ALBUQUERQUE — Wilson Hurley, one of America's premier landscape painters, was being remembered after his death Friday for his contributions to the art world and his talent for capturing the beauty of the West. He was 84.

Hurley had been diagnosed last year with Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, said his wife, Rosalyn Roembke. ALS damages the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, eventually leading to death.

He continued to paint up until January when the disease began to take a toll on him, she said. He died before dawn Friday.

His death means the painting world has "lost one of the finest," Roembke said.

"He was a great mentor to many, many artists throughout the years," she said.

Hurley, born in Tulsa, Okla., has paintings hanging in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma State Capitol, the Albuquerque Museum, the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Texas, the Whitney Museum in Wyoming and galleries in Santa Fe, to name a few places.

Albuquerque Museum Director Cathy Wright described Hurley as a kind and generous man and a "fantastic painter."

"He could convey the grandeur of the landscape here. His paintings were big," she said.

Hurley, a West Point graduate, also was an attorney, engineer, fighter pilot and bank founder. But through it all, since childhood, he was a painter.

Hurley's family came to New Mexico in 1935. At 13, he was introduced to the Taos and Santa Fe art communities, but it would be decades before he would turn to painting full time.

After attending Los Alamos Ranch School, where he focused on math and science, his father, former Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley, arranged for him to take the West Point entrance exam. He got in, graduated and arrived in the South Pacific just in time for the World War II victory celebration.

When he returned, he got his law degree from George Washington University, as his father had done.

He co-founded Citizens Bank and served as chairman and general counsel. But ultimately, Hurley gave up law, joined Sandia National Laboratories and tried to work as an engineer.

That didn't seem to fit either, so at age 40, Hurley started painting full time. "I didn't sell a painting for five years," he told The Associated Press in a 1995 interview. "So I was flying F-100s down here for the New Mexico Air National Guard, and that gave you in those days about $6,000 a year, which was ample to live. And I was just trying to improve myself as a painter."

A breakthrough came in 1966 when he visited a Monet and Turner show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He realized he didn't have to follow anybody's style, that he could look at the world and bring it to the canvas the way he interpreted it.

His art career was interrupted by the Vietnam War. He was reactivated in 1968 as a forward air controller guiding air strikes. The following year, he came home and married Roembke, who also paints.

Hurley received numerous awards for his landscapes and more than 800 hundred of his paintings have gone into private and corporate collections. At least 10 museums hold collections of his work.

Hurley was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1996 and was declared a cultural treasure in that state in 2002. That same year, he became the Albuquerque Museum Foundation's second Notable New Mexican.




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