Meredith Owen’s dream of becoming an interior designer reads like a playwright scripted it. The scene opens with a 10-year-old girl and her family moving into an older home that needs some work. “I played with fabrics and wallpapers while my mom was updating the...
Even before I started writing the Collector’s Notebook for Western Art & Architecture, I loved the magazine’s oversized, glossy pages filled with gorgeous photos and insightful stories. Honestly, it’s one of the only magazines I collect because each issue is like an oasis on...
Steve Kessler and his wife, Pam, weren’t looking to move out of Southern California, where Kessler had built a thriving company constructing production homes. But when his college fraternity brother called, gushing about a neighborhood near Tahoe called Montrêux, the Kesslers decided to check it...
One evening a few years back, friends of Linda Lillegraven stopped by for dinner. Earlier in the day, she’d been working on a landscape of rolling grasslands spooling out across many miles to the horizon and a somber, cloudless sky. The only indication of human...
Michael Kessler creates large-scale, mixed-media artworks that straddle the line between abstraction and realism. His meticulous mashups of neatly plotted grids and biomorphic tree forms invite viewers to contemplate their own place in the natural world. Using at least 40 and sometimes as many as...
Sherry Johnson’s recent paintings of sun-bleached skulls adorned with vibrantly colored flowers — a series she calls “Bones & Blossoms Collection,” epitomized in the painting Santa Fe Bull — breathe new life into the centuries-old artistic genre known as memento mori, literally “remember death.” But...
Joel Ostlind has a preternatural ability to tell a story in simple lines, without relying on color to fill in details like time of day or season. But how he transforms those drawings into elegant small-edition etchings, pulled by hand, as the earliest printmakers of...
Kimerlee Curyl’s intimate, up-close fine art photographs celebrate the exquisite beauty found amidst bands of wild horses that roam parts of the American West. At the same time, her works express the heartbreaking plight of these endangered national treasures. “Wild horses,” she says, “are being...
Somers Randolph strives to uncover infinity within a block of stone. Whether monument-sized or small enough to hold in the palm of one’s hand, his sculptures often possess smooth, sinuous swirls and loops that curve back upon themselves like the Mobius strips so many of...
Design-wise, Aspen, Colorado, has long been known for its mining-era architecture, art, and fashion-forward trend setters. But the transformation of this quiet mountain hamlet turned ski town and seasonal watering hole for the global elite does little to explain how the modernist movement, specifically Germany’s...