Lots of voices need to be heard when designing, building, and furnishing a house. For this new hilltop home in Victory Ranch, Utah, one of the strongest influences came from a mute figure: Chief Long Shadow, depicted in a 1986 painting by Jack Wolfe. “Truth be...
Two signature Western art events celebrated record-breaking totals amid September shows and sales in a sign that the rise of the genre’s popularity has yet to set. It was difficult to assess market strength tied to any one medium or any one style, as a...
Artists often do some odd things that can appear counterintuitive or even self-destructive — like inviting you over to see their latest work, then refusing to sell it to you. This isn’t a ploy to get you to pay more (though it might be). More...
Like many sculptures Pati Stajcar creates, her recent work titled Seascapes did not start with a specific concept but rather with the material itself: a chunk of red cedar burl, a knobby growth on tree trunks that loggers cut away because its dense, swirling grains...
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...