Artist John Mortensen’s Wyoming studio serves as an endless source of inspiration. When John Mortensen’s house was built in 1913, it anchored a burgeoning town at the key intersection of the remote high-altitude valley that early fur traders had dubbed Jackson Hole. Situated on Fish Creek...
About five years ago, award-winning Western and plein-air painter Tim Solliday learned he’d have to vacate the Pasadena, California, studio where he’d worked for more than a decade. The one-time atelier of famed early-20th-century painter and illustrator Frank Tenney Johnson had provided Solliday with ample...
Panoramic views of the Jemez Mountains greet David McElroy when he enters his studio on the high plains of New Mexico. A window in place of two garage doors provides unobstructed views, and, from time to time, a herd of grazing pronghorn antelope draws his...
When artist Paul Kos was commissioned to create a sculpture for the Poetry Sculpture Garden in the SoMa neighborhood in his adopted hometown of San Francisco, he knew precisely where to retreat for inspiration. Collaborating with Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the U.S., the...
For Irvin and Lisa Trujillo of Centinela Traditional Arts, weaving is not only an art form and livelihood, it’s also a celebration of the landscapes and lifestyles of their historic community of Chimayo, New Mexico. “I've always loved the land,” Irvin says. “And I’m a...
What makes Charlie Ringer a contemporary Western artist isn’t subject matter — or geography — although the Montana metal artist has cut, ground, and welded into being any number of bison and swirling trout. Instead, Ringer embodies the ethos of the West populated by cowboys,...
A vision of the mysterious light in Spanish Shawl, one of JoAnn Peralta’s most notable paintings, came to her as she was waking up one morning. The light was so purely brilliant, she felt she had to match it exactly. But she won’t reveal how...
For artist Pascal Pierme, art is both a calling and an inquiry. Both a way of life, and a way of posing questions through which to explore internal and external worlds. Pierme’s sculptures evoke qualities of architecture and nature, combining balance, energy, and movement. “I have...
Lucky is the glass art world for Pearl Jam. It was in the 1990s heyday of the grunge music scene in Seattle, Washington, that a young man named Preston Singletary was trying to make his way playing music. He was blowing glass by day, “as...
As pleasant and refined, cluttered and inspiring as one’s art studio may be, the truth is that art, in many mediums, can be messy. Most artists will put on their work clothes, maybe overalls or a smock, before getting down to business, cleaning scraps of...