05 Mar ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS: JAMES PENFIELD

James Penfield’s paintings often possess the kinetic energy of a live performance, taking viewers’ eyes on a dynamic journey across canvases that simultaneously feel like abstract compositions and convincingly realistic images of Western wildlife, people, and landscapes. His 2024 painting Minerva, for example, offers dramatic slashes and swirls of acrylics and charcoal on canvas that somehow coalesce into a representation of a bear’s face staring sternly at the viewer. Traces of hard-to-decipher handwriting also tantalizingly appear — as does a sketch of a raptor’s claw, jutting from the bear’s chest just above the artist’s signature. “I’d started a golden eagle,” Penfield explains, “and it wasn’t working how I wanted it, so I just kept going with something else.” The juxtaposition only adds to the artwork’s power.

Such spontaneity stems largely from a professional art practice that began with Penfield painting live during music festivals in his hometown of Minneapolis more than two decades ago. “I really love making art to music,” he explains. Penfield entered that performative scene after graduating with a degree in art history from Hamline University in Saint Paul, where he was mentored in fine art by noted intaglio printmaker Leonardo Lasansky. “He thought that knowledge [of the past] would better my process and career. It really sparked something in me.”

Alpenglow Road | Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas | 20 x 16 inches | 2025

The Midwesterner has also been possessed by a lifelong love of the West, and he’d originally intended to move there. But a serious snowboarding accident during Penfield’s first year at the University of Colorado Boulder sent him home to recuperate and eventually finish up his undergraduate studies, and he also completed a two-year graphic design program at Parsons The New School in Manhattan, New York. Penfield still manages, however, to pay frequent visits to the landscapes he loves, “the places that really inspire me,” and looks forward to sharing those places even more with his wife and their young twin sons.

Minerva | Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas | 30 x 24 inches | 2025

The inspiration and serenity Penfield feels in such settings can be appreciated in such works as Alpenglow Morning, featuring a cowboy on horseback silhouetted by a golden peak — a painting that also expresses his recent passion for and study of works by the great early 20th-century painters and illustrators of the Brandywine School artists’ colony, particularly Frank Schoonover and N.C. Wyeth. “Once I started to go down that rabbit hole and threw my head around their treatment of life and all their different ways of handling images, that really pushed my painting in new directions.”

Penfield is represented by Gallery Mar in Park City, Utah; Horizon Fine Art Gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and Schoonover Gallery in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.