From New York to New Mexico, with no regrets.

Aspiring actors flock to New York. Film stars to-be strike out for L.A. And those who yearn to capture the American West on canvas gravitate to New Mexico's high country, that enchanted strip of mountain and mesa north of Albuquerque that has been attracting artists like France draws oenophiles ever since Ernest Blumenschein stumbled upon its stark beauty in 1898.

Blumenschein was the first in modern times. After him, among thousands of others, came the Russian portraitist Nicolai Fechin, the Briton D.H. Lawrence, and Wisconsite Georgia O'Keeffe. What they all discovered, despite their differences in training, conception, and style, was that northern New Mexico is blessed with a fine, almost spiritual light that shapes and tints the scene like few other places on the continent. Blumenschein et al took one look at the brilliance of the New Mexico sun, the green of the mountains, the interplay between light and shadow, the subtle colors that change by the minute -- and they became disciples. And so it was with Walt Gonske.

A native of New Jersey, Gonske grew up in a Newark suburb. When he graduated from high school, he enrolled in art school there and then took a job producing mechanicals for an ad agency. Convinced he didn't want to do that for the rest of his life, he signed up for additional training at the Frank Reily School of Art in New York and then set up shop as an independent. By the late Sixties, he was living in a cramped, noisy walkup in Manhattan's West Village, scraping together an existence as a freelance illustrator of men's clothing.

"It was terrible," says Gonske, now 52 and recognized as one of the country's top painters of Western landscapes. "I lived in a hole-in-the-wall and I spent my days sitting around waiting for the telephone to ring. I might get a call from a client in the late afternoon so I'd rush out to pick up the garments he wanted illustrated and take them back to my apartment. Then I'd stay up most of the night drawing them so they'd be ready the next morning."

His life changed dramatically in 1971 when his sister telephoned and suggested that he come to visit her in New Mexico, where she was working in one of the ski lodges.

"It was February," Gonske recalls, "and it was cold." New York was gray and the streets were filled with dirty slush. Although he had never been to New Mexico, a trip to the West sounded terribly appealing.

Jumping in his van, he headed for New Jersey to pick up his parents. For two days, the three of them drove into the setting sun until they got to Taos, a tiny village of 4,000 nestled almost 7,000 feet above sea level at the base of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains, so named by the Spanish more than three centuries ago because they turn a blood red at sunset. (With the same attention to the peculiarities of nature, the conquistadores christened the mountain range north of what is now Albuquerque the Sandias ["watermelons"] and the range just to the south, the Manzanos ["apples"]).

Struck by the beauty of the land, a place where the colors were soft and delicate and snow was pristine white rather than a dingy gray, Gonske unslung his camera and shot roll after roll of film. In the months that followed, back in Manhattan, he would stare at those prints for hours at a time, transferring some of the vistas to watercolors which, with his sister's help, he placed on consignment with an Albuquerque gallery. Although he continued to live in New York, New Mexico had left its mark.

"I took a yellow legal pad and I drew a line down the center of the first page," Gonske says with a chuckle. "On one side of the page I wrote down the reasons for staying in New York and on the other side I listed the reasons for moving to New Mexico. I carried that paper in my wallet for weeks and I'd keep pulling it out and looking at it."

In February, 1972, a year after his first visit, Gonske made the decision to move West. His first home in New Mexico was in the tiny community of Cañon just to the east of Taos. After he became established and began making decent money, he bought two acres of land about two and a half miles northwest of Taos from the Indians of the Taos Pueblo and built an adobe redoubt, which he has been adding on to and expanding as his needs increased. Today it is a veritable retreat, complete with an outdoor work area and mobile model stand. Amenities include a courtyard fountain, an aspen-protected outdoor dining area, his own acequia (irrigation system), and a shoulder-high wall separating his flower-bedecked garden from the alfalfa fields that form a barrier between him and his closest neighbors, all of whom are comfortably beyond haling distance.

During the 22 years that Gonske has been in New Mexico both he and his style have mellowed and matured. A tall, rangy man with salt-and-pepper hair and bushy mustache, he prefers jeans and hiking boots to slacks and tasseled loafers, oils to watercolors, and landscapes to structures.

"When I first came out I was doing watercolors and acrylics of adobes, old churches and monuments," he says, all the cliche subjects most artists newly arrived in New Mexico initially turn to.

After about there years, however, Gonske burned out on the medium. "I bought a french easel," he says, "and switched to landscapes."

Almost immediately, Gonske began showing in galleries in Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. But as his fame grew, so too did his showplaces. These days, his paintings hang in the Collins-Petit in Taos, the prestigious Fenn in Santa Fe (which also shows contemporary painters Michael Coleman, Clark Hulings, Wilson Hurley, and Gary Niblett as well as historical works by, among others, Blumenschein, J.H. Sharp, Victor Higgins, Fechin, Leon Gaspard, O'Keeffe and John Marin), Trailside America in Scottsdale, a toney suburb of Phoenix, and a new Trailside in Carmel, California.

For several years he has been showing at the National Academy of Western Art (NAWA) at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma -- probably the country's top showcase for traditional Western art -- and this year he and stone sculptor Doug Hyde were the two featured artists at the Fenn during the wildly popular Indian Market weekend in late August.

Although lately he's been experimenting with figure line drawings, landscapes have been Gonske's bread and butter ever since he bought his french easel. An extremely prolific artist, Gonske produces about a hundred canvases a year, year in and year out. "I've now done 2,100-plus and I've been in New Mexico for 24 years," he says.

To paint landscapes, the artist has to go where the landscapes are, and that means a lot of travel under all kinds of road conditions in all kinds of weather, a situation that can cause considerable problems, especially in rural New Mexico where asphalt is still scarce and the weather can change in the blink of an eye.

"But those aren't problems for me any more," Gonske says, pointing proudly to a strange-looking vehicle parked just outside the arched gateway entrance to his compound. "That's my Paintmobile," he adds with a grin.

The "Paintmobile" is a custom-made camper mounted on the rear of a Ford pickup truck. Instead of providing a customary shelter for sleeping and cooking as would be sought by a common traveler, Gonske's vehicle is a thoughtfully designed studio on wheels. Built with an interior 6-feet 10-inches tall (the better to accommodate the 6-1 Gonske), its features include four windows that open outward to provide unobstructed views, two skylights for natural light, a heater to ward off the winter cold, an easel on rollers, cabinets in which he can store dozens of canvases upright and untouching, and paint storage cupboards holding enough tubes to last him for six months.

Usually, Gonske says, he puts about 25,000 miles a year on the "Paintmobile," although lately he has been alternating it with a new four-wheel drive vehicle he uses in warm weather. "Sometimes when I jump in and take off I have a specific destination in mind, but sometimes its just spontaneous."

By now, Gonske says, he figures he has settled in to his true career path. Landscapes will undoubtedly continue to be his mainstay (in the last few years he has been painting vistas in Italy, Spain, and Portugal in addition to the West), but he also is excited about the challenge of figure work. "So far, I haven't done any in oil," he admits. But his familiarity and ease with the subject are growing and the day that he does is probably not far off.

"Do I have any regrets about leaving the East?" he asks, lifting his eyebrows in surprise. "Not a one!" he says emphatically. "In fact, I've talked my two best friends into coming out here as well."