Collectors at autumn auctions and exhibits showed a strong appreciation for the iconography of the American West. Prices for paintings, sculptures, furniture, jewelry, and art tied to equine pursuits were generally solid, with the occasional outbreak of bidding fever driving the amounts of certain artworks...
Legend has it that when William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was visiting Wyoming in 1894, his son-in-law brought him to the top of the Bighorn Mountains. Looking out over the Shoshone River and the sprawling Bighorn Basin, the entrepreneur and legendary showman clearly saw an...
Sonoma, California-based architect Amy A. Alper has an ever-growing list of award-winning residential designs that, while modern, engage seamlessly with their Wine Country surroundings, employing so-called rustic materials in innovative ways. Since the catastrophic fire of 2017, and the yearly fires that have followed, her...
If the walls of room 222 at the Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado, could talk, overnight guests might hear tales of writer Louis L’Amour, who spent many days there, inspired by the gaiety and music emanating from the saloon directly beneath his room, fixated on...
The Newlywood Set by Earlywood Based in the mountain town of Red Lodge, Montana, Earlywood handcrafts heirloom-quality kitchen tools with an artisan twist. Founder Brad Bernhart — a former mechanical engineer — has always had a deep respect for “the oldest, most beat up, most worn,...
Art collectors are a curious and rare breed. So rare, in fact, that according to research published in 2015 by Larry’s List, an art industry research company, there are just 8,000 to 10,000 art collectors in the world. The world. Because collecting is such a dedicated...
One autumn afternoon in 2016, Karen Vance set out on a painting jaunt from her home in Winter Park Ranch, Colorado. Her destination was 40 minutes north in Rocky Mountain National Park: Bowen-Baker Gulch, where snowmelt-fed headwaters of the Colorado River flow beneath Baker Mountain....
Andrew Denman reimagines wildlife painting within a context of contemporary and modern art, dramatically shifting viewers’ perceptions. Take, for example, The Usual Suspects. The acrylic-on-cradled-board work presents 20 impeccably contoured ravens — some compositionally cropped along its edges — in four neat lineups against a...
Gordon McConnell breathes dynamic new life into the West of the imagination in acrylic paintings that “appropriate” imagery from classic films and transform them into boldly graphic celebrations of our great American mythology. His recent Django No Perdona … Viva Django, for example, takes its...
Prices heated up in recent auctions, where buyers showed equal enthusiasm for traditional Western art and contemporary works that explored the themes of landscape, history, and society in new ways. The art market has been buffeted in recent years by the same challenges people have sought...