Al Lostetter first experienced the West as a twenty-one-year-old art student, hitch hiking across the country in 1962. In the early seventies he made more exploratory visits on his motorcycle and in his truck, camping from border to border throughout the Rockies. In 1975, four years after receiving an MFA from Yale Art School and then teaching at the university level elswhere, he and his wife Kathie decided to make New Mexico their home. A year later they moved permanently to Abiquiu, where they built a home and raised two sons. AL Lostetter’s work has evolved as a thoughtful meditation on personal meaning, pertaining to this special place that he chose; and which in turn chose him. In Al’s estimation the following poem by Wallace Stevens sums up this special meditation profoundly and succinctly:

“Anecdote of Men by the Thousand”

The soul he said is composed
of the eternal world
There are men of the east, he said
Who are the east
There are men of province
Who are province
There are men of a valley
Who are the valley
The mandolin is the instrument
of a place
Are there mandolins of Western
mountains?
Are there mandolins of Northern
moonlight?
The dress of a woman of Lhasa
In its place
Is an invisible element of that place
made visible

“Al Lostetter is a masterful story-teller. He tells his stories not in words, but in his painting – paintings of magical power, yet full of charm and whimsy. His work is made up of three elements – painstakingly rendered feathers of various birds, plains Indian ledger paintings, subtly transformed by the artist’s thought, and likewise altered images recalling some of the great works of Vermeer, Manet, or Goya. … A lot of mythology, history, and philosophy speaks to us from Lostetter’s art… But Lostetter’s paintings’ main appeal is to the eye, rather than to the beguiling thought which created them, because, simply stated, they are damn good art, of a rare quality seldom encountered in our prosaic time – a time without mystery or legends. Lostetter puts a little of that missing magic back into our lives.”
-Richard Erdoes (1912-2008)

Erdoes was a photographer, artist and the co-author of “Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog,” “Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions,” “American Myths and Legends,” and more than twenty other titles.