do sooner or later, anyway.” Agnes Martin in a 1976 interview with John Gruen, article
I often wondered why people were quoting M. Oliver on social media platforms, it took a while for me to realize that M. Oliver was actually Mary Oliver not Marcia. Often is the case that women artists and writers use a first initial or a male sounding surname to disguise the prejudice which women in society face, even now in 2026.
It is my intent that the right art gallery venue notices this article and ‘discovers’ the artwork of Marcia Oliver.
Please Note: The current preferred contact for works by Marcia Oliver is
Jules Epstein, Taos Ceramics Center, 114 Estes Es Road, Ranchos de Taos
