No Words, Just Pictures: The Visual Language of Alum Dirk Kortz

SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN -- Kortz, who’s in his 70s, didn’t start out making compositions that were conflations of disparate imagery and artistic styles. For a time, the artist, who studied filmmaking and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University in the 1960s, strived for realism.

“For a long time, I was doing the best I could to paint classically,” says Kortz, who felt bogged down by the limitations of classical composition and working in a particular style.