05 Mar FROM THE EDITOR: THE WEST AS A MUSE

Flipping through this issue of Western Art & Architecture, I’m struck by a simple yet astonishing truth: Despite the collective decades that artists and architects have spent exploring the West’s mythology, beauty, stereotypes, and history, they are still able to come up with interesting new ways of looking at things. Imagination always finds undiscovered ground.

It takes shape in one of Kevin Chupik’s paintings of an Oldsmobile cattle drive or as a Mid-century Modern cowboy standing in plains of bright color (“Western Surrealism,” pg. 114). It glimmers with beauty in Teri Greeves’ sparkling beaded spiders, each tiny detail carrying forward her Kiowa heritage (“Creative Connectivity,” pg. 138). It radiates through a winter landscape by Dave Santillanes, whose work preserves fleeting moments of beauty so we can return to them again and again (“A Visionary of Light and Landscape,” pg. 126).

Architecture, too, is an art of imagination. Out West, designers continue to find graceful solutions to needs like accessibility and balancing exhibition space with windows for the view (“A Curatorial Approach,” pg. 132). Imagination is present in a home that reflects its Texas residents, merging Hill Country materials with Louisiana living (“Let the Good Times Roll,” pg. 120).

It’s inspiring — and encouraging — to know that the West remains open to reinvention. As a source of imagination, it seems an endless well, so long as someone shows up at the easel, the drafting table, the sketchbook to draw from its potential. Please join us in celebrating those who do.