Stacey Huddleston AKA Radhika - This Spring a marvelous fine art show took place in early May. Stacey Huddleston debuted many pieces of sculpture and painting that she had been creating in her studio on Ledoux Street (now located on Bent Street. In Taos, Stacey's friends call her Radhika, a name she was given by a saint in India some years ago, and she uses that name to sign some of her pieces.

Human Line Studio, a new gallery on 127D Bent Street recently opened by Taos artist Stacey Huddleston and showing only her work, is a must visit for art lovers, both local and visiting. Stacey has been painting, sculpting and printmaking in Taos for over twenty years, showing infrequently, considering her prolific output.

Her new show, Histoire Naturelle, consists of a dozen or so new paintings that are a joyful and profound exploration of the themes that run constantly throughout her enormous body of work. Eschewing the current trend for unsettling and “ugly” art, Huddleston stays true to her own vision: capturing in paint the undercurrent of spirituality in Nature. God’s eyes from India, Da Vinci’s universal man, lotus and goddess forms abstracted and reworked in oil, acrylic, graphite and pastel come together beneath the painter’s brush in a unique vision that is at once beautiful, humorous, political, and unnerving.

Large pieces, depicting figurative forms against the grids and handprints she is known for, combine with floral and botanical imagery in a dance that is a celebration of life. The paintings engage the viewer, demanding participation in their conception and manifestation. Writing on the paintings themselves, using both a free-hand scrawl and bold stencils, Huddleston tells a story. “Assume the feeling,” one piece reads, “of your wish fulfilled.”