Europe in the Cold War years was a dangerous place for Harold Bronson and his buddies, draftees commandeered into espionage and counterintelligence. Their low echelon escapades take them to Berlin, Ulm, the South of France, and Zurich. Bronson chooses this time of his life to explore a personal coming out, creating secrets within secrets in a disapproving military. In his off-time, Bronson paints portraits of the other denizens of Schloss Issel, earning money for trips and adventures to Paris and Nice.

Always on the edge of life, he taunts the higher-ups with a light-hearted acceptance of life in the spy world of 1957. Real danger is further off from his circle at the Schloss, but it is an insistent melody they can always hear.

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A scandal-colored death in Donovan Merrill’s family makes it necessary that he and his grandmother, Anna, leave the rectory in San Miguel. They move into her summer cottage in the midst of the artist community of Laguna Beach of 1938, starting life over. It will be difficult with their diminished resources, but Donovan and Anna prove up to the task.

They find friends and mentors among the painters and bohemians, Donovan early on deciding that he will become a painter himself. After the war years, Anna encourages him to study at the Beaux Arts in Paris; afterwards he paints for a summer in Provence and survives a difficult winter in Rome. On his return to the states, he finds a place for himself, Santa Fe, and starts his painting career there in a rented adobe.

When he meets Oliver de la Pena, a young Mexican writer, his life begins to tumble this way and that. Oliver’s efforts at writing are unformed, not so flourishing as Donovan’s painting career, so competitive troubles ensue. After building a house together, they must also face dealing with Oliver’s infidelities. Time in Laguna is good to Anna, happy in her growing circle of artist friends. A love affair and a later marriage to a German expatriate painter make a striking contrast to her old life as a minister’s wife in San Miguel. She worries as Donovan finds his way, supports him spiritually and financially.

But Donovan proves he can succeed on his own.

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Neil Bronson, new from the Royal Academy, summers in Provence, teaching himself to paint outside. Before returning home, he and his friends, Sam and Carrie, rent a cottage on the coast, playing a langorous triangle of seaside sexual attraction. Neil's uncle interrupts the idyll, urgently seeking their help teaching at his art school in Santa Fe. Their plans for big city art careers are put on hold.

A month later, Bronson and Sam move into Casa Marriner, the spacious, walled compound of adobe studios, houses and casitas that serves as home for the art school. They meet the other faculty members, several jealous and difficult. Bronson teaches the plein air classes, often at the Galisteo escarpment.

At first the students are confrontational and awkward, but they soon grasp his authentic enthusiasm with the New Mexico landscape. While they learn new skills, he refines his, taking the escarpment as a major motif for his own work. Crisis at the school involves Bronson in a curious project and a winter trip abroad to Greece. Besides discovering himself in Santa Fe, he explores the world of sex and love. New York must wait.

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Sunstone Press book review
     Outsiders seldom understand the curious amalgam of artists, galleries, misfits and hangers-on known as the Santa Fe Art Scene. Douglas Atwill, a painter living and working in its midst for many years, writes stories with an insider’s eye, tales of facing the easel every day, as well as those of dealing with the commercial demands from collectors, galleries and their crabby owners. In this collection of stories, we witness a group of Santa Fe painters confronting their art and life in creative ways, solving the ages-old problems of painting the perfect canvas, making that obstinate muse smile.