Pearson Design Group (PDG) has long been known for its expressive rustic architecture. Recently, the Montana firm has been stirring passions and inspiring imitators with its more contemporary-leaning designs. While this movement toward a rustic-modern aesthetic is partly due to evolving tastes and partly due...
He had a city boy’s fascination with the West. And though he’d often visited and was influenced by explorer-artists such as George Catlin and Thomas Moran, he painted not on the dry prairie or desert plain but on the flat roof of a Hoboken, New...
Artist Clare Graham has a special relationship with mundane household objects. While most people might think buttons belong on shirts, puzzle pieces fit together on the coffee table, and tin cans and their pop-tops head straight to the recycling bin, a visit to Graham’s studio...
Greg Godsey, a partner in Heritage Restorations, is passionate about historic timber-frame barns. The company keeps 50 to 70 historic barn timber frames in storage lots in Texas and Montana, and it’s Godsey’s job to find the right frame for the right family. At the Lucky...
Ethan Stern uses glass — hot and molten, cold and cut — as a conveyor of light. Luminous and jewel-like, the objects he creates redefine traditional purposes. By engraving on the glass, Stern speaks to a long history of industrial cut glass but adds to...
Justin Wheatley paints portraits that present themselves as houses. Using the iconic image of the “perfect home,” Wheatley conveys ideas about suburbia, isolation and relationships. “My process is pretty organic,” Wheatley says. “I don’t do a lot of planning. I always wanted to be that person...
Oil painter Terry Gardner, an expressive tonalist, reaches for the essence of what it means to live in the West today while acknowledging the past. His work feels contemporary while at the same time touches on aspects of the historical. His paintings speak to the...
When we put together issues of WA&A, themes often develop on their own. While reading over these pages, I see something new, an original thread that neatly weaves everything together as though it were a second binding; an unintentional bridge between artists and architects working...
Handmade Metal Switchplates by Four Winds West With a creative background in leather crafting, artist Joel Rubiner has evolved his skills into metalwork. From his Tucson, Arizona, workshop he creates switchplates in standard configurations out of heavy-gauged burnished copper, brass and nickel silver. What isn’t standard are his...
Designer Linda Perlman first fell in love with Native American textiles when she served as a trustee at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “The museum has an incredible collection, and spending time among those beautiful, historic pieces stirred my passion for the original patterns and...