The landscape around George Ranch in Sonoma is quintessentially Californian. Its rolling hills are studded with sculptural live oaks and teeming with birds and wildlife. Sun-drenched meadows contrast with fog-shrouded vineyards; intermittent glimpses of distant mountaintops appear as one travels curving country roads. In short,...
At 20 years old, Allan Houser, who had grown up on his parents’ farm near Apache, Oklahoma, noticed a poster at the Indian Affairs Office in nearby Anadarko. It invited artwork submissions to recruit students into a new art program at the Santa Fe Indian...
Jim Vogel was always known as the artist among his 11 sisters and brothers. As children, they’d be playing outside their home in Roswell, New Mexico, when an idea would pop into Jim’s head, and he’d run inside to craft his latest vision. Once, it...
Steven A. Jackson deploys his camera and the modern digital darkroom tools of Photoshop to record and transform scenes that, once processed and printed under his expert eye, often eerily express the subtle interactions between humans and the natural world in the Southwest, near and...
Danuta Tomzynski’s close-up, painstakingly detailed still-life oils of hand-tooled saddles and other leatherwork aim to look at life in the West through a cowboy’s eyes. “All the time in art,” she says, “we see them depicted on horses in scenic landscapes. But, meanwhile, they’re sitting...
Doug Atwill may well embody the definition of a modern Renaissance man. Yes, he paints landscapes and garden scenes bursting with vibrant colors and lively patterns in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has made his home for the past five and a...
Lori Putnam captures enthralling scenes of the natural world, including iconic Western landscapes and wildlife, in oil-on-panel works that provide viewers with a sense of immediacy. Yet, Putnam prefers to consider her paintings not so much realistic depictions of places and things but rather “abstracted...
Kaetlyn Able creates her multimedia art in a way that at times may seem more akin to lacemaking, or the almost-finer-than-the-naked-eye-can-see form of embroidery called petit point, than to simply brushing paint onto a surface. Such a complex approach seems appropriate, considering the depth and...
Each issue of WA&A is a celebration of reverence and reinvention — a view into how artists and designers engage with the West not as a fixed ideal but as an ever-evolving muse. Inside this issue, we discover painter Jared Sanders, who invites us to see...
Elizabeth Rosensteel’s approach to interior design comes from a background rich in artistic experiences. She is an artist, sculptor, furniture maker, art director, and inventor, and for 14 years, she sang with the Phoenix Symphony. Her designs include an expansive application of creativity. For example,...