03 Jul En Avant

Adrienne Stein was under pressure.

The atelier-trained painter had for years successfully put herself through every artistic rigor: studying and executing drawing for an entire year before approaching oil paint; copying works by Old Masters; studying the ages of art and exposing herself to great paintings in great museums across the globe.

But she was hobbled by her attempts to paint a horse. The creature she yearned to produce came to life everywhere — in her memory, in her mind’s eye, in her waking, in her sleeping — everywhere except on her canvas. Stein was in a quandary.

Tension building, confidence waning, she received an invitation from her sister to join her for a Christmas parade in Baltimore and was struck with the agony of indecision. She longed to stay in her studio and wrangle with her depiction of a horse modeled after ranch horses seen in New Mexico. But equally compelling was her desire to spend time with family.

Stein, who is the mother of a young boy and wife of acclaimed artist Quang Ho, possesses a keenness for artistic expression and inflection matched only by her moral rectitude; she decided in favor of others. That was the beginning. The end is Onyx, the image of a stallion whose coiled strength is hidden in a maned neck and revealed in the powerful muscles of its chest.

“We had front-row seats,” Stein says of the parade. “Trotting down the road were Spanish riders from a Spanish riding school. They stopped right in front of us. I had a gorgeous profile view of these horses and I thought, ‘My painting is done; it’s resolved.’”

Onyx | Oil on Linen Panel | 24 x 18 inches

Onyx is among 50 paintings — 40 new, 10 on loan from private collections — by the award-winning artist to be featured in a one-woman show, The Enchanted West of Adrienne Stein, at the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, Texas, from August 22 to November 7. The show represents Stein’s immersion in the West and a genre that evolved after the Pennsylvania native fell in love with Ho and with his home base of Colorado.

It was just a matter of saying yes — yes to a life with her beloved and yes to a life in the American West. Similarly, the Western man said yes to an Eastern woman and yes to the region of her birth. The family now divides their time between the two states.

Stein’s pilgrimages to the West have borne fruit. “The decade of experiences exploring those landscapes, colors, and forms has inspired this body of work,” she said of the pictures to be featured at the Museum of Western Art.

Nyx I | Oil on Linen | 36 x 24 inches

Stein is a colorist with skill in the mode of Henri Matisse. Like that mid-20th-century Modernist, Stein marshals color to do her bidding through restraint. She is among those artists who do not simply foist color on the entire weight of a two-dimensional image; that is an art of certain artists and it is not easy to achieve. But, then, Stein is not looking for easy; anyone can do easy, and Stein is not just anyone.

Trumpets | Oil on Linen Panel | 24 x 18 inches

With a Master of Fine Arts from Boston University and as a magna cum laude graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Laguna College of Art and Design, Stein, in discipline and effort, evokes another period of painting. It is one that proceeded from the Neoclassicism of the early 19th-century French Academy yet preceded the subject-object fragmentation through angular abstraction explored by Cubists.

From portraiture to animals, from still life to landscape, Stein exhibits a style as versatile as it is visionary. She is what might be called an artist’s artist in education and experience but she is the observer’s inspiration because she has captured what cannot be contained: unalloyed joy.

If you can’t see it in her brush, you can hear it in her voice — it is alight with laughter and tuneful to the ears — and you certainly will be pliant under the allure of her eye. Who but Wordsworth is apt to assemble such lines? “While with an eye made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy/We see into the life of things.”

Guardian | Oil on Canvas | 40 x 30 inches

Stein sees into the life of some things we didn’t know had life. She is an avid observer of the beauty of ungulate skulls and antlers. She is an apt pupil of all that nature has to teach. She is an ardent examiner of the microscopic and the monumental.

Stein has adapted to aligning with the forms of the western United States to express it. “A skull is a stand-in for a ‘portrait’ of the West,” she says. “Bones are very easy to look at abstractly; they are symbolic of the region, they can serve as a grounding form for a painting and as its subject.”

And she says it is relatively recent that she develops a painting before a brush or paint is introduced. The work begins to grow in her mind from the seed that is planted in her heart.

Scenes double as dialogues in paintings such as Frisco Clouds, where towering sky structures vie with mountains for magnificence, and Helios, in which rabbitbrush illumes the desert to the same degree the sun brightens the bones of a floating skull.

In spirit, Stein is the descendant of Georgia O’Keeffe and that celebrated artist’s less-celebrated doppelganger, Agnes Pelton, a German immigrant who believed images of her paintings were channeled to her by spirits. She was not the first artist to conceive of an other-worldly influence on her visions. William Blake, the 18th century poet, printmaker, and painter, called many of his Christian-influenced poems and pictures “prophetic” and no one since has had the temerity to contradict him.

Frisco Clouds | Oil on Linen | 36 x 36 inches

Christianity is Stein’s foundation with the understanding that under that banner is the creative act of creating, the heady engagement of heart and intellect, the mysterious movements entailed in a journey of faith, the startling recognition of what Charles Darwin implied was the enigma of beauty and the variety of its moods.

Penumbra | Oil on Linen | 60 x 48 inches

Stein, whose paintings have been featured in museums from Los Angeles to Barcelona, Spain, looks at western landscapes from the outside. And, she looks at them from the inside. She has had the benefit of tutelage from a friend-paleontologist about the layered rock formations — the geologic “parfait” — in states such as Colorado.

July | Oil on Canvas | 30 x 24 inches

“You get this sense of deep time; I’m very captivated by that,” she says. “There is a cathedral-type form to them. They are religious icons in a way. I’m conscious of the space they will create in a painting and the scale of it.” Penumbra, among pictures to be shown at the Museum of the West exhibit, is a large-sized idea that came to life, in oil and on linen, from such musings.

Alcea Rugosa | Oil on Linen Panel | 36 x 24 inches

It is an exercise in futility to pigeon-hole Stein. Her influences are broad, ranging from the Dutch masters to painter-progenitors of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — and every movement before and since.

Stein in her Eastern studio poses with two major works destined for the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, Texas.

Stein, who is represented by Gallery 1261 in Denver and was the 2023 winner of the Fra Angelico Artist of the Year award by the Windows to the Divine Foundation, can convey in a single painting the effects of both stillness and movement. Nyx, a vertical portrait of a snowy owl, demonstrates her unusual fusion of rest and flight.

At one time, art was a career Stein sought to pursue. Now that career pursues her. For her part, Stein perceives her art as a divine gift that brings forth, in the manner of a divine dance, images that will outlast her mortal life. “Painting isn’t something I do; it’s something I am. It’s part of my identity and way of being in the world.”