04 Jul Artist Spotlights: Julie Oriet

One afternoon last December, as Julie Oriet drove across a bridge near her home in Cody, Wyoming, she spied a brilliant blue stream clogged with ice floes, backed by russet-hued grassy banks and birches aglow in the sunlight. “I had to paint it,” she recalls. “So many artists say that you can’t do a painting that’s half-hot and half-cold. But I had to figure out how to make it work.” So, she “slammed on the brakes,” snapped photos, jotted observations in her notebook, and headed to her studio. 

Completed over the next two weeks in her “loosely realistic” style, the oil-on-linen Running Hot and Cold brilliantly reinterprets that scene, balancing the warm-hued background with the near-abstract deep-azure water and bluish-white ice. The painting debuts in this September’s invitation-only 44th annual Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody — just the latest success in a professional career now spanning over three decades.

Such recognition didn’t always seem likely during Oriet’s late teens and early adulthood. Growing up near Bozeman, Montana, her early glimmerings of artistry received ample encouragement from her parents and at Belgrade High School, but, after enrolling at Montana State University as a double major in art and physical education, she dropped art at the start of her junior year “because the instructors kept telling me I had no talent.” Still, after graduation, Oriet stayed connected to the arts, first pouring waxes and painting bronzes for a pair of sculptors and then, for seven years, hand-painting wooden duck decoys for a local company. She also painted in watercolor in her spare time, finding avid buyers at local art fairs.

Red, White and Wranglers | Oil on Linen | 20 x 16 inches

When the decoy company laid her off, Oriet recalls, “I thought, well, what the heck, and I applied to an art show to see if I could get in, and I did.” That wasn’t just any show — it was the 1994 edition of The Russell, the annual event at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls featuring auctions, educational symposiums, and a quick draw. “Things just took off from there. Galleries approached me, and three picked me up that first year,” the artist says.

Smooth Sailing | Oil on Linen | 24 x 18 inches

Evolving through watercolors and pastels to oils — “I like learning new things,” she says — her work continued gaining in recognition, including the Artists’ Choice Award at the 2002 Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale and repeated appearances in The Russell, the Coors Western Art Show & Sale, and other top venues. More recently, she’s savored a pair of two-artist museum shows with her husband, famed wildlife sculptor T.D. Kelsey, in 2022 at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, and at Colorado’s Steamboat Springs Art Museum in 2023.

Done for the Day | Oil on Linen | 16 x 12 inches

Despite such success, Oriet still enjoys challenging herself. Her recent Red, White and Wranglers, for example, presents a surprisingly simplified, almost abstracted image: a cowboy in blue jeans, chaps, white shirt, white Stetson, and red bandanna, astride a white horse against a simple blue background. “I keep pushing the edges of what I do,” she says cheerfully. “I just want to continue stretching my learning curve.”

Oriet is represented by Mary Williams Fine Arts in Boulder, Colorado; Claggett/Rey Gallery in Edwards, Colorado; Simpson Gallagher Gallery in Cody, Wyoming; and FoR Fine Art in Whitefish, Montana. She will be participating in the Bighorn Rendezvous in Bighorn, Wyoming, through August 23; and the Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale in Cody, Wyoming, September 19 and 20.

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.