Margi Lucena: She loved the land, her art and her family
She could point out familiar hummingbirds outside her window like they were old friends. Under the grey scrub of desert landscape, she saw light, shadow and life. Where others saw a blue New Mexico sky, she saw a prism of color.
Margi Lucena had a gift for looking at the world around her, seeing its glorious details and capturing the emotion she saw in her art.
Beloved wife, mother and friend, she died Aug. 31, 2022. She was 67.
“There are still great days ahead,” she wrote in a little notebook as she approached the final weeks of her life, after confronting a series of health issues. “The best will be when all the kids will be with us again. I dream of that day, with all of my children and grandchildren.”
Margaret Kathleen Lucena was born Oct. 18, 1954 in Torrance, California to Esther and Richard Muldoon, and spent her early years in the port town of San Pedro, California, growing up in the same house that her maternal grandparents, immigrants from Mexico, had settled in decades before. Her father, who had been a high school gymnast, was a lifeguard at San Pedro’s Cabrillo Beach, an early fan of surfing, a musician and artist. Her mother Esther was a pretty and bright young woman with a knack for singing, sewing and math.
From an early age, Margi showed an interest in drawing and painting, and learned a great deal from her father, an accomplished amateur who encouraged her and taught her about color, shadow and light. Eventually, her family moved to Independence in the Owens Valley east of California’s Sierra Nevada, and later to Ventura County, on the Southern California coast.
“I totally fell in love with the land, with those massive mountains,” she told Southwest Art in a 2016 interview. “I connected with the landscape, and it had a big influence on the ways I looked at shapes and light. I was just a kid, but I remember noticing those things.”
Margi attended Ventura High School, where she met and then in 1972 married her husband Dado, who had enlisted in the Army. After his discharge, they spent 17 years in Dado’s home state, Hawaii, where they raised their four children. Margi took art classes at community colleges and painted with friends while her husband joined the National Guard.
In 1990, Dado’s career in the National Guard took him and Margi to northeastern Oklahoma. In Pryor, she met Clesta Jean Manley, an artist of Cherokee descent who ran an art store, gallery and taught art, and who was honored as a Cherokee National Treasure. Clesta, who died in March 2022 at age 97, encouraged her to enter her first art competition, in Grand River. Margi won top honors in the landscape division, the first of many regional and national awards, including the 2021 FASO BoldBrush competition. The Lucenas moved to Arkansas after five years in Oklahoma.
In 2002, Margi and her husband, by then retired, moved to Socorro, New Mexico, to be near Margi’s ailing father
“Going to the high desert turned out to be a very good move for my husband and I,” she told The Pastel Journal in 2010. “New Mexico has just a nice blend of everything: landscape, art and culture. It has everything that’s good for artists, including a great deal of support.”
She soon connected with the arts community there, establishing close friendships with artists Natasha Isenhour, Skeeter Leard, Sharon Fullingim and others. She dressed casually, favoring silver and turquoise jewelry, a floppy hat shading her hazel eyes and the light brown hair she allowed to turn grey.
She had worked in watercolors and oils, but became hooked on pastels in her new arts community. Encouraged by her husband, she came into her own in New Mexico, discovered her voice, and often expressed wonder at the appreciation that others showed for her work.
“I have painted in different mediums over the years, but something special happened when I picked up pastels for the first time,” she said on her website. She told The Pastel Journal, “It’s like someone switched on a light switch.”
“I had finally found a way to express what my heart was trying to say,” she said on her website. “The most rewarding thing is when that expression touches someone else's heart.”
She became a part owner of Fullingim-Isenhour & Leard Galleries, which became Curious Crow. Margi and her partners eventually closed the business around 2013 and she used as her studio a sunroom at her adobe house, built outside Socorro around the turn of the last century on a bluff just west of the Rio Grande, where she wanted her ashes spread.
She and Dado often went for drives into the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, a wild land of wetlands, desert and forests that’s famous the sandhill cranes, geese and ducks that migrate to there each winter.
“I will pull over for a bush by the side of the road,” she said in an interview with Outdoor Painter shortly before her death. “Things hide from the sun, but there is still so much going on. There is life under those bushes, little things that are so beautiful. You know something lives there. People may look around the desert and say there is nothing here — that’s just not so.”
She continued to paint, to take part in several plein air and other arts organizations and to teach and influence other artists, leading workshops with emphasis on working with pastels on applied textured surfaces – a technique that became her signature style. A member of the American Impressionist Society, Plein Air New Mexico and the Pastel Society of New Mexico, her works have been displayed in galleries across the Southwest, she was featured in several arts publications and collectors worldwide have valued her paintings.
“Her art spoke loud and clear,” close friend and fellow artist Natasha Isenhour wrote on Facebook. “She never painted a ‘thing.’ Instead, she gave you a load of emotion you could feel in your bones.”
While passionate about her art, Margi’s first love was her family. Diminutive and independent, she also cared deeply about social justice, and about animals, too, scooping up stray animals and helping them find homes. At 5-feet-2 she was spitfire, family members said, strong in her beliefs and willing to stick up for the underdogs. In her voice, her mother said, she heard music.
That strength helped her overcome cancer in her 30s, and congestive heart failure in 2018. It helped her to pick up her brushes despite a worsening tremor in her painting hand. She continued to see the bright side.
“But in pastel, it sometimes actually helps,” she told Outdoor Painter of her condition, which runs in her family. “I breathe a sigh of relief that I can still do this “
In her notes to herself, she wrote of the pain in her hands and the exhaustion she felt, her love for her mother and her family, her hope for forgiveness.
“Please, everyone be kind,” she wrote over the summer. “Oh, I love you all so much.”
No public services are immediately planned.
Margi was preceded in death by her father Richard Muldoon, father-in-law Ruben Lucena, mother-in-law Priscilla Lucena, nephews Patrick and Eddie Myers and granddaughter Emma Lucena.
Margi is survived by her husband Diosdado Lucena; and her mother Esther Gonzalez of Montana.
She is remembered as a loving mother, grandmother and great-grandmother by son Eric Lucena of Washington state;
daughter Kim Lucena-Pargas (Ernest) of Socorro, NM, and their children: Shaelynne Pargas (mother of Noah, Nolan, Nyrah and Nazairi); Kaelynne Pargas (mother of Joshua, Courageous and Jazasia); Alika Lucena; Kiana Jones; Rae Pargas; and Keoni Pargas;
son Colin Lucena of Socorro and his children: Miranda Lemmings (husband Ryan, mother of Oliver, Ellis and Isaiah); Carson Lucena; Caitlin Lucena; Lauren Lucena; and the late Emma Lucena;
and son Gabriel Lucena of Carlsbad, NM, and his son: Roman Lucena.
Other survivors include siblings Patricia Myers of Oklahoma, Maureen Muldoon of Idaho, Debe Moffatt (Don) of Montana, Michael Muldoon (Ipo) of California, Matthew Muldoon (Ruth) of Germany, Joseph Muldoon (Lisa) of Idaho, Tricia Sanchez of Arizona, Billy Muldoon of Arizona and Megan Muldoon of Arizona; numerous uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews; special cousins Virginia Gonzalez and Ron Gonzales of California; friend Natasha Isenhour and many other friends.
- By Ron Gonzales
Last two projects that were left on Margi's easels...
