William Hook’s recent Heads Up captures the discerning appeal of a realist painter at the top of his game. Against a distant Southwestern mountainscape, a vast blue sky, and a towering cumulus, wild sunflowers reach toward the heavens. Every element — composition, colors, and brushstrokes...
The unreality of the American West feels more real to Nicholas Ward. When the 28-year-old artist, who lives and paints in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, seeks out subjects for his large-scale canvases, he summons from his imagination a state of magical realism, with surrealist landscapes populated...
Cora Sexton Wheeler has never stopped trying to capture something she considers forever elusive. “You can never recreate what nature creates,” she says. And yet, the artist remains adamant about filling her canvases with scenes of ranch life, Western flora and fauna, mountain skylines, and...
Destiny Bowman devotes her artistic talents to two primary genres: portraits and still lifes. Those dual callings may at first seem antithetical; after all, figurative works celebrate living beings, while the term “still life” can sometimes seem like a demure way of referring to paintings...
Russ Fry designs furniture, lighting, and architectural installations that make traditional Western materials and forms feel new. Using items as diverse as wood burls and reclaimed steel, old barn timbers, and even repurposed ski-lift chairs, he and his team of craftspeople “work with interior designers...
Mitch Baird’s paintings offer two distinct, pleasurable viewing experiences. See them from 10 feet away and they appear as wondrously realistic scenes of the Western landscapes he passionately loves. Come nearer, however, so a single scene like Bluffs of Navajo Sandstone almost fills your field...
Natalie Featherston delightfully tricks the eye multiple times in her trompe l’oeil paintings, which often involve creating more than one work of art. Look, for example, at Anywhere But Here, which appears to be a slightly crumpled, whimsical child’s collage of a UFO visit to...
Eugene Tapahe’s ravishingly beautiful photographs achieve far more than merely pleasing the viewer’s eye with scenes of Indigenous women wearing ceremonial regalia posing serenely in sacred sites. The ever-growing body of works in his Jingle Dance Project — begun in the early days of the...
Jennifer Pulchinski creates what might best be described as large-scale three-dimension-al drawings composed with lengths of fallen barbed wire. The sculptor tracks down her materials, and her inspiration, by wandering the rangelands and mountain slopes — with permission of landowners, of course — beyond her...
Heather Burton portrays horses with a painterly realism that captures their spirits as vividly as their physicality. Consider Azteca, featuring a breed of the same name that is considered Mexico’s national horse, often trained for elaborate dancing exhibitions and prized for its fine musculature and...