A Rocky Enchantment

Wide Open Spaces and Desert Skies. This Rocky Mountain Landscape Is What Moved Prolific Artist Georgia O’keeffe to Create Artworks Depicting the Vastness of Nature, Fragile Life and the Brevity of It All, Once Again Juxtaposed by the Remnants That Remain. Anthea Gerrie Followed the Native American Trail and Discovered New Mexico and Arizona in All Its Enchantment.

- Anthea Gerrie

I may have spent 30 years bringing southwest cuisine to California, but I always knew I’d come home,” says John Sedlar, delicately arranging “poppies” of purple potato chips with orange trout roe and pale pink habanero crème fraîche centres on a sheep skull at his Eloisa restaurant in Santa Fe.

It may sound pretentious, but the poppies are an homage to a famous artist this New Mexico town calls its own, and there are animal skulls, not to mention sculptural antlers, everywhere in this artsy state capital – on walls, doors, piled up in markets; their latest upcycling as serveware in a chic new restaurant is novel, but perfectly in sync with the surroundings.

It’s all thanks to Georgia O’Keeffe, who came west in the 1920's and identified what others dismissed as desert debris – items of wonder and beauty to be celebrated on canvas like the red hills and sinuously curved adobe (clay) buildings, which define this most exotic of US states.

John’s great-aunt Jerry, sister to grandma Eloisa, was Georgia’s cook and chauffeur for 15 years, and John grew up picking apricots in Georgia’s organic orchards. “She greeted me with a snarl when she spotted me,” he laughs. “Fuzzy and embracing she was not! But, like Jerry and Eloisa, Georgia was one of the strong, formidable women who characterise this state.”

The Georgia O’Keeffe Table at Eloisa (eloisasantafe.com), in which John pays tribute in artfully composed dishes to the artist and her work, is arguably Santa Fe’s most amazing meal. And that’s saying something in a fantastic eating city – once the only draw to northern New Mexico for visitors who bypassed its many other attractions.